6296: The Courage Of Kitt.

From The Chicago Tribune…

Eartha Kitt: The patriot who was right all along

By John Nichols

Forty years ago, America’s cultural icons expressed the frustration of the American people with the failure of President Lyndon Johnson to end this country’s undeclared war in Vietnam by boldly demanding peace.

The nation’s most respected newsman, CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite, explained to a national television audience after the Tet Offensive that the war had gone horribly awry.

Singer Johnny Cash, whose music and style had made him a hero of blue-collar Americans, described himself as “a dove with claws” and began singing the anti-war song “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream.”

But the most direct and powerful anti-war statement of the period was delivered by singer Eartha Kitt at the height of her celebrity.

Kitt, the sultry singer of hits such as “Santa Baby” who died at 81 on Christmas, was, in 1968, an internationally acclaimed music star who had begun making major stage and screen appearances.

So it came as no great surprise when she was invited to a White House luncheon hosted by Lady Bird Johnson. But the first lady was surprised when she asked Kitt about the Vietnam War. “You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed,” the singer told the first lady and the 50 other women at the luncheon. “They rebel in the street. They don’t want to go to school because they’re going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam.”

The first lady reportedly burst into tears. The president was furious. Kitt was blacklisted. She was investigated by the FBI and the CIA and ended up on the “enemies list” of Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon.

Kitt spent the next decade performing mostly in Europe until, in 1978—after a triumphal return to Broadway in the musical “Timbuktu!”—she was invited back to the White House by the great healing executive of the postwar era, Jimmy Carter.

Years later, Kitt recalled her White House visit in an interview with Esquire magazine, saying, “The thing that hurts, that became anger, was when I realized that if you tell the truth—in a country that says you’re entitled to tell the truth—you get your face slapped and you get put out of work.”

It was a painful lesson.

But we remember Kitt as one of those remarkable Americans who was patriotic enough to speak truth to power. And she spoke in such a remarkable voice that it will linger far longer in our memory than those foolish politicians and misguided media moguls who were wrong about Vietnam—and wrong about Kitt.

John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation magazine.