Obituary | April 16, 2008
Just like his Planet of the Apes alter-ego, George Taylor, Charlton Heston may very well have been the last real man on earth. Since his passing was announced a short time ago, Heston’s contributions to both cinema and society have been acknowledged by prominent public figures across the political spectrum. Everyone from Hollywood conspiracy theorist Oliver Stone to presidential candidate John McCain has paid their respects to the larger-than-life American icon. President Bush, who awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Heston in 2003, declared that the country has lost a “strong advocate of liberty.” Even Michael Moore, who used “creative” editing in his anti-gun tirade, Bowling for Columbine, to deliberately misrepresent comments made by Heston, posted a picture of the actor on his personal website.
Ironically, Heston’s acting legacy is open to less artistic interpretation than his political one. Critics, actors, and movie fans alike laud Heston’s commanding stage presence and sonorous, eloquent voice and admire his movie star physique and striking chiseled features. Regrettably, most young Americans have not seen his epic film performances—chariot racing in Ben-Hur, parting the Red Sea as Moses in The Ten Commandments, or fighting off those damn, dirty apes in Planet of the Apes. George Clooney, who despicably mocked Alzheimer’s symptoms in an invective against Heston, can only dream of creating the same timeless performances.
While these movies and others will certainly live on in film history, good acting did not this man make. From his time as a union leader and young civil rights activist marching alongside Martin Luther King and picketing segregated movie theatres, to his later years as president of the NRA and active campaigner for Republican presidential and congressional candidates, Heston inspired millions of Americans not only with his acting, but also with his devoted public service.
Disturbingly, many mainstream news eulogies as well as liberal activists have attempted to juxtapose his early civil rights work with his more recent conservative activism. As Earl Ofari Hutchinson, president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Round Table, remarked, “Charlton Heston was a complex individual. He lived a long time, and certainly, there were many phases. The phases we prefer to remember were certainly his contributions to Dr. King and civil rights.”
Despite what Hutchinson may have us believe, there is nothing complex about Heston supporting both civil rights and conservative causes. While liberals have tried for decades to co-opt issues regarding civil rights as part of the liberal agenda, it is disingenuous of them to inaccurately represent Heston’s political history in such a manner. Although he might not fit the mold of the stereotypical civil rights leader manufactured by the Left, Heston remained a civil rights advocate long after he joined the Republican party. Sandry Froman, former vice president of the NRA under Heston and a later president herself, explained the link between 2nd amendment advocacy and civil rights in her own eulogy for her friend and colleague.
“Heston marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s, and was one of the foremost advocates of racial equality long before others took up the cause. His passion for civil rights and for human dignity was part of the foundation for his Second Amendment leadership. The NRA is the oldest and largest civil rights organization in America. Charlton Heston’s leadership of the NRA was a natural extension of his lifelong crusade to protect individual liberty and dignity.”
From his crusade to support oppressed black Americans beginning in the 1950s to his campaign against affirmative action in the 1980s, Heston never let personal expediency or popularity contests influence his beliefs or change his positions. Unlike many contemporary Republicans, both at Tufts and in the country at large, Heston was not afraid to stake out unpopular stances or express controversial statements. “You must be willing to be humiliated, to endure the modern-day equivalent of the police dogs at Montgomery and the water cannons at Selma,” Heston urged in a 1999 speech, entitled “Winning the Culture War” at a Harvard Law School Forum. He warned his audience not to “let America’s universities continue to serve as incubators for this rampant epidemic of new McCarthyism.” This new McCarthyism was, as Heston saw it, the forces of political correctness, or “tyranny with manners.” He encouraged Americans to take pride in their unique heritage and fight against those who seek to divide us with the “creation of more and more labeled fractions.” The onslaught against the values that made America, he protested, must be confronted.
Chuck Colson, a prison reform activist, wrote that Heston “was not content just to be celebrated as a cultural icon for playing roles like Moses, Ben-Hur, Michelangelo, and others. He was willing to risk scorn and ridicule to be a countercultural icon as well.” And countercultural icon he became. Heston attended a 1992 Time-Warner shareholders’ meeting in which he slowly articulated all the lyrics to “Cop Killer” by the group Body Count (featuring Ice-T) to draw attention to the company’s decision to release an album that included such contemptible lyrics. Sure enough, Ice-T’s contract was terminated a short two months later. Even more daring was Charlton Heston’s bold defense of the 2nd amendment one week after the Columbine school shootings, expressing sympathy with the victims’ families but resisting the overwhelming public sentiment that blamed the tragedy on lax gun control laws. While he did not compromise his beliefs, he nonetheless lamented that, “those who are hostile towards us will lie in wait to seize on a sound bite out of context, ever searching for an embarrassing moment to ridicule us.”
Charlton Heston was an epic actor and an equally epic man. While even radical Leftists have acknowledged his enormous contributions, his life and accomplishments cannot be separated from the profoundly American and conservative values that guided them. Even more impressive, perhaps, than his political and acting achievements, however, were his grace and humility. After being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2002, Heston humorously requested that his audience laugh anyway in the unfortunate scenario that he repeated a joke. He added, “For an actor, there is no greater loss than the loss of his audience. I can part the Red Sea, but I can’t part with you.”
His audience will certainly never part with him.
— By Matthew Schuster
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