“When I was a teen-ager, I sort of hated Bob Hope. All of us did. … There he was, year after year, on those post-Christmas U.S.O. specials, with shrieking starlets and shirtless soldiers, swinging his golf club like a swagger stick. … America, however, is the country of the eternal appeals court, where judgment, once it has worked its way through the system, has to work its way through it all over again.”