Did you know he helped win the Cold War too?
No, I'm not talking about his travels around the world in the 1980's with the Green Berets. I'm talking about his recurring bit role as an extra on Dallas. (He was one of the mercenaries in one of the mercenary subplots, believe it not).
Reason Magazine explains:
Dallas wasn’t simply a popular television show. It was a
bourbon-and-sex-soaked caricature of free enterprise that proved
irresistible and catalytic not just to stagflation-weary Americans but
to viewers in France, the Soviet Union, and Romania. No matter how evil
various translators tried to make J.R. and his milieu (“Dallas, you
merciless universe!” ran the French lyrics added to the wordless U.S.
theme song), viewers in nearly 100 countries, including the Warsaw Pact
nations, came to believe that they too deserved cars as big as boats
and swimming pools the size of small mansions.
“I think we were
directly or indirectly responsible for the fall of the [Soviet]
empire,” Hagman told the Associated Press a decade ago. “They would see
the wealthy Ewings and say, ‘Hey, we don’t have all this stuff.’ I
think it was good old-fashioned greed that got them to question their
authority.”
In Romania, Dallas was the last Western
show allowed during the nightmarish 1980s because President Nicolae
Ceausescu was persuaded that it was sufficiently anticapitalistic. In
fact, the show provided a luxuriant alternative to a communism that was
forcing people to wait more than a decade to buy the most rattletrap
Romanian car.
After the dictator and his wife were shot on Christmas Eve 1989, the pilot episode of Dallas—with a previously censored sex scene spliced back in—was one of the first foreign shows broadcast on liberated Romanian TV.
Winning the hearts and minds indeed.
