Why did West Point cancel an award ceremony for Tom Hanks?
Per a report by the Washington Post, Hanks will no longer be honored at an event held by the West Point Association of Graduates later this month.
The U.S. Military Academy’s alumni group has reportedly cancelled a planned award ceremony for Hollywood icon Tom Hanks.
The Washington Post first reported that Hanks will no longer be honored on September 25, when the 69-year-old was due to receive the West Point Association of Graduates’ 2025 Sylvanus Thayer Award.
“Outstanding citizen of the United States”
In June, the alumni association had announced its intention to present Hanks with the award, which has been handed out annually since 1958.
In a statement, the group said the prize honors “an outstanding citizen of the United States whose service and accomplishments in the national interest exemplify personal devotion to the ideals expressed in West Point’s motto: ‘Duty, Honor, Country.’”
The statement also quoted the WPAOG’s board chairman, Robert A. McDonald, who said: “Tom Hanks has done more for the positive portrayal of the American service member, more for the caring of the American veteran, their caregivers and their family, and more for the American space program and all branches of government than many other Americans.”
This weekend, however, it emerged that there will no longer be a presentation ceremony.
“Allows the Academy to continue its focus on its core mission”
Per the Post, retired Col. Mark Bieger, the president and CEO of the West Point Association of Graduates, said in an email to faculty: “This decision allows the Academy to continue its focus on its core mission of preparing cadets to lead, fight, and win as officers in the world’s most lethal force, the United States Army.”
The Post also noted that it’s unclear whether Hanks will still be receiving the award despite the axing of his presentation event.
Previous recipients of the Sylvanus Thayer Award include former U.S. presidents such as Barack Obama, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan; former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger; legendary newscaster Walter Cronkite; and Hanks’s Apollo 13 co-star, Gary Sinise.
“Award isn’t a heavy lift”
Speaking to NPR, Ty Seidule, a retired U.S. Army brigadier general and West Point professor emeritus of history, made clear his skepticism at Bieger’s explanation for the cancellation of the ceremony.
“The award isn’t a heavy lift,” Seidule said. “It’s a parade and a dinner. Cadets love to rub elbows with some of America’s greatest citizens […]. West Point is capable of focusing on the Secretary of Defense priorities and still having a parade and dinner.”
This week’s about-turn on Hanks, who is a well-known Trump critic, comes amid a climate in which the president’s government has, in the words of Variety journalist Jack Dunn, “continued to intervene with […] military academies across the nation”.
“Sweeping assault”
In May, indeed, a West Point philosophy professor resigned in protest at what he termed a “sweeping assault on the school’s curriculum” by the administration.
“I cannot tolerate these changes, which prevent me from doing my job responsibly,” Dr. Graham Parsons wrote in an essay for the New York Times. “I am ashamed to be associated with the academy in its current form.”
Four months earlier, the president had issued an executive order pledging to overhaul military academies’ “leadership, curriculum, and instructors”, and prohibiting their promotion of so-called “un-American” and “divisive” ideas.
Meanwhile, a report by the New York Times last week revealed that the Pentagon has ordered a portrait of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee to be returned to the walls of the West Point library. “Under this administration, we honor our history and learn from it - we don’t erase it,” said the Army’s communications director, Rebecca Hodson, per the Times.
The portrait had been taken down in 2022, as part of a congressional drive to remove displays that “commemorate or memorialize the Confederacy.”
Hanks: Trump a “gasbag”
Hanks has spoken openly of his aversion to Trump, having in 2016 referred to the then-presidential candidate as a “self-involved gasbag”.
Ahead of the Republican’s 2024 election victory, Hanks told CNN in June last year that the U.S.’s “journey to a more perfect union has missteps”.
In February, the two-time Oscar winner then elicited the ire of Trump supporters over an appearance on the comedy-sketch show Saturday Night Live, in which he played a character in a red “MAGA” cap who is unwilling to shake a Black gameshow host’s hand.
Hanks has been a prominent supporter of the Democrats. He is known to have donated to the party, and has publicly endorsed Democratic presidential candidates including Trump’s 2020 opponent, Joe Biden.
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