Columnist – John Sammon
Bill O’Reilly was on TV interviewing Patrick Wayne about his father, the late actor John Wayne. O’Reilly has done other pieces about “The Duke.”

Then, a second such interview appeared on another channel. Gee! I asked myself, why the sudden resurgent interest in John Wayne?

I think I know. The conservatives, hurting from recent election defeats, are going back to the “drawing board,” as they used to say, trotting out their (Right Wing) icons.

Even though he’s been dead for thirty years, John Wayne is the top, the Jesus Christ, of conservatism. Every white boy in the country over the age of forty including myself, George Bush and Bill O’Reilly, grew up watching and loving John Wayne.

American foreign policy, the way we deal with other countries, has been influenced by John Wayne, and the impact he made.

Wayne would swagger through the saloon doors and gun down or punch out the bad guys, never mind that the Old West portrayed in these comic book-like outings wasn’t anything like the real Old West, the guns of the 1870s being notoriously unreliable and inaccurate. Though Wayne always draws his gun faster than anyone else, it was Wyatt Earp, the real Wyatt Earp (whom Wayne once met), who said the gunman who took his time shooting was the most dangerous.

The actor who reportedly displayed the most quick-draw gun prowess was little Sammy Davis Jr. (he played the drums equally well).

But no matter. Wayne was an ideal, a sort of rough-neck Galahad, who also exhibited signs of being a bully. He was good looking and self assured, and huge (the bad guys in his films were half his size to give Wayne’s six-foot-four height extra stature).

Every white boy wanted to be like him. I even heard an African American once say he wanted to be John Wayne.

O’Reilly in particular, seems to hero-worship Wayne, and has often cited “The Shootist” as his favorite movie. The late Wally George, a vile, finger-pointing to-the-right-of-Genghis Kahn talk show host of the 1970s, displayed a portrait of The Duke on his set.

Wayne did have a pleasant aspect. He was a family man and loved his family. He was a hard worker and devoted everything to his craft, and he did make a few good movies (The Searchers). He was loyal to friends, and kept has-been buddies like Bruce Cabot in film work for years.

But there was an extremely ugly side to the man. Wayne was part of Senator “Bogus Tail Gunner” Joe McCarthy‘s movement of the 1950s, branding people who disagreed with the conservative credo as communist, or disloyal, or both. Some of his victims were in fact communist, but many were not. Much like the conservative extremism of today’s firebrands (O’Reilly, Karl Rove and Ann Coulter), Wayne was a promoter of political intolerance.

He once took out an ad in Daily Variety hinting strongly that anyone who didn’t vote an Academy Award for his movie The Alamo was in league with the communists. The movie, panned by critics, played loose with the historical facts and only got an award for best sound.

But most damning. For all his patriotic zeal and questioning others’ patriotism, Wayne, like the modern O’Reilly, and Karl Rove, Limbaugh and the rest, never served in the military.

Wayne never served in World War Two. He sat it out while other actors went and had their careers suffer because of it. Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda and even the older Clark Gable did their patriotic thing while Wayne remained behind in Hollywood, fighting the war on the screen. Wayne didn’t do anything illegal to stay out of the service (he had a family and children), but he didn’t do anything to get in either. His wife later said his arch-conservative Pro-Vietnam stance of the 1960s was a reflection of his missing World War Two, and the shame he felt for not having gone to the biggest event of the 20th century.

Everybody who could went into World War Two.

Except Duke.

Even old John Ford, the director and Wayne’s mentor, almost old enough to be Wayne’s father, was at the Battle of Midway Island. Ford tried to shame Wayne into joining, peppering him with letters from the front that said, “Duke, when are you gonna get in this (war)?

Wayne never did.

In fairness, he’d worked too hard struggling for years in B Westerns and was poised on the edge of major stardom when the war broke out. He wasn’t going to let a little thing like World War Two spoil it. Plus, with all the other stars out of town fighting the war, Wayne could cash in on the screen.

But he had to take Ford’s taunts about it for years afterwards.

It’s also pretty obvious Wayne didn’t like blacks. He wasn’t a card-carrying cross-burning Klansman, but he seemed to have the usual prejudice of his day, I’ll tolerate ‘em, as long as they don’t get uppity, and know their place, and don’t cause trouble.

To Wayne and other right-wingers, Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement were causing communist-inspired trouble.

On the 1962 set of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Wayne was taking a mercilious ribbing from Ford about missing the war, or the distinctive way Wayne walked, or a dozen other taunts, like, “I taught Duke to use toilet paper.” (Duke stayed loyal to Ford, the man who had made him a star, to the end, and never lost his temper with him).

But Duke was mad, furious. He needed a patsy he could slap around.

He picked a bit actor in the film, Woody Strode. Bad choice. Strode, a black, ex-football player from UCLA and the L.A.

Rams, was as athletically gifted as he was powerful. Duke by this time was a hard-drinking middle-aged fifty-year-old. When Strode attempted to help Wayne subdue some out-of-control horses during a stunt, Wayne roughly pushed him back.

Strode jumped down from a wagon and faced Wayne. Ford saw what was about to happen and ran up yelling, “Woody, don’t hit Duke. We need him!”

Strode, who would have cleaned Duke’s clock in a fight (he was seven years younger), came along at a time before blacks played action heroes in movies. He was playing (you guessed it), Wayne’s servant.

There isn’t a doubt in my mind that the men, white men, who have been running this country (Clinton excluded), grew up watching Wayne’s bravado and were influenced by it.

Our foreign policy over the past has been it’s them or us, good and bad, draw and shoot, and ask questions later.
Lyndon Johnson once said, “I’m not going to let a little piss-ant country (Vietnam) push us around.”

Disgraced former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told Bush and others “we have to attack Iraq, as a lesson to Arabs that we won’t tolerate it.” (Terror, though Iraq had no involvement with 9-11).

Our foreign policy reflects our love of John Wayne. George Bush grew up watching Wayne. He wanted to be Wayne too. Our foreign policy has been shaped by the Duke, who influenced not only Bush, but O’Reilly, Limbaugh and the rest, even Ann Coulter.

The Duke was given the highest civilian medal from Congress shortly before he died. The medal should be withdrawn because Wayne did what he loved (making movies), and got paid handsomely. Other actors, who went and served in World War Two, and whose careers suffered for it, never received such a medal. You shouldn’t get a medal for being a rich movie star, for not sacrificing anything, except to teach a whole generation of white boys (some of whom now run our government) to swagger and think themselves superior.

It’s unclear how Obama regards Wayne. Ironically, Obama is related by a distant ancestor to Wild Bill Hickok, the famous western marshal whom Wayne loosely portrayed in The Shootist.

Teenagers today seem only vaguely aware of Wayne.

What is clear is that now that conservatives have lost the election and over half the American people have turned against their policies and extreme rhetoric, the rightists will pick themselves up off the figurative saloon floor by promoting their pantheon of heroes, for solace, and to look for inspiration, and for the promise of a better day, by recollecting The Duke, Reagan, maybe even Barry Goldwater.

Copyright 2008 Sammonsays.

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