Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (4 page)

But the male American movie stars of the World War II era—from the most politically conservative to the most liberal—went off to fight for their country in droves. Virtually every one of the top male box-office draws of that time enlisted, among them William Holden, James Stewart, Clark Gable, Tyrone Power, and Henry Fonda.

But
not
John Wayne, the Ultimate Icon of right-wing Male Courage. At the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, Wayne was already a major star due to his lead role in the 1939 hit Western
Stagecoach.
Yet once the war began, Wayne told friends and associates he feared that leaving Hollywood for an extended period to fight would harm his career. Later in life, Wayne claimed that he was unable to fight in the war because of his age and the need to support his three children.

But at the time of the Pearl Harbor attacks, Jimmy Stewart was thirty-three—just a year younger than Wayne—and he flew more than twenty combat missions. When Clark Gable volunteered for World War II combat duty, he was forty. The liberal Henry Fonda could easily have avoided combat had he wanted to. When the Japanese struck at Pearl Harbor, he was thirty-seven years old—three years older than Wayne—with three children. Yet Fonda, like many of his wealthiest and most powerful peers in the film business, went off and fought for his country.

Wayne simply refused. Throughout World War II, he turned to a series of increasingly extreme measures to protect himself from being drafted. According to Garry Wills’s
John Wayne’s America,
the Duke did not even reply to letters from the Selective Service System and applied for numerous deferments.

Initially, Wayne obtained 3-A status, “deferred for [family] dependency reasons,” and assured numerous friends that he would enlist as soon as he made one or two more films that would provide his family more financial comfort than they already enjoyed. Yet Wayne never fulfilled this promise.

With virtually all of his competition overseas fighting, Wayne’s acting career soared during the war. Wayne made one successful film after another for enormous and ever-increasing fees. During World War II alone, he starred in thirteen films. Ironically, he often played courageous war heroes even as his peers were away doing the real thing. As the 1969
Time
profile put it,

During World War II, the western dwindled in popularity, but the hero could pull more than one trigger. Wayne switched from Colt to M-1 and became a screen soldier. He was a bit unsteady out of the saddle, but there was conviction behind his “Let’s get the Nips!” rallying cry.

In 1944, Wayne actually invoked his astoundingly successful movie career not as a justification for finally enlisting (as he promised ultimately to do), but instead as an excuse for not being sent to fight. Based on the argument that his war films provided value to the country, Wayne received a 2-A classification, “deferred in support of [the] national…interest.” A month later, however, the Selective Service—with the U.S. armed forces increasingly in need of fresh American fighters as the war dragged on—decided to revoke many previous deferments. It thus reclassified Wayne as 1-A, which would have led to his being drafted. But Wayne implored his film studio to appeal on his behalf, which it did successfully, and his 2-A “national interest” status was reinstated until after the war ended.

John Wayne thus spent the entire war
pretending
to be a tough guy while doing everything in his power to avoid the real fight. He became an extremely rich man while his peers served their country. And the more success, fame, and money he garnered, the more selfishly and desperately he sought to preserve his comforts and avoid fighting. He thereby created the mold of the Great American Hypocrite of today’s right wing.

Despite (or because of) his fanatical combat avoidance during World War II, John Wayne would spend the next forty years of his life strutting around as though he were some sort of über-patriotic war hero. He became as well-known for his far-right, pro-war political views as he was for his acting career. In 1944, he helped found the right-wing Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, eventually becoming its president.

Not only in films, but particularly in politics, he deliberately held himself out as a symbol of manly courage and resolute strength. And perhaps most reprehensibly of all—given his own history—he was often found leading the demonization of those Americans who opposed war, and especially those who did not want to fight in combat.

Luis I. Reyes and Ed Rampell, coauthors of
Made in Paradise: Hollywood’s Films of Hawaii and the South Seas,
reported that Wayne’s third wife, Pilar, drew a clear connection between Wayne’s selfish and war-avoiding behavior during World War II and the hard-core, right-wing, pro-war viewpoints he espoused for the remainder of his life. The authors drew the obvious parallel to today’s right-wing war cheerleaders:

According to Pilar Wayne, her husband “would become a ‘superpatriot’ for the rest of his life trying to atone for staying home” during WWII. Like Wayne, the current crop of GOP chicken hawks are great actors, overcompensating for their previous patriotic failings (draft dodging, etc.) by sounding the jingoistic battle cry for a new generation of working-class sons and daughters to go to war.

Wayne himself frequently and expressly claimed to be the very epitome of the virile fighting male, making swaggering, chest-beating pronouncements like the following at various stages of his life:

“God-damn, I’m the stuff men are made of!”

“Courage is being scared to death—and saddling up anyway.”

“I am an old-fashioned, honest-to-goodness, flag-waving patriot.”

In one interview, Wayne explained that he single-handedly innovated the concept of the Real Cowboy:

I made up my mind that I was going to play a real man to the best of my ability. I felt many of the Western stars of the twenties and thirties were too goddamn perfect. They never drank or smoked. They never wanted to go to bed with a beautiful girl. They never had a fight. A heavy might throw a chair at them, and they just looked surprised and didn’t fight in this spirit. They were too goddamn sweet and pure to be dirty fighters. Well, I wanted to be a dirty fighter if that was the only way to fight back.

If someone throws a chair at you, hell, you pick up a chair and belt him right back. I was trying to play a man who gets dirty, who sweats sometimes, who enjoys kissing a gal he likes, who gets angry, who fights clean whenever possible but will fight dirty if he has to. You could say I made the Western hero a roughneck.

In the 1969
Time
profile, Wayne similarly boasted: “When I came in, the western man never lost his white hat and always rode the white horse and waited for the man to get up again in the fight. Following my Dad’s advice, if a guy hit me with a vase, I’d hit him with a chair. That’s the way we played it. I changed the saintly Boy Scout of the original cowboy hero into a more normal kind of fella.”

So the actor who in reality hid from the opportunity—and the duty—to “belt right back” when his country was attacked by the Japanese and threatened by the Nazis spent the rest of his life loudly claiming to be the Real Man, the one who Fights Back.

Worse still, after World War II, Wayne repeatedly and viciously attacked various films for being allegedly anti-American or insufficiently reverent of America. In one interview, he complained: “
High Noon
was the most un-American thing I have ever seen in my whole life. The last thing in the picture is ol’ Coop [Gary Cooper] putting the United States Marshal’s badge under his foot and stepping on it. I’ll never regret having run [screenwriter and accused Communist] Carl Foreman out of this country.”

Wayne’s boast that he ran Foreman “out of this country” referenced the fact that, in the 1950s, Wayne became a fervent and paranoid anti-Communist McCarthyite. He actively assisted the House Un-American Activities Committee in its effort to ferret out suspected Communist sympathizers in Hollywood. He made a practice of accusing Hollywood figures of being Communists based on the flimsiest of evidence, proclaiming in one interview:

The only guy that ever fooled me was the director Edward Dmytryk. I made a picture with him called
Back to Bataan.

He started talking about the masses, and as soon as he started using that word—which is from their book, not ours—I knew he was a Commie.

In 1960, Frank Sinatra—at the request of his political ally, then-senator and presidential candidate John Kennedy—hired a Hollywood writer, Albert Maltz, one of the “Hollywood Ten” who had been blacklisted during the height of the anti-Communist hysteria. Wayne led the charge in attacking Sinatra: “I wonder how Sinatra’s crony Senator John Kennedy feels about him hiring such a man.”

Wayne became even more extremist later in life, and his delusions of grandeur as a Warrior for Freedom grew steadily. He told a
Time
reporter in 1969: “I think those blacklisted people should have been sent over to Russia. They’d have been taken care of over there, and if the Commies ever won over here, why hell, those guys would be the first ones they’d take care of—after me.”

As the 1950s came to a close, Wayne’s domestic Communist-hunting began to transform into fanatical support for the American war in Vietnam. In 1960, he produced and directed the film
The Alamo,
in which he starred as Davy Crockett. Historians across the board condemned the film for its litany of historical inaccuracies, all designed to glorify the battle for Texas. When confronted with such criticisms, Wayne issued this solemn lecture to Americans on the cost of “liberty and freedom”:

This picture is America. I hope that seeing the battle of the Alamo
will remind Americans that liberty and freedom don’t come cheap.
This picture, well, I guess making it has made me feel useful to my country.

After evading service during World War II, Wayne proclaimed that producing a film in which he pretended to be yet another war hero “made him feel useful to his country.” He made
The Alamo,
he said, “to remind people not only in America but everywhere that there were once men and women who
had the guts to stand up for the things they believed.
”

Throughout the 1960s, Wayne was situated at the epicenter of the pro-war, right-wing American political faction. He spent the 1960s campaigning in California for Ronald Reagan—who, while at least enlisting in the military during World War II, also avoided combat by being classified “for limited service only” due to eyesight difficulties, then spent much of the war safely ensconced in the so-called 1st Motion Picture Unit in Culver City, California.

In 1965, Wayne wrote a letter to President Lyndon Johnson explaining why he wanted to make the pro–Vietnam War propaganda film
The Green Berets.
In his letter, Wayne intoned: It is “extremely important that not only the people of the United States but those all over the world should know why it is necessary for us to be there.” He stressed that he wanted to “tell the story of our fighting men in Vietnam…in a manner that will inspire a patriotic attitude on the part of fellow-Americans—a feeling which we have always had in this country in the past during times of stress and trouble.”

According to his 1979
Newsweek
obituary, Wayne’s initial script for
The Green Berets
was such a transparent and inaccurate piece of pro-war propaganda that even the U.S. military was uncomfortable with it: “The Army rejected the initial script because Wayne’s Green Berets were too gung-ho in their anti-Communist enthusiasm.”

After much controversy,
The Green Berets
was finally made, one of the very few films about the Vietnam War that Hollywood produced during the time the war lasted. The film glorified the war in every way. Wayne played a swaggering, courageous colonel assigned to the dangerous mission of kidnapping a North Vietnamese general, and uttered tough-guy lines such as “Out here, due process is a bullet.” The film was almost universally panned by critics, yet it was so popular among American war supporters that it became the second-most-profitable film of Wayne’s career.

In a 2003 issue of the
Journal of Film and Video,
Brian Woodman reviewed just some of the jingoistic fiction pervading Wayne’s film:

In
The Green Berets,
the Vietcong are almost always seen in long shots or in shadows. They commit dastardly acts, such as stabbing an American soldier in the back, and they often use primitive weapons such as knives and swords, as if to underscore their barbaric nature. The film’s racist depiction of Vietnamese communists is reflected in the opinion of the film’s lead actor, conservative cold warrior John Wayne, who stated in a 1971
Playboy
interview that the Vietcong were treacherous and “that the dirty sons of bitches are raping, torturing gorillas.”

The Green Berets
was so wildly propagandistic that at the time of its release, New York congressman Benjamin Rosenthal accused Wayne and the army of producing the film in cahoots. According to Congressman Rosenthal, the film “became a useful and skilled device employed by the Pentagon to present a view of the war which was disputed in 1967 and is largely repudiated today.”