Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics Read Online Free PDF Page A

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