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

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