John Wayne is the Jesus Christ of the Right Wing

Posted on 11 January 2009
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.