Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics (3 page)

Although he spent the 1950s enthusiastically promoting Joseph McCarthy and the 1960s excoriating war opponents as traitors and cowards, when his country needed him most, Wayne preferred that other Americans fight and die—including the country’s wealthiest and most famous actors—so that he could remain in Hollywood and, as one of the only leading men not to fight, become very rich making one war film after another.

And in this critical regard, Wayne was a true trailblazer of the modern American right-wing movement. He was one of the first Americans to pretend that he possessed the “warrior virtues”—strength, courage, resoluteness, spine, a fanatical devotion to fighting for America—not by virtue of his own conduct but by virtue of how frequently and loudly he urged that other Americans be sent off to fight in wars.

Wayne scornfully condemned films that he claimed deviated from wholesome American values. Yet in his own life, Wayne was not only married to three different women but engaged in multiple affairs with a whole array of Hollywood actresses and socialites. While he loudly denounced those whom he deemed to be morally impure, Wayne indulged an alcohol addiction and a barbiturate and amphetamine habit for years.

John Wayne flamboyantly paraded around as the embodiment of courage, masculinity, patriotism, wholesomeness, and the warrior virtues. He adopted right-wing political positions that he claimed demonstrated his thorough, tough, and resolute patriotism. This man who ran away from war then spent the rest of his life loudly cheering for every American war he could find. And as he left a series of broken marriages characterized by ugly divorces involving allegations of abuse, and as he further entered multiple adulterous relationships, he insisted—with increasing shrillness—that he was devoted to wholesome, American, Christian values.

It is true, then, that John Wayne indeed epitomizes the American right-wing male—though not quite in the way that conservative ideologues have, for decades, suggested. The ideals that Wayne endlessly claimed to stand for are the same as those that the modern right wing and its Republican Party endlessly exploit.

Yet, just as was true of John Wayne, the leaders of today’s right-wing movement could not be any further removed from these values in their actual lives. They talk tough and prance around as wholesome warriors, yet their conduct in their personal lives reveals—time and again—that they are the exact opposite.

Almost invariably, it is those modern right-wing leaders with the filthiest, most untraditional, and most decadent personal lives—from Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter to Fred Thompson and Newt Gingrich—who become the most boisterous advocates for so-called traditional marriage and family values. And even more so, it is those with a history of cowardly avoidance of combat and wars, including wars they claim to have supported—such as Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Bill Kristol, and Limbaugh and Gingrich again, to say nothing of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush—who become the most aggressive and bellicose, endlessly questioning the courage and manliness of those who oppose them.

And so it was with the original model of this right-wing strain of manly virtue, John Wayne. Two of his most notable features—his all-American, masculinity-exuding name and thick head of hair—were pure artifice. Wayne, born Marion Morrison, wore a toupee for most of his career to conceal his baldness. Although he stood 6'4?, he frequently wore large lifts in his shoes to appear taller still. Like the right-wing warriors who would idolize him and follow in his path, Wayne excelled at playacting the masculine virtues but failed miserably at adhering to them in his life.

The more Wayne was confronted with his failure to conform to these virtues, the more desperate he became to use political extremism to compensate. Endlessly cheering on new wars became his path to assuaging feelings of weakness and cowardliness for having avoided World War II. Joining in McCarthyite crusades and attacking Vietnam War opponents as traitors became his way of proving his patriotism. And proclaiming himself a steadfast adherent of American Morality gave cover to the decadent and amoral personal life he led.

To this day, Wayne is held up as an icon of right-wing courage, American virtue, and conservative manliness. On his hundredth birthday in 2007, the right-wing
Orange County Register
published an article glorifying his “legacy,” which quoted a local leader as saying: “When they say ‘John Wayne: American,’ they described him well. He was one of a kind.” The same week, the
Orange County Weekly
published an article that satirically though accurately captures Wayne’s image, even today:

John Wayne is not about gray areas.

John Wayne is not about faggy fogs of war.

John Wayne IS America, the greatest country ever created by God, forever and ever, amen.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan delivered his first speech after receiving the GOP nomination at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi. Neshoba County is the place where civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered in 1964. As the
Boston Globe
noted in 2004, “The county fair was legendary for segregationist speeches and Dixie ditties.” Reagan, however, did not mention Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner at all in his remarks, but did, according to the
Globe,
“effusively praise John Wayne,” saying,

God rest his soul. I don’t know whether John Wayne had this experience or not, but I wish he had, because I don’t know of anyone who would have loved it more or been more at home here than the Duke would have been, right here.

Wayne’s popularity among many Americans as the Ultimate American Male is hard to overstate. The
Los Angeles Times
reported in 1995—eighteen years after Wayne’s death—that “Wayne has long been—and remains—one of the nation’s most popular film stars. He ranked first in a 1995 Harris poll that included Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson and Denzel Washington.”

As the same article noted, “Wayne’s image is still used in a beer commercial to exemplify the ideal American fighting man.” When he died, Congress commemorated his life with a medal that simply read “John Wayne, American.” Then-president Jimmy Carter said upon his death, “John Wayne was bigger than life. In an age of few heroes, he was the genuine article.”

Wayne’s status as a supreme icon of American patriotism and manly warrior virtues was expressed vividly by Ron Kovic, the Vietnam veteran and author of
Born on the Fourth of July.
Kovic described how he and a war comrade had watched Wayne in
Sands of Iwo Jima,
in which Wayne—as he so frequently did—played the role of a battle-hardened marine:

We sat glued to our seats…watching Sergeant Stryker, played by John Wayne, charge up the hill and get killed just before he reached the top. And then they showed the men raising the flag on Iwo Jima with the marines’ hymn still playing, and Castiglia and I cried in our seats…and every time I heard it I would think of John Wayne and the brave men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima that day.

Kovic goes on to describe how, after volunteering for the marines during the Vietnam War, he returned home paralyzed:

Nobody ever told me I was going to come back from this war without a penis…Oh God oh God I want it back! I gave it for the whole country…I gave [it] for John Wayne…

In 1969,
Time
magazine published a lengthy cover story profiling Wayne, titled “John Wayne as the Last Hero.” The article declared that Wayne “has become the essential American soul that D. H. Lawrence once characterized as ‘harsh, isolate, stoic and a killer.’” Regarding his politics,
Time
wrote: “If Wayne stands to the right in sex, he is an unabashed reactionary in politics. A rapping Republican and flapping hawk, he has made the Viet Nam war his personal crusade.”

Most revealingly,
Time
celebrated Wayne as the ultimate man’s man: “In a field where male stars are constantly rumored to be epicene, Wayne’s masculinity is incontestable.” In his film roles, which quickly spilled over into how he was perceived and how he perceived himself, he was the “essential western man, fearin’ God but no one else. Tough to men and kind to wimmin, slow to anger but duck behind the bar when he got mad, for he had a gun and a word that never failed.”

As is true of most of our country’s right-wing leaders today, however, Wayne’s showy manliness and warrior courage masked an opposite reality. Yet Wayne’s case is even more striking. Whereas large numbers of the top Republican leadership today evaded combat during the Vietnam War, Wayne did so during World War II, when combat-avoidance was exceedingly rare.

Indeed, the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor generated a unity among the American citizenry rarely seen before or since. Americans from across the political spectrum supported U.S. involvement in the war and lined up behind the liberal Democratic president, Franklin Roosevelt, as he led the nation. Roosevelt had expressly campaigned in 1940 on a platform of reinstating the draft and was reelected easily. Among American males, there was a widespread desire to fight for their country.

For the past several decades, by contrast, only a tiny fraction of the U.S. population has actually fought in the numerous wars we’ve waged. And beginning in earnest with the Vietnam War, the children of our nation’s wealthiest and most powerful individuals virtually never risked their lives in combat.

Today, the sons of our nation’s wealthiest and most powerful families frequently cheer on any war that our political class proposes. The most politically powerful right-wing families have an almost perfect record of advocating numerous wars while ensuring that their own sons and daughters do not risk their lives to fight in them. Now it is commonplace, even perfectly acceptable, for those who want the nation to fight in one war after another—who want us to remain in a state of Permanent War—to bear no personal risk or sacrifice whatsoever for the wars they spawn.

The vast, vast majority of our nation’s most vocal war supporters—those who support not only current wars but new ones as well—find no contradiction in their warmongering while refusing to fight. Indeed, on television and in our nation’s newspapers, one commonly observes young, able-bodied, right-wing American conservatives in their twenties and thirties boldly proclaiming that America is involved in an existential War of Civilizations on which the fate of our country depends. They viciously attack those who oppose war as cowards and weaklings. Yet they never appear to contemplate any duty to fight. They can playact as warriors, feign toughness and courage, but only by sending other people off to risk their lives.

This change in the approach Americans—especially American males—take toward war is reflected in the behavior of pro-war political leaders. Whereas President Roosevelt advocated a draft even before the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor, virtually every American politician today—and especially those who are fond of wrapping themselves in tough-guy pro-war rhetoric—considers calling for the draft to be the most toxic political poison there is.

Even as the Bush administration started wars and threatened new ones—and even as the American military became stretched far too thin due to too many commitments and not enough volunteers—Bush officials emphatically insisted that they would never consider a draft. Suggesting the possibility of a draft is the death knell for any politician in a country that could aptly be called a John Wayne Nation—filled with people who want to cheer on wars but do not want to fight in them.

In today’s America, war advocacy is a means of feeling tough and strong without having actually to be either. Huge numbers of Americans want to reserve the right to demand that the country fight wars without having to sacrifice or risk in any way for them. And the right-wing political movement is teeming with people who imply that their support for war renders them tough and powerful even though they themselves do everything possible to avoid combat service.

Such behavior, however, was virtually unheard of in America during World War II, particularly among the nation’s able-bodied men. With the United States fighting a war that most Americans actually believed in, the nation’s men overwhelmingly displayed the courage of their convictions. The war supporters of the 1940s were a breed much different than America’s loudmouthed pro-war chest-beaters of today.

According to a study in the December 2004 issue of
Population Bulletin,
more than 9 percent of the American population served in the U.S. military during World War II—more than double the percentage that served during any foreign war in U.S. history. By contrast, less than 2 percent of the American population served in the Vietnam War, and less than 1 percent during the 1991 Gulf War.

As of 2006—even with President Bush and most of the right wing unceasingly pounding the claim that we are engaged in an existential, permanent war, requiring endless fighting in Iraq as well as new wars in Iran and beyond—
fewer than one-third of 1 percent of the American population serve in the armed forces.
Thus, the percentage of American citizens serving in the armed forces was twenty-seven times greater during World War II than it is today.

Today, the very idea of our nation’s top movie stars volunteering to fight in Iraq is simply unthinkable. One cannot imagine, say, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Bruce Willis, or Tom Cruise anywhere near a marine platoon or a tank in Anbar Province.