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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.”
    During the Vietnam War, the draft-dodging Wayne vocally condemned teenagers who went to Europe or Canada in order to avoid the draft, calling them “cowards,” “traitors,” and “Communists.” He was fond of issuing similar chest-beating attacks on Hollywood activists who opposed the war, such as Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland.
    Like so many of our current right-wing political leaders and pundits who playact at being a warrior for so long that they come to believe it is their reality, Wayne spent his last several decades convinced that “war hero” was not merely a fictional role he played, but was what he in fact was.
    And it is no surprise that Wayne came to view himself as a genuine war hero, since that is how the country—more enamored of the image of warrior courage than the reality—continuously treated him. According to the 1969 Time profile: “Nobody took a dim view of Wayne for staying out [of World War II]. In the ’50s, General Douglas MacArthur told him, ‘Young man, you represent the cavalry officer better than any man who wears a uniform.’”
    The gap between Wayne’s tough-guy image and his fear of combat was perhaps matched only by the gap between Wayne’s public moralizing and the decadent, adulterous, and hedonistic personal life he led for decades. Almost as much as he paraded around as a tough warrior, Wayne held himself out as a defender of traditional moral values and the beacon of the wholesome American man.
    Long before it was fashionable as a political weapon, Wayne attacked anything that had any whiff of homosexuality to it. Upon the 1959 release of Suddenly, Last Summer, he denounced Tennessee Williams’s vaguely homoerotic film as “too disgusting even for discussion” while making clear he would never see it. Wayne sermonized: “It is too distasteful to be put on a screen designed to entertain a family, or any member of a decent family.”
    A decade earlier, in 1949, producer Robert Rossen had offered Wayne the role of Willie Stark in All the King’s Men. After reading the script, Wayne refused to have anything to do with the film, sending his agent an angry letter claiming that the film “smears the machinery of government for no purpose of humor or enlightenment” “degrades all relationships” and is suffused with “drunken mothers; conniving fathers; double-crossing sweethearts; bad, bad, rich people; and bad, bad poor people if they want to get ahead.” The film, wrote Wayne, degraded “the American way of life,” and he concluded by telling his agent that “you can take this script and shove it up Robert Rossen’s derrière.”
    Yet again, like so many of our current right-wing moralizers, Wayne’s actual life could not have been any less faithful to the moral standards he loved using to attack others publicly. And it was not merely a sinful act here and there that Wayne committed. To begin with, Wayne—like much of the leadership of the right-wing political faction today—was incapable of adhering to any of the basic oaths of so-called traditional marriage. He vowed on three different occasions, with three different women, that he would remain in holy matrimony till death do us part, yet failed to do so even once.
    Wayne, after twelve years of marriage, divorced his first wife, Josephine, after he became a successful film star. While married