I just read this quote and I wanted to pass it along.
John Wayne was a conservative. But in 1960 he said this after the election of John Kennedy: “I didn’t vote for him, but he’s my President, and I hope he does a good job.”
I wish this kind of thinking was more common fifty years later.
Maybe instead of asking, “What would Jesus do?”, we should be asking “What would John Wayne do?”
I think generally speaking it would involve a good deal of shootings and beat downs.
Did John Wayne have anything like this OFF screen?
No idea, but John Wayne was the Chuck Norris of his day. Look at the Chuck threads and you’d get a pretty good idea of what people would think about the Duke – true or not.
And there’s that walk.
If memory serves, the Canadian government seized a substantial quantity of expensive alcohol from the Duke’s yacht at one point. He confronted some very high officials about this, using language and behavior that, in the words of one witness, “wouldn’t make good print.”
Per the OP: the Duke reacted much the same way to Jimmy Carter’s election, attending the Inaugural Ball as a self-proclaimed member of the “loyal opposition”. Say what you want; the Duke could be a real class act politically. When he was sober.
Wayne also strongly supported President Carter in transferring control of the Panama Canal to the locals, unlike most of his conservative pals: http://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/16/us/reagan-angered-john-wayne.html
As to the OP, I agree.
Reading through the stuff IMDB has on him and some of his movies, he seems to have a little bit of a “frat boy” streak:
Quoted from the IMDB entry for “Rio Bravo”:
The Smothers Brothers, who had endless battles with CBS over their political and religious material, ended their show several times by asking viewers “to pray for our President and his efforts to make peace.”
I wish that kind of thinking had been more common 40 years later, especially among those who bring it up now.