According to this book, John Wayne was constantly under attack by Communist assassins. :dubious: First, ones sent by Stalin. :dubious: :dubious: Then, after Stalin died, Khrushchev allegedly stopped the attempts, purportedly because he was <snort> a John Wayne fan! :dubious::dubious: :dubious:
Then American Commies sent killers after him! :dubious: :dubious: :dubious: :dubious: :dubious: :smack:
I call BS on this.
My Question Is--------------- Does anybody have any independent confirmation of this? Or is it cheap sensationalism, meant to sell books? Or an exaggeration, meant likewise?
On the face of it, the story seems preposterous, like the stuff of John Birch Society fantasies. It seems pretty implausible, and my first instinct is to say “Naaaah, I’m pretty sure that never happened.”
But you never know!
I mean, we’ve had Presidents here in the U.S. who developed irrational hatreds for various celebrities (think of Nixon’s “enemies’ list”). And our CIA has formulated some laughably insane plots (giving Fidel Castro drugs so that his beard would fall out?), too.
Now, it’s well know that Joe Stalin was obsessed with American movies (he often patterned his behavior after American gangster icons like James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson). So… is it remotely possible that he took John Wayne far more seriously than Wayne deserved to be taken? That an aged, increasingly insane, out-of-touch Stalin put a hit out on an actor, and everyone was too afraid to tell him “no.” Yeah, it’s possible.
Assassinating John Wayne would have promoted him into an even higher level of God-Hood than he already occupies. So, this obviously would be counter-productive.
They would have been much more successful at character assassination if they had the information that Cecil mentions in his John Wayne deferment column: http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_004.html
Back in the late 1940s and on into the 1950s American Communist Party members were conventionally depicted as real-life boogie men. A good deal of the organization’s leadership were jailed for conspiring to overthrow the government, and nobody seemed to consider a mitigating factor that they didn’t have the slightest chance at succeeding.
In One Lonely Night, Mickey Spillane depicted the rank and file of the party as psychotic sadists who attended mass meetings where women were tortured for their entertainment. In a movie of the era produced by Howard Hughes (sorry: I can’t recall the title just now), it was revealed that they not only all dressed and talked like gangsters, they disposed of people they didn’t like by making them wear “cement overshoes”.
On radio dramas of the time they were forever being foiled in the nick of time before they blew up a dam or a hospital.
In short, the American Communist of the popular imagination at the time was sort of like the Satanic conspirators one still hears about from time-to-time. You know the ones: sacrificing babies, committing mass poisonings of children on Halloween, using magic ointments to fly…
And at least as hard to find. Maybe there were American Commies out there putting out contracts on people, but I would really like to see a cite for this beyond this sort of fly-by-night book. I don’t, for instance, ever recall hearing of any documentation from that era of such activities, though–as mentioned–they were occurring in popular fiction all the time. Instead, the party members just come across–as today–as mostly lonely misfits passing out leaflets on street corners–and getting beaten up for their efforts.
Frankly, with the arguable exception of the Rosenbergs, I suspect The Duke, with his loud mouth and vivid imagination, did far more harm to this country than any domestic Communist conspiracy.
The Guardian’s version of the story does at least explain how Welles is supposed to have been privy to the information. He was supposedly told by Sergei Bondachuk (presumably when making Waterloo), whose souces in turn were Alexei Kapler and Sergei Gerasimov.
A Russian version of Chinese whispers aside, it wouldn’t have been the first time Welles made up a dinner table anecdote. But he no doubt told it brilliantly.
Sooooo…the Man Who Would Sell No Wine Before It’s Time, But Would Still Drink It, was asked for a story, this “journalist” was buying the drinks, & the man who scared America shitless with bogus Martians got in one last zinger.
As a regular Private Eye reader, I had become familiar with the suggestions that Michael Munn was just making stuff up, but hadn’t made the connection with this John Wayne story until this big article in today’s Observer.
Seems I was rather unfair to Welles back in 2003. It probably wasn’t him who’d made the story up.
