Circa ’70, John Wayne, and Playboy

Take a guess where that combination leads? A crash course on how far we’ve come.

In 1971, Playboy had an interview with John Wayne. (excerpts)

Last fall, Wayne’s first television special—a 90-minute quasi-historical pageant dripping with God-home-and-country hyperbole—racked up such a hefty Nielsen rating that it was rebroadcast in April. At year’s end, Wayne was named one of the nation’s most admired entertainers in a Gallup Poll. Assigned by Playboy shortly afterward to interview the superstar, contributing Editor Richard Warren Lewis journeyed to Wayne’s sprawling (11-room, seven-bath) $175,000 bayfront residence on the Gold Coast of Newport Beach, California, where he lives with his third Latin wife—Peruvian-born Pilar Pallete—and three of his seven children.

Too bad that “God-home-and-country” touches a spot in people, even years later. Those are just the ideals and values the Left detests. It’s the same M/O today.

Here is an excerpt from the interview in which Wayne was defending the types of movies he made verses the realism of gore that was gaining popularity. He claimed their new direction left little to imagination. But then he said something about what is not left to the imagination, commenting on the current culture — circa ’71.

PLAYBOY: But isn’t your kind of screen rebellion very different from that of today’s young people?
WAYNE: Sure. Mine is a personal rebellion against the monotony of life, against the status quo. The rebellion in these kids—especially in the SDSers and those groups—seems to be a kind of dissension by rote.

PLAYBOY: Meaning what?
WAYNE: Just this: The articulate liberal group has caused certain things in our country, and I wonder how long the young people who read Playboy are going to allow these things to go on. George Putnam, the Los Angeles news analyst, put it quite succinctly when he said, “What kind of a nation is it that fails to understand that freedom of speech and assembly are one thing, and anarchy and treason are quite another, that allows known Communists to serve as teachers to pervert the natural loyalties and ideals of our kids, filling them with fear and doubt and hate and down-grading patriotism and all our heroes of the past?”

PLAYBOY: You blame all this on liberals?
WAYNE: Well, the liberals seem to be quite willing to have Communists teach their kids in school. The Communists realized that they couldn’t start a workers’ revolution in the United States, since the workers were too affluent and too progressive. So the Commies decided on the next-best thing, and that’s to start on the schools, start on the kids. And they’ve managed to do it. They’re already in colleges; now they’re getting into high schools. I wouldn’t mind if they taught my children the basic philosophy of communism, in theory and how it works in actuality.

You have to say, in so many ways, John Wayne had his finger on the pulse of the country and he knew the direction it was headed. At least in the Left, academia, and in movies — even if prophetic. I think I’ll just let the Duke’s words speak for themselves.

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