Excerpts from Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America by Richard Slotkin (Atheneum, 1992), pp. 2, 3-4, 497-504, 512-520

This book is cultural history. Some students love this, others find it hard to gather the meaning and argument. What is the author’s argument and how does he use movies to support his argument. If you have watched John Wayne movies you will be one step ahead. Another question to consider: can you see the issue of wars and hero images in recent developments since 9/11? Has anyone heard of any references to frontier/Indian fighting in recent events?

Kennedy’s use of “New Frontier” (as the metaphor for his administration) tapped a vein of latent ideological power. While he and his advisers could not have predicted just how effective the symbolism would be, they certainly understood that they were invoking what was a venerable tradition in American political rhetoric…..

The exchange of an old, domestic, agrarian frontier for a new frontier of world power and industrial development had been a central trope in American political and historiographical debates since the 1890s. Sixty-seven years (almost to the day) before Kennedy's address, Frederick Jackson Turner had delivered his epoch-making address on "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," in which he asserted that the contemporary crisis of American development had arisen from the closing of the "old frontier" and the delay in finding a new one. His "Frontier Thesis" would become the basis of the dominant school of American historical interpretation and would provide the historiographic rationale for the ideologies of both Republican Progressives and Democratic liberals for much of the ensuing century.

For Kennedy and his advisers, the choice of the Frontier as symbol was not simply a device for trade-marking the candidate. It was an authentic metaphor, descriptive of the way in which they hoped to use political power and the kinds of struggle in which they wished to engage. The "Frontier" was for them a complexly resonant symbol, a vivid and memorable set of hero-tales--each a model of successful and morally justifying action on the stage of historical conflict.

Those who were persuaded to identify with Kennedy's heroic political scenario found that it entailed more than simple affiliation with the campaign or the administration. Its central purpose was to summon the nation as a whole to undertake (or at least support) a heroic engagement in the "long twilight struggle" against Communism and the social and economic injustices that foster it. The symbolism of a "New Frontier" set the terms in which the administration would seek public consent to and participation in its counterinsurgency "mission" in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. And it shaped the language through which the resultant wars would be understood by those who commanded and fought them. Seven years after Kennedy's nomination, American troops would be describing Vietnam as "Indian country" and search-and-destroy missions as a game of “Cowboys and Indians"; and Kennedy's ambassador to Vietnam would justify a massive military escalation by citing the necessity of moving the "Indians" away from the "fort" so that the "settlers" could plant “corn." But the provenance and utility of the Frontier symbol did not end with the Kennedy/Johnson administrations: twenty years after Kennedy's acceptance speech the same symbolism-expressed in talismanic invocations of the images of movie-cowboys John Wayne and Clint Eastwood--would serve the successful campaigns of a Republican arch-conservative and former Hollywood actor identified (perhaps unfairly) with Western roles. . . .

Heroic Leadership and the Cult of Toughness

Kennedy's projection of himself as "hero-president" was built on two basic structures. His heroic style was that of the warrior. He gave this character historical resonance by drawing on three specific forms of warrior-myth, each of which had both a historical reference and a reference to contemporary movie genres. His campaign identified him with the heroes of the combat film through invocations of his wartime heroism ("P.T. 109") and with the heroes of the Frontier Myth. The "regal" style of his White House led to his identification with the myths of chivalric knighthood (Camelot), a venerable historical structure.

But the form of his heroism is as significant as its content. Like his folkloric ancestor, the hero of a modern mass-culture myth is offered as the embodiment of certain natural and historical principles or forces, as an idealized representation of his people's characteristic traits, and as a model for emulation. When the heroic character is assumed by a modern political leader, its representational function becomes political as well as symbolic. To the extent that the hero- leader "represents us," we license him to act on our behalf, to achieve things that are beyond us. If we can also believe that he represents our own best selves--if we actively identify with him, as we identify with the protagonist of a movie--then his unilateral decisions will seem to be enactments of our will (or at least of our wishes). From the perspective of a President who conceives himself as a hero, the actions he wishes to take will seem to be "representative" of things the people wish for--or would wish for if they shared the superior knowledge and courage that make him a hero. He therefore feels empowered to act beyond the expressed or legislated will of the people and sees in such action nothing inconsistent with his function as the agent or representative of the people. During his brief administration, Kennedy had considerable success in achieving public credibility as a hero. The power of Kennedy as symbol was augmented by his tragic assassination in 1963, and in subsequent years he has become the center of a public "cult": a heroic symbol to be invoked by politicians from both ends of the political spectrum. That heroic “cult" has been for most of his successors a problematic legacy: a vision of the power they might exercise if only they could capture for themselves the heroic afflatus that (in hindsight) seemed Kennedy's natural gift.

But Kennedy's heroic myth owed as much to careful construction as to his unquestionable gifts as a performer. . . A "heroic" style enhances the appearance of power by indicating that the President is confident that he possesses strength and is willing to use it to further national and personal objectives, even at great risk.

. . .The key to his persuasive power was his ability to engage a significant percentage of the American public (particularly among the college-educated) in personal identification with him, to see him as a genuine representative of the ideals and aspirations of the younger political generations, and to accept, either personally or vicariously, his invitation to participate in the "long twilight struggle." Kennedy was not less committed than Eisenhower to the secret use of presidential instruments like the CIA and to the evasion of the mechanisms of Congressional consent. But he differed from Eisenhower in his belief that it was necessary to establish a climate of public opinion that was openly supportive of "dirty war" operations and the "stretching" of constitutional limited powers that such operations entailed. To a remarkable degree he . . .won the complicity of a broad spectrum of the intellectual and political elite, and of the general public, in such projects as the "Secret War" against Castro and counterinsurgency in Vietnam.

His inaugural address, and the policy formulations that followed it, framed the New Frontier's project as one of personal moral regeneration achieved through action in a particular heroic style. The goal was not merely to survive or maintain our national and personal standing but to achieve "greatness" as both individuals and as a nation. Kennedy's rhetoric is filled with recurrent assertions of his belief that the American nation, and himself as the nation's leader, have a "high destiny," that this is "a time for greatness," and that his ambition as President is not merely to do a decent job but to achieve and promote that "greatness." Under modern conditions, greatness was to be achieved, not by a single romantic Errol Flynn-like cavalry charge, but by close engagement in a "long twilight struggle" against tyranny and poverty. But though the means and styles of action might be those of the "gritty" combat film or the cynical gunfighter Western, the idealism of the ends was evoked by the language of chivalry: the vision of a world polity "in which the strong are just, and the weak are protected." The line . . owed something to the Arthurian slogan "might in the cause of right" from the script of the contemporary Broadway musical, Cam- elot.

War was a primary symbol of political value on the New Frontier. Its symbolic importance was first registered in Kennedy's request that Robert Frost read "The Gift Outright" during the inaugural ceremonies--a poem in which Frost describes the emergent nationality of Americans as the people's "gift outright" of themselves to "the land vaguely realizing westward" and ties that process to necessary violence: "The deed of gift was many deeds of war.” The senior personnel of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations shared a common mystique of "war," similar in both its sources and its content to that which had informed the intellectual life of the post-Civil War generation. War was identified as the supreme expression of American values, in which the society "as one man" assumes the moral burden of a struggle (on the grandest scale) for justice and against a great evil, submerges petty and individual concerns in a collective and patriotic effort, and in pursuit of victory develops, organizes, and directs the full potential of the American political and economic system. When so construed, war comes to seem an appropriate metaphor even for programs as pacific as the "War on Poverty."

But the mythology of war prevalent in American culture also sanctifies a hierarchical and highly "command-centered" version of democratic or republican ideology. When the war metaphor is invoked for a national project (containment of Communism, the war on poverty), the people as a whole become the platoon and the President becomes the commander in whom (at least for the duration of the crisis) we must repose implicit confidence. The paradox of the New Frontier was that it aimed at achieving democratic goals through structures and methods that were elite-dominated and command-oriented.

The Kennedy administration cultivated an image of "tough-mindedness" and scorn for the "sentimentality" and hide-bound routine of the Eisenhower regime. Its style was "to advocate restraint, and yet to despise softness and to admire a willingness to use military power; to feel conscience, but by no means allow it to paralyze one into inaction; to walk softly with one's big stick, in fact, but to be ready to crack heads with it." Like the "gunfighter style" of the Magnificent Seven, the Kennedy style was a mixture of "idealism and cynicism"--idealism as to ends, and cynicism as to means. Thus the definition and resolution of most important international issues tended to emphasize the element of the "force" involved: What sort of military threat did a given political development pose? What sort of force could be deployed to meet it? Kennedy's administration had “a conviction of the efficacy of force amounting almost to romanticism [and] a strategic doctrine that, while nominally designed to make nuclear war less likely, had the practical effect of making every other kind of war less unattractive." Problems were perceived as "challenges," and it was important that the administration be perceived as being "disposed to act forcefully."

The projection of a President as "heroic" is not merely a play of images but a way of construing presidential power. Father John B. Shecrin, writing in Catholic World, voiced what had become conventional wisdom in regard to the President's license to respond to threatening situations abroad: "The fact is that he does have a mandate to solve our international problems by means of any device that will work. This was the ideological problem Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., addressed in his 1960 article "On Heroic Leadership and the Dilemma of Strong Men and Weak Peoples." Though nominally addressed to the "Zapata problem" of Third World societies, the article offers a general theory of democratic leadership which asserts the necessity of Strong Men even in a fully matured constitutional democracy. Schlesinger's conception of the heroic president had real authority: he was a leading member of Kennedy's intellectual cadre, and he was (and is) a distinguished historian whose prize-winning biographies of Andrew Jackson and FDR used the lives of two notably "strong" Democratic presidents as occasions for exploring both the theory and the practice of democratic leadership. . Modern leaders are not . . .the spontaneous expressions of native genius but the crafted andlargely falsified products of a manipulative manufacturing process. . . Indeed, such falsification is, in Schlesinger's view, a necessary precondition for the effective functioning of heroic leadership in a modern society; and the necessity of such falsification should be recognized in principle. (This is the same ideological position that is promulgated at the end of Fort Apache.-see below) . . .

The heroic President is not merely the instrument of popular or majority will. Rather, acting out of a higher and more perfect sense of the nation's mission and necessity than any popular majority could possess, he helps his race or nation to realize its latent destiny by leading it forward in directions it might not have chosen by or for itself. What Schlesinger says of Third World leadership therefore applies with equal force to American leadership:

The real division in these countries is not between left and right; it is between hard and soft-between leadership which has the will to do what must be done to lay the foundations for economic growth, and leadership which falters before the vested interests of traditional society or the peremptory challenges of rising social groups.

This model of leadership dovetailed with the tradition of "closed politics" in which most of Kennedy's advisers had been reared. It also conformed to the Cold War doctrine embodied in the Doolittle Report, which held that it was incumbent on the government to act in advance of or even in opposition to an expression of popular will in order to respond effectively to the "dirty war" tactics of the enemy.. . .

By identifying with the complex of chivalric and gunfighter/Indian-fighter imagery that invested the New Frontier Americans as a people gave their consent to the project of "caring for" the poor of the Third World. But with their consent given, the deeds of charity would be vicarious. The actual work would be entrusted to small, elite cadres of volunteers who would live among the natives and learn their ways but who would resist the temptation to "go native." Instead, they would begin the process of modernizing--which is to say, Americanizing--the indigenous cultures. The Peace Corps and the Green Berets were the political instruments most closely identified with Kennedy-style heroism. Both would pride themselves on their volunteer spirit and their radical pragmatism-their ability to improvise techniques on the ground and to overcome hidebound regimes of red tape and bureaucratic restraint. Both would begin by achieving mastery of the local rules, mirroring the wiles of the native enemy to defeat that enemy on his own ground. The Peace Corps . . . would work directly with village counterparts on local projects, using "small" technology and "getting their hands dirty." In the case of the Green Berets, "fighting dirty"--fighting "like the lndians"- was part of the original charter, and in Vietnam this style of warfare was expected to prove itself in the field. These two organizations put in practice the "neo-Turnerian" . . . aspects of the administration's myth of choice. The Peace Corps and the Alianza para el Progreso in Latin America aimed at achieving economic abundance and political reform through the peaceful infusion of American capital, energy, and expertise; while the Special Forces made a . . .connection between counterinsurgency warfare and the processes of nation-building.-,,,

Kennedy's public persona thus represents a political realization of the myth/ideology of "progressivism," and particularly of its literary mythology. . . the powerful appeal of the "New Frontier" and the Kennedy style obscures the elitist and anti-democratic implications of "Camelot," with respect to both the treatment of "weaker" peoples and nations abroad and to the management and control of public opinion and Congressional consent at home.

John Wayne Syndrome: The Cult of "The Duke"

The period of Kennedy's campaign for the presidency coincided with the transformation of John Wayne from a major Hollywood star to a powerful cultural icon. Since 1949,

Wayne had been perhaps the most widely and consistently popular Hollywood actor. But the most striking peculiarity of his stardom was its generic limitation. His screen persona was identified with his roles in combat films and Westerns, and even when he was cast in other kinds of film his role was usually designed to refer more or less explicitly to his soldier/cowboy persona. This concentration of screen activity created a particularly strong link between Wayne's screen persona and his off-screen role as celebrity and public figure. Such linkages are (as we have seen) a normal feature of movie-stardom. But Wayne's identification with war and the West linked him with a highly specific set of myth-historical referents. And over time he came to be identified with those referents--came to be seen, not as a player in cowboy and combat pictures, but as an authentic representative of "the Old West" or of "the American soldier."

By the end of the 1960s, Wayne would be so identified with the West that his presence in a Western was taken as a guarantee of authenticity, similar to that which "original participants" had pro- vided for Wild West shows and early movies--even though his "participation" was as a movie actor, not as a working cowboy or actor in frontier history. The ultimate development of this paradox is nicely represented by P. F. Kluge's laudatory 1972 article in Life: "First and Last, a Cowboy / Half myth and half movie star, John Wayne rides a lost frontier." Kluge wants us to see Wayne as an "authentic" representative of the Old West and of " 19th Century values," although Wayne's knowledge of both derives entirely from roles played in fiction films. So Kluge describes the filming of Westerns on location as a form of pioneering (a "community of men ... [doing] rough work in remote awesome locations, [living in] tent cities. . . ") and has Wayne complaining, like a crusty old cowpoke or mountain man, how "everything has gotten built up so, it's hard to find distant locations for roughing it, like we did before."

Kluge identifies Wayne's movie roles as historical performances in order to lend authority to Wayne's angry polemic against contemporary American values and politics: "He has been a leatherneck and he has been a Green Beret, but he has gone on being a cowboy. But now he sees his kind of cowboy, his kind of western as part of a legacy which is increasingly threatened. When Kluge asks, "What frontiers will replace the West, which is all won and closed and settled and where locations for a western film are getting scarce?" Wayne replies with a diatribe that is both a reprise of the classic Teddy Roosevelt version of the Myth of the Frontier (from an essay like "Expansion and Peace") and a direct response to the contemporary politics of decolonization:

"Your generation's frontier should have been Tanganyika ... It's a land with eight million blacks and it could hold 60 million people. We could feed India with the food we produced in Tanganyika! It could have been a new frontier for any American or English or French kid with a little gumption! Another Israel! But the do-gooders had to give it back to the Indians!

"Meanwhile, your son and my son are given numbers back here and live in apartment buildings on top of each other ."

Wayne’s version of the "New Frontier" differs from the Kennedy version in being an excessively explicit and credulous reproduction of the mythic tradition. But the two have important cognate features of style and content. Wayne's Third World Frontier is literally and naively Turnerian, with its scenario of individual "kids" establishing the farms whose wheat will feed starving India. But Kennedy also saw the Third World as a frontier in which the kids of "this generation"--acting as agents of the nation rather than as individual settlers-could justify their moral character and bring waste spaces into productivity. Wayne's distinction between "blacks" and "people" openly applies to contemporary Africans the original colonists' characterization of land occupied by American Indians as an "unpeopled waste." The administration's belief in the "primitivism" of Third World cultures was a more sophisticated application of this classic analogy between American Indians and non-White natives elsewhere--although it would never express these ideas in language so frankly racist. Wayne's formulation differs only in its explicit anger from Samuel Eliot Morison's likening the French surrender of Algeria to a putative American surrender of Ohio to Tecumseh. His use of the standard of productivity to define the qualitative difference between Euro-Americans and natives is both a traditional aspect of the Frontier Myth and an essential premise of the New Frontier's "modernization" and "nation-building" strategy, and "do-gooders" was nearly as much a term of contempt among the President and his

men as it is for Wayne .

Wayne's connections to the figures of "leatherneck" and "Green Beret" were every bit as fictive as those that identified him as a nineteenth-century cowboy. Wayne never served a day in the military, although he contributed to the war effort as a civilian entertainer of troops overseas and as an actor in films designed to spur the war effort . But the movie-myth that developed around Wayne became a more than adequate substitute for his lack of real military experience. In a speech before the American Legion Convention, General Douglas MacArthur praised Wayne's performance as the hard-boiled Marine sergeant in Sands of Iwo Jima (I 949) by declaring, "You represent the American serviceman better than the American serviceman himself "--a statement which suggests that Wayne's mythic figure is not merely a representation but a valid substitute for and even an improvement on the real thing. This confounding of myth and reality would reach its culmination in Congress's authorization of a John Wayne medal, identifying the lifelong civilian as the embodiment of American military virtue.

The essential elements of Wayne's cowboy/soldier persona are visible in his earliest "B"-Western roles and in the spate of wartime action films he made between 1942 and 1945. But Wayne achieved the most complete and powerful development of that persona in the postwar films he did for John Ford and Howard Hawks. Ford and Hawks constructed the powerful screen persona Wayne came to inhabit and taught him how to use that persona effectively. As his career prospered, Wayne sought to apply what he had learned by taking greater control of that image. He used his leverage as a star to negotiate with producers for particular roles and for the choice of scriptwriter and director. He produced two of his own pictures in the late 1940s, and in 1952 he formed a production company of his own, Wayne-Fellows. That company produced three films, including two trademark Wayne performances in Hondo (1953) and The High and the Mighty (1954)

In 1955 Wayne formed his own production company (Batjac) and began serious work on a project that had interested him since 1946--an epic treatment of the defense of the Alamo. The picture was to be a "blockbuster," but Wayne also intended it as both a personal and a political statement. He risked his own and his company's fortunes on the production and pushed it to completion despite mounting financial difficulties. When he insisted on independent production, his former studio (Republic) vindictively attempted to pre-empt the subject by rushing The Last Command (1955) into production.

Wayne wanted The Alamo to be received as a serious historical epic that gave an authentic picture of the historical event and linked it to an impeccable and uplifting moral and political message. He wrote much of the publicity for the film, defining his purposes in terms that echo Buffalo Bill's "Salutatory" assertion of historical authority and educational purpose:

We want to recreate a moment in history which will show to this living generation of Americans what their country really stands for, and to put in front of their eyes the bloody truth of what some of their forebears went through to win what they had to have or die-liberty and freedom.

He hoped that the film would play a role in the struggle against Communism in the emerging nations, that through it he could "sell America to countries threatened with Communist domination ... [and] put new heart and faith into all the world's free people...." But his more immediate purpose was to "sell America" to the American people, whose patriotism had gone flabby: "I think we've all been going soft, taking freedom for granted."

As the reviewer for the Los Angeles Times noted, this rhetorical line--which might have seemed a cliche a year or two before- seemed very timely. Wayne released the film on the eve of the 1960 presidential election, in which Kennedy and Nixon vied with each other in asserting their commitment to a more vigorous opposition to Communist advances. Although Wayne was a Republican, his "going soft" remark, and the heroic persona that lies behind it, corresponds more closely to the rhetorical style and ideological stance of Kennedy. The difference between them was that while Kennedy identified "softness" with the regime of an aged Republican general, Wayne blamed intellectuals: "those pseudo-sophisticates, the people who belittle honor, courage, cleanliness." But that sort of intellectual--by implication leftist and critical of American policy in the Cold War--was just as antipathetic to Kennedy and the "tough-minded" academics who advised him.

Wayne's choice of the Davy Crockett role for himself was a way of buttressing his moral authority in the narrative's The Alamo was developed in the midst of the "Crockett Craze" spawned by Disney Studios' three-part TV serial, Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier (1954, released as a movie in 1955, and followed by sequels in TV and theatrical release) .

Wayne's Davy Crockett borrows the "populist style" of the Disney version-folksy humor, frankness, preference for substance over formality-but uses it to sanctify an essentially undemocratic set of political manipulations. Wayne's Crockett has brought his volunteers to Texas under the pretense that they are merely hunting, but he plans to inveigle them into enlisting in the Texan cause by means of an elaborate psychological ruse. He tells us that his Tennesseans are too independent and hard-headed to simply enlist in someone else's fight or to succumb to highfalutin' patriotic rhetoric. To persuade them, he will first have to show them that the Texans are their kind of people: brave, Anglo-American (for the most part), and opposed to the kind of government oppression any Tennessean would naturally resent. He then supplements fact with deceit, producing a forged letter supposedly from Santa Anna, which implicitly insults the Tennesseans' manhood. Having aroused their ire, he then unmasks his deceit and restores his standing as a truthful man. But his falsification has been persuasive in opening the men's eyes, and they agree to stay and fight. (Crockett's procedure here mirrors John Ford's play on truth, falsification, and belief at the end of Fort Apache.)

Wayne's relation to his men is a good metaphoric rendering of the public relations problem faced by American policy-makers and their methods for dealing with it. The Tennesseans are as isolationist and self-interested as the public imagined by the policy-makers. Their leaders must define a mission that they would not choose for themselves and trick them into accepting it as if it were their own. The trick is not unmasked until they have emotionally committed themselves, and its exposure merely adds a corollary to the ideological imperatives of their leaders-namely, that they give their free consent to be ruled by a set of procedures which require that crucial information be concealed from them "for their own good."

This message is amplified in the relationship between Colonel Travis (Laurence Harvey) and the soldiers in the Alamo, particularly the Hispanic Texans who are serving with him. Travis believes that if his troops learn that they have been ordered to fight to the last man and are certain to be overwhelmed by Santa Anna's army, they will simply bolt. He therefore conceals the true situation, even though this requires him to contemptuously dismiss intelligence brought to him by Hispanic Texans. At this point in the narrative, Travis appears to be a "martinet" figure: he relies too much on formal authority and lacks Crockett's warmth and plebeian touch. However, although his manner is repellent, his method of command is vindicated by its similarity to Crockett's own deceptive procedures. Even his insulting manner toward the Hispanics is accounted for as an expression of paternal concern. He knows that when the Alamo falls, Santa Anna will be merciless to any Mexicans who have fought against him, and he wishes to spare them by driving them away.

The politics of The Alamo thus mirror the emerging politics of counterinsurgency in their insistence on the legitimacy of falsification and manipulation to evade (until commitment is an established fact) a skeptical public scrutiny, and in the tendency to substitute American for non-American forces in an approaching crisis. The movie also addresses the question of military "style," in the conflict between the “regular” command principles of Travis and the "irregular" methods of Bowie and Crockett. Although the movie gives Travis and command authority their due, it clearly regards the "irregular" style as the most effective as well as the most "American," and it signals that emphasis by making Wayne's Crockett the figure who effects the compromise between Travis and the excessively "irregular" Bowie.

Wayne equated dislike of the film with the eastern "pseudo-sophisticates'" distaste for his message's But the film's formal defects contributed to a critical reception that was at best lukewarm and at its harshest contemptuous of both Wayne's polemics and his film- making. For the most part, the film's jingoism was less problematic even to liberals of that era than was the fatuous, self-important, and doctrinaire tone in which Wayne delivers his opinions on patriotism, courage, religious faith, "Woman," race relations, the marriage bond, the balance of military and civilian authority, and so on. Wayne's handling of the theme of slavery drew on a recognizably denigrating stereotype of the faithful black servant and reiterated one of the oldest of pro-slavery myths by having Bowie's servant resist his own manumission and elect to die with his master. His treatment of gender follows the model of patriarchal dominance (modified by chivalry): at one point the script declares that "a man without a woman is half a man, but a woman without a man is nothing." His religious enthusiasm reaches a point of absurdity when one of the soldiers declares that he is unwilling to die with anyone who doesn't believe in God. It is not enough that, as the proverb says, there are no atheists in foxholes-Wayne wants it understood thatff an atheist appears he will be asked to leave. But despite the weaknesses of The Alamo, Wayne's performances during the 5os and 60s, and the linkage of his screen persona and his role as a public figure, made him a public icon whose ideological resonance nearly rnatched the ambitions of his Crockett portrayal. As the public perceived him, he was not only the actor who had played all those Western and Marine Corps heroes; he was somehow, in his own person, a breathing incarnation of the personalities and consciousness of Ringo, Kirby York, Colonel Jim Madden, Tom Dunson, Sergeant Stryker, and Ethan Edwards."' His roles in The Longest Day (1962), How the West Was Won (1962), and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) are almost purely iconic in their use of Wayne to invoke military and Western associations.

These iconic cameos were merely one aspect of a public persona that had transcended the movie roles from which it had derived its identity and force. By 1960 "John Wayne" had become a kind of folk-hero, his name an idiomatic expression, a metaphoric formula or cliche that instantly invoked a well-recognized set of American heroic virtues-or, from a different perspective, inflated American pretensions. His triumph over cancer and his return to the screen were hailed in cover stories in both Life and Newsweek; Time compared him favorably with the Hemingway ideal of heroism in "John Wayne Rides Again." Reviewing two Wayne vehicles in 1967, Richard Schickel treats Wayne as a mythic figure, "a kind of natural phenomenon, rather like a spectacular geological remnant of a vanished age," representing a heroic past which is at once that of the Old West and of an older Hollywood:

For some of us who have grown up in his shadow, measuring our changing personalities against his towering constancy, Wayne has become one of life's bedrock necessities. He reminds us of a time when right was right, wrong was wrong, and the differences between them could be set right by the simplest means.

There used to be many like him, but death and age ... have robbed him of most of his competition-and robbed us of the opportunity to regress ... to the mythic days of yesteryear.... If anything, he has im- proved with age.... Most men of his paunch have given up righteous violence in favor of guileful acquiescence in the world's wickedness; the Duke is still banging away at it ... an unconscious existential hero....

(Within the special subdivision of the culture that belongs to the military, the John Wayne image also had important meanings. Its most obvious role was its "recruiting poster" idealization of military heroism, which attracted many young recruits (like Ron Kovic) to the Marine Corps. But it also had meaning for the professional officer corps, as a way of expressing the intangible qualities that give a commander authority: "[Colonel] Porter, who was somewhat in awe of Harkins, thought that he resembled John Wayne.” The necessary concomitant of this role was the use of Wayne as symbolic scapegoat when patriotic heroism led to personal or collective catastrophe, as in the crippled veteran Ron Kovic's bitter cry, "Nobody ever told me I was going to come back from the 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."

The double-edged quality of the Wayne icon appears in the complex of war-related stress disorders identified by Vietnam veterans and their doctors as "John Wayne Syndrome." The common feature of the syndrome was the soldier's internalization of an ideal of superhuman military bravery, skill, and invulnerability to guilt and grief, which is identified at some point with "John Wayne." The identification is not necessarily with a specific Wayne film or group of films, but with Wayne as a figure of speech, signifying the supposed perfection of soldierly masculinity. Since that ideal is, in fact, impossible to live up to, "John Wayne Syndrome" often took the form of excessive guilt or shame for feelings of guilt or grief, or for responding to battlefield stress with a normal human mix of fear and bravery. Disillusion with the Wayne ideal, or recognition of its inapplicability in the real world of combat, could transform the heroic symbol into its opposite, a metaphor of false consciousness, pretension, and military excess, as in the statement attributed to a Marine in I Corps, "There are always two ways to do something--the right way and the John Wayne way. We might as well do it the right way." The phrase is actually a variation on the army folk-saying that distinguishes "the right way, the wrong way, and the army way," in which a symbolic "John Wayne" takes the place of the military institution itself. It is also worth noting that the I Corps Marine identified the "John Wayne" approach with the abandonment of successful Marine pacification campaigns ("the right way") in favor of the more destructive big-unit operations.

While this weight of public symbolism is indeed "a heavy weight to lay on a movie star," Wayne invited such readings of his performances by his deliberate efforts to use his screen image as an instrument of political persuasion. The tendency to increasingly explicit political polemics is marked in the movement from The Alamo to The Comancheros (a 1961 "Mexico Western") and McLintock! (1963)."' The culmination of his efforts in this line was reached in i966 when, after returning from a trip to Vietnam, he decided to make The Green Berets. .. .