Wayne’s World (review of John Wayne’s America: The Politics of Celebrity, by Garry Wills)

John Wayne’s America: The Politics of Celebrity, by Garry Wills (Simon & Schuster, 380 pp., $26)

ONE might not know it from his intelligently conceived and elegantly argued Lincoln at Gettysburg, but Garry Wills is a political pamphleteer by reflex, someone with a fatal attraction to the principles of the leftover Left. Despite the passing of the years and despite the fact that he was something of a conservative back then, Wills still has perfect pitch for the raucous intellectual tonalities of the Sixties-the belief that the American people are mired in false consciousness, the inclination to transform a minor moral blemish into a suppurating sore, and the conviction that consensus is a cover for conspiracy. No wonder Oliver Stone, in endorsing Wills’s new book, calls him a “master thinker.”

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Peter Collier

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John Wayne’s America: The Politics of Celebrity, by Garry Wills (Simon & Schuster, 380 pp., $26)

ONE might not know it from his intelligently conceived and elegantly argued Lincoln at Gettysburg, but Garry Wills is a political pamphleteer by reflex, someone with a fatal attraction to the principles of the leftover Left. Despite the passing of the years and despite the fact that he was something of a conservative back then, Wills still has perfect pitch for the raucous intellectual tonalities of the Sixties-the belief that the American people are mired in false consciousness, the inclination to transform a minor moral blemish into a suppurating sore, and the conviction that consensus is a cover for conspiracy. No wonder Oliver Stone, in endorsing Wills’s new book, calls him a “master thinker.”