The Green Berets

At the end of December 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson L received a letter which began: 'Dear Mr President. When I was a little boy, my father always told me that if you want to get anything done see the top man – so I am addressing this letter to you'. The author was a fifty-eight-year-old John Wayne, the Hollywood legend, born Marion Michael Morrison and by then veteran of around 140 films including, most famously, westerns and war movies. He went on to propose a patriotic movie about America's growing involvement in the Vietnam War. The eventual result was The Green Berets (1968) directed by, and starring, Wayne. It was the most blatantly propagandist contemporaneous American feature film made about the Vietnam war.