Frank Sinatra - 1942 - Actor - Singer - Publicity Photo - George Hurrell - MGM

Credit: Far Out / MGM

The star who served as “America’s symbol to the world”, according to Frank Sinatra

Wed 20 May 2026 0:30, UK

If viewed from a wider perspective that spans the entire length of his time in the public eye, it would be fair to position Frank Sinatra as a progressive and left-leaning figure who used his platform to speak out in support of civil rights and to publicly endorse Democratic presidential candidates.

For a long time, his detractors were keen to label him a communist, something which he ardently refuted due to the overwhelming amount of stigma surrounding the ideology within America in the years post-World War II. President Harry S Truman, who was appointed as the Democratic successor to Franklin D Roosevelt in 1945, had long warned against the rising tide of authoritarian communist regimes as a result of Soviet influence, and was staunchly in favour of US intervention in Eastern Europe and Asia to prevent the spread of these values and to stop other nations from succumbing to what he perceived to be a dangerous political movement.

As a supporter of Truman in the 1940s, Sinatra would later go on to align himself with other prominent figures within the Democratic Party, befriending future president John F Kennedy and embarking on tours that were used to rally support for party candidates such as Hubert Humphrey. However, despite having such strong ties to the Democratic Party and being vocally in favour of progressive views, his relationship with this end of the political spectrum would sour in 1970.

His connections to the criminal underworld were something that high-profile Democrats had always been wary of, and the more these were placed under scrutiny, the more people on the left would begin to distance themselves from Sinatra, avoiding using him as a spokesperson for their beliefs. It was around this time that he found himself becoming close associates with Spiro Agnew, the Republican governor who would become vice president under Richard Nixon, and from this moment forward, Sinatra found himself forming a greater alliance with the political right.

This pivot towards conservative views was a great cause for concern for people who had previously found themselves in support of his progressive attitude, with a fear growing that he would effectively undo all of the contributions he had made to left-leaning politics in the US by affiliating himself with the Republican Party.

When someone makes such a brazen U-turn with regards to their personal beliefs, they begin to form unexpected bonds with people whom you may have previously thought to be their opposite, and true to form, Sinatra found himself not only supporting the likes of Nixon and Ronald Reagan but also other high-profile Republicans in the entertainment industry.

Sinatra’s relationship with actor John Wayne is understandably complex, with Wayne having always stood for the inverse of Sinatra’s progressive attitudes until his desertion of the Democratic Party. Wayne frequently used his power as a high-profile actor to raise awareness of conservative values, mirroring what Sinatra had previously done, and the two even found themselves embroiled in an altercation that led many to believe that the two were fierce enemies.

So, for Sinatra to have been asked to introduce Wayne in 1979 when he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for his contributions to American life, demonstrates a gigantic change in his values, and his choice of words when describing Wayne to the audience only go to show just how far he’d radically altered his perception, stating: “For over half a century, Mr Wayne has served honourably as America’s symbol to the world of the highest morals and prudent standards of our society.”

While many other prominent figures in the entertainment industry have found themselves falling foul of supporting political views that directly oppose everything they had previously stood for, for Sinatra to have hailed a lifelong conservative like Wayne is a total abandonment of his own beliefs that he had worked so hard to establish in the public eye, and one that many onlookers were never able to forgive the singer for.