When John Wayne threatened a world leader: “I’m gonna knock him on his sorry fucking ass”
Spending decades as one of Hollywood’s biggest, brightest, and most famous stars meant that John Wayne rubbed shoulders with several American presidents, but he was far too patriotic to issue threats to the person in charge of the country he’d bleed red, white, and blue for.
When the then-current incumbent of the White House sent word that he wanted ‘The Duke’ to meet another world leader who’d requested some face-to-face time with the cinematic icon, under most circumstances, it was a request he wouldn’t have needed to think twice about.
However, the high-powered politician who demanded to sit down and have a drink with Wayne happened to be Nikita Khrushchev, who’d recently been sworn in as the premier of the Soviet Union. Obviously, the face of the industry’s anti-communist witchhunt wasn’t exactly thrilled at the prospect of knocking back a few tipples with the movement’s flagship state, but he did it anyway.
It must have been quite the moral dilemma for ‘The Duke’; he was the onscreen embodiment of pure, unfiltered Americana, so when Dwight Eisenhower reached out for a favour, he wouldn’t have dreamed of turning it down. On the other hand, with Josef Stalin having died in 1953, Khrushchev was basically the commie to end all commies.
It was a history-making moment six years later, with the visit marking the first time a Soviet leader had touched down in the United States. As the story goes, Khrushchev had only two asks of his trip; he wanted to go to Disneyland, and he wanted to meet John Wayne. Security concerns ruled out the former, but he did at least achieve the latter.
“If he hadn’t been a communist, the man might have impressed me,” ‘The Duke’ told Michael Munn. “But even though he was no Stalin, he was still a communist, and I’ll tell you what’s bad about that. Khrushchev said something with a big smile on his face and laughed, and I was smiling as I said to the interpreter, ‘What did he say?’ The interpreter said, ‘He is the leader of the biggest state in the world and will one day rule the whole world.'”
Funnily enough, Wayne didn’t take too kindly to tales of potential world domination, regardless of how serious they were. “I laughed politely and said, still smiling, ‘And I’m gonna knock him on his sorry fucking ass,'” he claimed. “The interpreter said something, and Khrushchev laughed, so I said, ‘What did you tell him I said?'”
The Soviet premier had been informed that Wayne had promised to “buy him a drink the day he rules America,” a low blow if ever there was one. He’d said it in the heat of the moment, but it wouldn’t have been the ideal situation for global sociopolitical relations if the interpreter had whispered in Khrushchev’s ear that ‘The Duke’ had actually threatened to “knock him on his sorry fucking ass” for daring to suggest that communism was only going to expand in the years to come.
Of course, the urban legend perpetuated by Wayne and his longtime friend, Yakima Canutt, was that he’d agreed to meet Khrushchev to find out why Stalin had wanted him dead. Whether that’s true or not, the actor conceded that their tete-a-tete was “a good piece of propaganda for the press” either way.
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