The Assassination of Big Jim McLain

I'm not saying it's true. I'm just saying that Reuters is reporting it:

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was so outraged by the anti-communistic attitude of film star John Wayne that he tried to have him assassinated.

A new biography of the American icon -- 'John Wayne -- The Man Behind the Myth' by British writer and actor Michael Munn -- says there were several attempts in the late 1940s and early 1950s to kill the man known to movie audiences worldwide as "The Duke"….

The book says the Soviet plots were cancelled after Stalin's death in 1953 by his successor Nikita Krushchev who was a fan of the larger-than-life star of more than 100 films.

"That was a decision of Stalin during his last five mad years. When Stalin died I rescinded that order," the book quotes Krushchev as telling Wayne during a private meeting in 1958.

Wayne was also targeted, Munn claims, by Mao Zedong. His source for all this is Orson Welles, and indeed, it sounds like the sort of mad yarn that Welles would try to palm off on a gullible writer. Think of it as his final, posthumous gift to his fans.

Comments

[Brady]

This is hard to believe, but definitely makes for entertaining reading. "Lie to him, he likes it"

[Ray]

No really. . .

[Ray]

I pesonally could not care less but why is it so hard to believe?

I mean despite both men being responsible for millions upon millions of murders, why is it so hard to believe that, during the huge espionage push into our country in the middle of the century, that the ultimate head of that espionage would want to take out an American icon?

[s.m. koppelman]

Orson Welles and John Wayne were responsible for millions upon millions of murders? Say it isn't so!

[Jean Bart]

Mao Zedong wasn't as singularly responsible as Stalin was - given that Mao's power was always more tenuous and he fell out of power on at least one occassion. China never had a ruler like Stalin who ruled absolutely; power was always much more fractured amongst the CCP than in the USSR (though that fracturing did occur in the USSR after Stalin's death). I guess the difference between an oligarchical totalitarian state and a dictatorial one. I think this may also be the reason why change was more easy to manage in the PRC than in the USSR as well.