People don't seem to know this anymore. For example, in the movie Beavis & Butt-head Do America, their World War Two veteran neighbor idolized John Wayne.
The truth was that most veterans hated Wayne because Wayne stayed out of the war. In his first brush with the draft board, Wayne got out of it by saying he was the sole financial support for his wife and children. He didn't mention he was about to get divorced because he was sleeping with Marlene Dietrich.
His career was just starting to take off with Stagecoach (1939) but he hit it really big when all the other leading men went off to serve in the fight against fascism. Wayne became an A-lister and got rich. He wasn't much different than Sonny Tufts in that regard except that Sonny Tufts was genuinely 4F.
Wayne reportedly made some half-hearted efforts to join. He wrote to someone about joining the OSS, but by the time they wrote back he had already left his wife and she didn't forward the letter to him. Seems like, if he really wanted to join, the obvious thing would be for him to contact them again.
Wayne went on tour with the USO and was booed by the real men---the real teenage men---he was supposed to be entertaining. He KNEW there was a problem.
After the war, he said that he thought he could best serve the war effort by being a wealthy movie star. And he apparently tried to make up for it--or COVER up for it--by becoming a McCarthyite bum after the war.
Now, to be fair, as a politician, celebrity Democrat Al Franken has defended and supported every war he could. Even before he ran for Senate, the first bit of photographic evidence of his sexual abuse of women was from his flight back from visiting the troops in Afghanistan. The only war he ever opposed was the one he might have been asked to fight in. In his book, Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot, be brags about helping his brother lose so much weight that he couldn't be drafted. He was right about Vietnam. He was wrong about the wars he actively supported.
James Dean stayed out of the Korean War by writing to his draft board that he was homosexual.
If, some time after the war, John Wayne had said, "They wouldn't take me! I was gay!" I would have admired him even if it was demonstrably untrue.
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