Duke felt progressively more uncomfortable with prevailing values in the late 1960s. As he grew older, his determination to play characters who were courageous and honorable intensified. He felt that it was essential for him to set an example for a society racing toward permissiveness. He became convinced that a radical minority was leading the country's youth astray. He was appalled at the widespread use of drugs and the counterculture's defiance of established conventions. “There doesn't seem to be respect for authority anymore,” Wayne said. Through a turbulent time of nasty demonstrations Duke remained vitally concerned about America's reputation. He believed in the importance of the individual but maintained that his countrymen must express gratitude for the freedom they enjoyed with responsibility. Showing little sympathy for the changing world around him, Wayne refused to accept that his thinking was obsolete. In his mind he was simply a concerned patriot who believed in his nation's basic compact.

During his final decade the actor's work and his political views meshed, with one simply dramatizing the other. After a trip to Vietnam in 1966 Duke became a man with a mission. He felt compelled to make the first movie about America's brave soldiers fighting in the Asian war. "I want to show the folks back home just what they're up against out there-their heroism against tremendous odds," he said. Wayne secured the rights to a novel called The Green Berets, negotiated for the cooperation of the Defense Department, and set out to make an action film that contained a statement about the valor of his country's troops. The Green Berets, the only major pro-war movie made in Hollywood during the 1960s, proved to be Duke's most controversial film. Critics blasted it, and angry demonstrations took place at theaters where the picture was shown. Wayne remained unperturbed. "A little clique back in the East has taken great satisfaction in reviewing my politics instead of my picture," he said.

The Duke with Glen Campbell during the filming of Wayne's Oscar-winning True Grit.

But two years later Duke found an ideal, more agreeable part- Rooster Cogburn in True Grit. As Wayne played him, Rooster emerged as a swaggering braggart, burly, tough, a paladin past his prime and wearing an eye patch, yet with a rude dignity that alternated between warmth and humor. "He feels the same way about life that I do," the actor said. "He doesn't believe in pampering wrongdoers. He doesn't believe in accommodation. Neither do I." The part was beautifully written and won for Duke an Academy Award as the year's best actor. "If I'd known what I know now," Wayne said in his acceptance speech, "I'd have put a patch on my eye 35 years ago."

Duke was making Rio Lobo on location at the time the Oscars were given out in 1969. When he returned to the set in Old Tucson after accepting his award, he found the entire cast and crew-even his horse-wearing patches over their left eyes. Rio Lobo would be Wayne's 144th movie. "He doesn't move as much as he did," the picture's director, Howard Hawks, said, but "he's got a quality that nobody else has." Despite their declining popularity, Duke insisted that good Westerns embodied the country's best qualities, while fans treasured the actor as a constant amid a morass of change.

Privately Wayne was conscious that age was catching up with him. In Big Jake the title character hunts for his grandson and gives the boy a lesson in growing up when he discovers him in a dangerous situation. In The Cowboys Duke played an elderly rancher whose hired hands abandon him right before they are to drive 1,500 head of cattle to market. In desperation the old man enlists the aid of a passel of young boys, whom he fathers and guides to manhood.

By the early 1970s John Wayne had become the best-known movie star in the world. Photoplay readers voted him the most popular male actor of 1971, and the Motion Picture Herald named him that year's top box-office personality. But more than Hollywood's most durable moneymaker, Duke had become a national monument. "To the people of the world," actress Maureen O'Hara told a congressional subcommittee a month before Duke's death, "John Wayne is the United States of America. He is what they believe it to be. He is what they hope it will be. And he is what they hope it will always be."

After True Grit, Duke's image was so fixed in the American consciousness that even a succession of lesser pictures-The Train Robbers, Cahill, United States Marshal, and McQ-could not tarnish his standing. Rooster Cogburn, a commercial postscript to Wayne's Oscar-winning role, sparked great publicity since it paired Duke with Katharine Hepburn for what would be their only work together. Different personalities though the two veterans were, they respected one another and got along famously. "I'm glad I didn't know you with two lungs," Hepburn teased Wayne at a cast party. "You really must have been a bastard."

In January 1976 Duke began making The Shootist in Carson City, Nev. The plot seemed to come from his own life, since its central character is informed by a physician that he has terminal cancer. The Shootist would be the cowboy star's last movie, for his health failed sharply. When Wayne began to complain of stomach pains, surgeons found that he was again suffering from cancer. The actor died in Los Angeles on June 11, 1979. The next day a Tokyo newspaper proclaimed, "Mr. America Passes On."

With Kim Darby and Campbell in True Grit.

If anything the John Wayne legacy has grown since his death. In a 1995 Harris Poll the actor still ranked as America's favorite movie star. More than a Golden Age film personality, Duke Wayne remains a legend, a cultural phenomenon whose stature grows with the passage of time. Enhanced in memory and invigorated to meet the turmoil of the modern world, Wayne's image stands as a reminder of America's frontier past. Like Joan of Arc, Duke is best understood in terms of his heroic reputation rather than in terms of his deeds. He mirrors his culture's expectations of heroism; he is a cultural receptor that successive generations can remake to meet the requirements of their changing society. For millions the Duke continues to be emblematic of strong, silent manhood, of courage and honor in a world of timidity and moral indifference.

For Americans, the saga of the Old West is comparable to the Greek Iliad, the Robin Hood legends of England, the Wagnerian Ring des Nibelungen, or stories of the Japanese samurai. Wayne's imaginary West is a place of hope, where heroes are in control and men have integrity and purpose. While the characters Wayne played are flawed and commit mistakes, audiences know that Duke, whatever his role, has done the best he could and will be man enough to admit his shortcomings. Actor Jimmy Stewart once compared Wayne to a mountain; he's there for us, etched against the sky, and we know what to expect from him.

"Growing up on a ranch," a history graduate student confided in 1998, "it was easy for me to relate to John Wayne. Now that I've reached the ripe old age of 26, he brings back the belief I had as a child-the conviction that if you ride high in the saddle, you can accomplish anything. Thanks to John Wayne, I'll never turn loose of those dreams." And so it is with a multitude of classic movie fans.