In 1971 John Wayne, the iconic movie star who had “charged the beaches at Iwo Jima, beaten back the Indians at Fort Apache, and often bloodied his fists in the name of frontier justice” was at the height of his popularity: Having appeared in over 200 films to date, he’d been listed among Hollywood’s top ten box-office attractions for two decades straight, had just won a Best Actor Academy Award for his portrayal of Rooster Cogburn (the “fearless, one-eyed U.S. marshal who never knew a dry day in his life”) in True Grit, and had garnered impressive ratings with his star-studded John Wayne’s Tribute to America NBC television special.

In that moment, Playboy magazine interviewed the Western film legend (with the results published in their May 1971 issue) and found that his reputation for being archly conservative in his politics was true to the man himself, not just to the characters he played on the silver screen.

Particularly, Wayne was unsparingly unsympathetic to the plight of real Native Americans (still termed “Indians” in the parlance of the times) who had been portrayed as adversaries in so many of this films, expressing his viewpoint that they deserved whatever misfortunes had befallen them, and that modern Americans bore no responsibility for addressing wrongs done to Native Americans by previous generations: