His CIA code name is Condor. In the next seventy-two hours almost everyone he trusts will try to kill him.

Seventy years ago, John Wayne put San Dimas on the map via a line of movie dialogue. I’m talking about 1953’s “Hondo.” Did Wayne laud downtown’s wooden sidewalks or put in a plug for Raging Waters?

The Western is one of America’s unique cultural gifts and no one personified that genre better than John Wayne — not Gary Cooper, not Clint Eastwood. In a career that spanned four decades, Wayne, with ...