Driving the Duke
Alta Journal | 3rd April 2026
Finding family and a hero while serving as John Wayne’s chauffeur during the production of The Green Berets. In the fall of 1967, I went to work for Batjac Productions. It was a Monday-to-Friday job from around 3:30 in the afternoon—when I wasn’t in detention—until 6:30 or 7. The company had this 16-year-old Loyola High School senior photocopying scripts, answering fan mail, matching canceled checks to bank statements, running messages and film cans between Batjac’s offices at Paramount in Hollywood and Warner Bros. in Burbank, and, from time to time, driving John Wayne. The actor (and Batjac cofounder) always sat in the front passenger seat of his big, green Pontiac station wagon with the roof raised high to take all six foot four of him. That work finished when I graduated, but in early August, I encountered Mr. Wayne in Miami during the Republican National Convention. The young woman from…
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The Epic Story of the Little City That Cast Off Assad
The New York Times
In Days of Love and Rage, Anand Gopal creates an indelible portrait of revolution and civil war in Syria. “Manbij. May God protect it,” the great traveler Ibn Jubayr of Valencia wrote in June 1184. “Its skies are bright, its…
A History of Modern Syria — the people at the heart of their own story
Financial Times
Daniel Neep’s excellent account corrects the traditional narrative to show a nation surviving and resisting the powers that have vied to dominate it. Syria is as ancient, and as complex, as civilisation itself. Lying between antiquity’s great empires of Egypt…
Imperial graveyard: the sufferings of Afghanistan, and of those who invade it
Times Literary Supplement
Afghans may wonder why foreigners repeatedly invade their country before, invariably, scrambling for the exit. In 1842, the massacre of a retreating British army that had conquered the country four years earlier should have prevented Britain from trying – and…
