Jack Webb was more than merely a successful Hollywood actor, director and producer.  He was an American patriot. His work was entertaining while showing us what it meant to be an American and the values that we should all strive to live by and protect.

    Born in Santa Monica, California, on April 2, 1920, the son of Samuel Chester Webb and Margaret (née Smith) Webb. He grew up in the Bunker Hill section of Los Angeles.  As a child, Webb worshiped at Our Lady of Loretto Catholic Church and attended Our Lady of Loretto Elementary School where he served as an altar boy. Webb would remain a devout Catholic for the rest of his life. He then attended Belmont High School near downtown Los Angeles, where he was elected student body president.

  Webb served in the Army Air Corps and after his discharge, took a job as a radio announcer. This led to a long career in radio, television and motion pictures. Webb loved his country and never missed the opportunity incorporate patriotism into his shows. In the late 1940s, before televisions were widely in use, Jack started a popular radio program titled Dragnet. Rather than fabricate police noir stories, Webb then took the then novel approach of using real police cases directly from the LAPD files and making radio dramas out of them.

  Dragnet became a nationally syndicated program which portrayed the day-to-day work of the LAPD in their war against crime. It was a wildly popular show. Mr. Webb would develop a decades long relationship with the dedicated officers of the Los Angeles Police Department. Dragnet showed the American people the long, thankless hours law enforcement spent tracking down criminals and protecting we the citizenry. The American publican began to develop a newfound level of respect for the police. Dragnet later would become a popular TV series starring Webb. Each week, the show would dramatize real cases handled by the LAPD and at the end, show the outcome of those cases including when the criminal was convicted, and the sentence meted out. Some of the Dragnet shows showed police addressing the subversive Communist elements in our society as well as their kissing cousins, the hippies. Dragnet is still broadcast today on the ME-TV cable channel and other networks- a testament to its enduring appeal.

  While making Dragnet in the 1950s, Mr. Webb was cast to star in the popular motion picture, The D.I. (1957) playing the lead role of Gunnery Sgt. Jim Moore. The movie explained the training that went into making members of America’s toughest service branch, the United States Marine Corps. Training and dialogue were portrayed in a very realistic manner, The film showed the US Marine Corps for what it is, an exclusive organization where one must earn all that they receive including the very title of “US Marine.” The film is still revered to this day by Marines everywhere and over the years, more than one young man after watching the film, has chosen to test himself by seeing if he has what it takes to become a of the few and the proud.

   In the realm of motion pictures, Webb had an impressive career which included a role in the American Classic movie, Sunset Boulevard (1950). Perhaps, Webb’s magnum opus was the film Red Nightmare (1962). The film was praised and supported by the Kennedy administration and by the President’s brother, US Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy. The film presented a nightmarish no-holds-barred look at what life might be like in the United States if the Left had their way.

   This disturbing film set during the Cold War, has many striking parallels to the politically correct, DEI, cancel culture of today.  The Communist message is clear, “In America you have too many freedoms. One day it will be our mission to destroy those bourgeois capitalist freedoms.” This, just as the Nouveau Left of today advocate for.

   In the film, we are shown a traditional Midwestern small town which has been transformed into a hellish landscape of barbed wire fences with Communist guards securing the exit points and Marxist imagery.  The once clean and vibrant small town has been transformed into a lifeless, frightening wasteland of scattered debris and near empty streets similar to communities in the Communist world. Webb appears on screen and begins his narration:

   “From the looks of it, it could be Iowa, California, Tennessee. You might call this a college town, Communist style, as part of a long-range plan to destroy our free way of life.”

   The film shows those typically strange people among us whom we often tend to ignore: the weird people, the eccentrics, the vocal liberals and other oddballs. Yet some of these cranks in the film had an ideologic agenda and are now among the town’s Communist overseers.

   They turn the schools into Leftist indoctrination centers (sound familiar?) and one of the characters has a daughter who comes home from school and proclaims:

    “It’s true, Daddy. The party convinced me that I should free myself of the lingering bourgeois influence of family life.”

   This film, made over 60 years ago, presents characters whose rhetoric has an uncanny resemblance to the types of things we might hear today from Balack Lives Matter activists or other contemporary Leftist groups. I would encourage anyone who values their liberty to watch it.

   Webb was a champion for police officers everywhere and a tireless fighter for the preservation of Constitutionally guaranteed American freedoms. He left a legacy of great works that people are still enjoying to this day. Our society owes Jack Webb and those like him, a debt of gratitude.