The series ran for five years, 1957-1962, written by creators Sam Rolfe and Herb Meadows, with Albert Aley, Bruce Geller and the pre-Star Trek Gene Roddenberry.  Paladin, as played as a world-weary, sybaritic, murderous, generous entrepreneur and professional gunfighter (40-year-old Richard Boone), was supposed to be a West Pointer, ex-Army officer, as well as an educated, refined, musical, gaming, private detective, who also spoke Chinese, Spanish, many dialects of Native American, Italian, French, Latin, Greek, and was also capable of accompanying an opera singer with Mozart and serving as president of the San Francisco Stock Exchange Club.  Polymath and paladin.  It all worked because Boone played Paladin as an impossibly self-confident and solitary man, without colleagues, without equals, wifeless and childless, like a shaman of aggression, who regarded his judgement as exceptional and superior.  In short, just like America played it 1945 to 1965, before the car crash of the Vietnam War.  Paladin's rise and domination of the American Western conversation -- he was routinely, mercilessly homicidal: the body count was enormous -- was coincidental with the rise and domination of the politician who was exactly Paladin's age, Jack Kennedy. Both Boone and Kennedy saw combat in the South Pacific (Boone on carriers as an ordinanceman; Kennedy on PT 109); both were somber, methodical personalities; both believed that gunplay and talk are effective.  When you put Paladin's self-confidence in his own opinion together with Jack Kennedy's self-same confidence, and add American exceptionalism, you get something like the aggressive policies of the brief Kennedy years, 1961-1963, and then something like the legend of JFK ever since.  We do right because we are right.  Even the opening scene, the unholstering of the weapon, the threat, the speech, all clear American gestures of righteousness.   And then the weapon goes back in the holster.  Ultimatum delivered.  Ready to draw and shoot.  Make your move, villain.