Education of a G.I.

Pulitzer Prizewinner Bill Mauldin, whose cartoons of grimy, unsmiling G.I.s were the war's best, chalked off two milestones in his postwar career last week. He got married, for the second time.* He also turned out a cartoon (see cut) that was in effect an announcement of a drastic change in his own political thinking.

A year ago Mauldin was playing a hard game of footie with the far left. He made leftists happy with some speeches, turned out bitter cartoons about those who questioned Russia's motives. But now, says William Henry Mauldin, 25, ex-G.I.:

"I guess I'm a disillusioned fellow traveler. I'm angry with our former great Allies. It's an accumulation of many things, but principally it's because of Russia's behavior in the United Nations. The Russians are determined to break up U.N. We could take a lot of slaps at our own foreign policy, and we've lost a lot of our moral right to criticize. We're all wrong, but Russia is wronger."

Babyfaced, serious-eyed Bill Mauldin also takes quite a few slaps at the Mauldin who, he says, "was a very embittered little squirt" when he got out of the Army two years ago. He knocks down his war-born reputation as "overinflated, overpublicized--and I wasn't that good." When he started doing civilian strips (TIME, Sept. 24, 1945), he had 180 papers using his cartoons; now he is down to 79 (circ. about 5,000,000). He is not bitter over the cancellations: "The quality of my drawings was lousy, and I got mad when I heard everybody talking about another war before the blood had dried up. I made the mistake of going around trying to hit people with a sledge hammer. I lost my sense of humor. I was floating around with my feet about 20 feet off the ground, and I'm just beginning to get them down to earth again."

* To dark-haired, 23-year-old Natalie Evans of Manhattan, who, says Mauldin, "wishes to write."

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