Finding a President

Roosevelt was a yard of cigarette holder tilting up from a generous jaw. Truman was a bespectacled screech owl. Eisenhower was a pair of ears pierced by a disingenuous grin, and Kennedy--well, some semblance of Kennedy could always be drawn under that hummock of hair. To such lean and telling presidential portraiture, editorial cartoonists for the nation's newspapers bring a keen eye, a sharp pen and a drop or two of acid ink. Now they are honing their art on a new subject whose face might have been designed for their drawing boards. But how successfully have they captured Lyndon B. Johnson?

To hear some of them tell it, Johnson is a blindfold cinch. "He doesn't give me any trouble at all," says the Los Angeles Times's gifted Paul Conrad (TIME, Jan. 31), who accentuates what he calls the President's "dish face." The Chicago Sun-Times's Bill Mauldin, who found Kennedy "inscrutable" and therefore hard to capture, ropes Johnson with ease: "He's scrutable. What he's thinking shows through." The Washington Star's James Berryman, who has harpooned Presidents for 31 years, considers Johnson "the answer to a cartoonist's prayer--with those great, heavy eyebrows, the tremendous darkness around his eyes, that long eagle beak, the short upper lip that makes him look like he doesn't have his uppers in, and the largest ears of anybody outside of a donkey I've ever seen."

Others are not so certain that it's all that easy to limn the essential Lyndon. At the Christian Science Monitor, Cartoonist Guernsey Le Pelley practiced for a week while committing the President to print, and even now draws guardedly: "You change Johnson too much and he looks like Eleanor Roosevelt." Don Wright of the Miami News finds Johnson a slippery subject. "If you aren't sure you have him, you put him in a ten-gallon hat." In the same way and for the same reason, many cartoonists suit up the President in cowboy uniform, right down to the Texas boots.

The ultimate test of the cartoonist's skill at character definition--or character assassination--is the presidential portrait. The available evidence to date (see cuts) suggests that the man with the dish face and the donkey's ears has not yet been pinned to the sketch boards of the U.S. press.

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