DOONESBURY: Drawing and Quartering for Fun and Profit

The snow-covered mountain is deserted. "Roger, Mogul Two. You and Snowbunny may proceed," shouts the disembodied voice of a Secret Service agent. "Snowbunny?" asks a second voice. Replies a third: "Okay, Mr. President. Now remember, keep low to the ground."

Gerald Ford did not go by the code name "Snowbunny" on the ski slopes at Vail last Christmas, but he did one day on the pen-and-ink slopes of Doonesbury. That comic-strip episode now hangs on the wall of Ford's private study, just off the Oval Office. Down the hall, Ron Nessen keeps three more Doonesburys, all poking gentle fun at the press secretary. Downstairs, in the office of White House Photographer David Kennerly, who covered the Viet Nam War for U.P.I, and TIME, there is a set of Doonesbury panels depicting a homesick Viet Cong terrorist writing to his mother from an assignment in Laos: "How I wish I could be home violating the truce accords." Down the street, Treasury Secretary William Simon hoards a series of Doonesburys drawn in 1972, when Simon was the nation's first energy czar. They show him issuing fiats from a throne and demanding "my signet ring and hot wax!"

It takes an artist of power and originality to transform the White House into a cartoon museum. His name is Garry Trudeau, and his Doonesbury is more than mindless mirth. It is a climate of opinion, a mocking view of American life. Since the spidery lines of Doonesbury first appeared in the Yale campus newspaper in 1968, they have become the punch lines of some 449 dailies. The strip is now scanned by more than 60 million readers in the U.S. and Canada. Hard-and soft-bound collections have sold over three-quarters of a million copies, and the biggest assemblage yet, The Doonesbury Chronicles (Holt, Rinehart & Winston; $12.95 hardcover, $6.95 paper), has sold 270,000 copies since last fall.

The strip's pivotal character is the pencil-nosed naif Michael J. Doonesbury, a founding member of the Walden Puddle Commune and an armchair liberal who spends much of his time, quite literally in an armchair, sampling the world's lunacy from television newscasts. He seems to have a gift for the mal mot, telling a menacing group of black separatists, "Hey, ol' Martin Luther King was one heck of a fellah, wasn't he?" or informing a $65,000-a-year rock entrepreneur in California that "back East you 'Frisco hipsters are kind of legendary, living off the land the way you do." Among other communards and coconspirators:

> Zonker Harris, a spaghetti-haired specimen of the drug culture who carries on Socratic dialogues with his philodendron, gets busted for possession, discovers that the prosecutor has bugged his room, and tells the hidden microphone: "I hate grass. I just get high on life! And America!"

>The Rev. Scot Sloan, "the fighting young priest who can talk to the young ... Didn't you read about me in Look? Birmingham, Selma, Chicago '68?" He lives with his dog, Unconditional Amnesty, and his cat, Kent State.

> Megaphone Mark Slackmeyer, an unregenerate campus radical, whose disapproving father rented his room when he left for college, and who gets a job as a disk jockey, reciting his own "Watergate Profiles" between platters ("Okay! Profile of John Dean III going out to Joey with hugs from Donna").

> Virginia, a superliberated black law student who next week will announce her candidacy for Congress. Ginny will also continue to suffer the affections of Clyde, a jive-spouting lay-about who buys a new Buick with silver-fox fur seats because "I'm into comfort."

> Joanie Caucus, Ginny's roommate and perhaps Trudeau's most popular character. A lumpy, fortyish housewife, Joanie enrolls in law school after walking out on her husband and children: "He put his arm around me and said, 'My wife. I think I'll keep her.' I broke his nose."

In Doonesbury the real and the fictive combine, and actuality blends into commentary. The results are often closer to truth than mere news reports. A week ago, for instance, a presidential aide was complaining in Doonesbury that the congressional report on CIA assassination plots did not give the agency proper credit for bumping off Spain's Generalissimo Francisco Franco last fall: "He was giving us some trouble over our bases in Spain, so in 1963 one of our agents poisoned him with a time-release capsule. It reached full potency last November." "Really? ... That's amazing," says an incredulous Ford. "Have there been other successes?" Mutters the aide: "Not to hear Congress tell it!"

No other strip could make that statement--no other would want to. Yet such material has propelled Trudeau, at the age of 27, to the top of two professions: funny-paper illustrator and political commentator. The only difference between Garry Trudeau and Eric Sevareid, say Doonesbury fans with some hyperbole, is that Sevareid cannot draw. But then, neither can Trudeau. An indifferent draftsman, the artist is usually just good enough to strike an attitude or sink a platitude. But at his best, Trudeau manages to be a Hogarth in a hurry, a satirist who brings political comment back to the comic pages.

Trudeau's dislikes are ambidextrous. Neither radicals nor reactionaries are safe from his artillery. Stuffed shirts of Oxford broadcloth or frayed denim receive the same impudent deflation. Yet Trudeau attacks with such gentle humor that even hard-nosed presidential aides can occasionally be heard chuckling over the daily White House news summary--when it includes a Doonesbury. "It has replaced Peanuts as the first thing I read every morning," says Ron Nessen. Admits Snowbunny himself: "There are only three major vehicles to keep us informed as to what is going on in Washington--the electronic media, the print media and Doonesbury, and not necessarily in that order."

Last May Trudeau received the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, the first comic-strip artist so honored. This election year, Doonesbury should reach unprecedented popularity. With public confidence in elected officials and democratic institutions about as low as the temperature in New Hampshire on primary morning, many citizens have concluded that there is only one way to take the 1976 presidential race: lightly.

Some of the most pointed political commentary nowadays takes place on a stage that measures only about 20 square inches. A crowd of young editorial cartoonists have begun to dignify what Oldtimer Don Hesse of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat calls "the ungentlemanly art."

The dean of the new--and largely liberal--school is the Washington Star's Patrick Oliphant, 40, an Australian who came to the U.S. in 1964 and brought with him the wry wit and clear, single line of British illustration that many younger cartoonists imitate. Tony Auth, 33, graduated from the UCLA student paper to the Philadelphia Inquirer, where his strongly liberal cartoons have sometimes been at odds with the paper's editorial policy. The Dayton Daily News's Mike Peters, 33, is such a comically gifted draftsman that many of his cartoons could stand without their captions. The Miami News's Don Wright, virtually an old codger at 42, nonetheless has a sprightly style that lassoed Richard Nixon more effectively than perhaps any of Wright's colleagues. The Richmond News-Leader's Jeff MacNelly, 28, is one of the few cartoonists who can turn out hilarious conservative commentary. Paul Szep, 33, a Canadian who joined the Boston Globe a decade ago, won the Pulitzer Prize for his Watergate cartoons, particularly the one in which John Mitchell, paddling away from a sinking ship in a rubber raft, says to Nixon: "I've decided not to tell you about the alleged ship-wreck."

Of this recent generation, only Garry Trudeau manages to combine editorial-page gravity and funny-paper levity. Unlike his colleagues who customarily work in one panel, Trudeau employs the sequential boxcar format of the comics. As any pop-culture devotee knows, Doonesbury is not the first strip to make funnies a political forum. A generation ago, Al Capp's Li'l Abner was peopled with Senators, robber barons and other oversized targets. Walt Kelly's Pogo once made Lyndon Johnson a longhorn steer and Spiro Agnew a hyena. Charles Schulz's Peanuts has long twitted such current topics as alienation and sexism. But over the years Li'l Abner began spouting right-wing boilerplate, and Dogpatch has degenerated into a flaccid strip of fools. Kelly died in 1973; his widow Selby, who struggled admirably to keep Pogo going, shut shop last year. As for Peanuts, Schulz's kids are still too wrapped up in security blankets and warm puppies to say much about the pressure of events.

Perhaps because of these strengths and shortcomings, Trudeau's fellow artists are quick to acknowledge their younger colleague's unique role. Al Capp grudgingly admits that he is "awed" by Trudeau: "Anybody who can draw bad pictures of the White House four times in a row and succeed knows something I don't. His style defies all measurement." Says Peanuts' Charles Schulz: "I think all the cartoonists admire Garry's originality. He's gone into areas that haven't been touched before."

Doonesbury 's author acknowledges his predecessors with equal alacrity. He has been known to sneak a caricature of Snoopy into his early works, and Li'I Abner's creator says Trudeau once ran up to him and gushed, "I've just been introduced as the young Al Capp. Gee, that was the greatest compliment I ever had."

Trudeau is also in debt to Jules Feiffer's skeletal style and balloonless neurotic monologues. But the cartoonist Trudeau most admires is a past master, the long-neglected Winsor McCay, whose Little Nemo in Slumberland appeared in the New York Herald 70 years ago. Nemo, a boy who wandered each night in surreal dreamscapes, was an enchanting champion of childhood fantasy. Though Trudeau cannot approach McCay's technique, he still retains the ability to see things through young eyes. "A flight of fantasy," he writes in his preface to the Chronicles, "is no mere sleight of mind. But only children . . . are nurtured by it. Later, of course, many of us comprehend our self-imposed poverty and try to double back, but the bread crumbs are always missing and our failures are immense."

The make-believe world Trudeau has organized in Doonesbury is as accurate a microcosm of the universe as Nemo's dreamland--or Dogpatch or the Okefenokee Swamp. But unlike these earlier locales, the backgrounds of Doonesbury are not metaphors. They are instantly recognizable as the White House, Viet Nam--or outer space, where three Sky lab astronauts discover that the nation is so bored with the space program that their congratulations are being telephoned not by the President, not by the Vice President, but . . . Stand by for "the Lieutenant Governor of Iowa!" Trudeau does not anthropomorphize his characters into Shmoos or possums, nor does he disguise the identities of real-life figures. On occasion Doonesbury has gone anachronistic: in a Bicentennial flashback, Paul Revere's feminist apprentice yearns to be a "Minuteperson." In addition, the strip frequently becomes an illuminated roman `a clef sprinkled with such celebrities as Journalist Hunter S. Thompson Jr., who is thinly disguised as Zonker Harris' dope-eating Uncle Duke. Duke last month was named U.S. envoy to China after a Senate confirmation hearing overlooking massive corporate payoffs to him. Thompson denies that he is insulted by this unflattering characterization, but recently told a friend, "If I ever catch that little bastard, I'll tear his lungs out."

Thompson is not the only one discomfited by Trudeau's characterizations. The panels are so volatile that half a dozen editors regularly run the strip on the editorial page. Sometimes they don't run it at all. The Los Angeles Times yanked a 1972 Trudeau strip about a diplomatic visit by Nixon and Kissinger to a distant and alien land: Watts. A number of papers dropped a recent strip in which Trudeau called President Ford's son Jack a "pothead." Trudeau's most inspired excess was the Nixon-era strip in which Radical Disk Jockey Mark Slackmeyer ends a surprisingly fair "Watergate Profile" of John Mitchell with the remark that "everything known to date could lead one to conclude that he's guilty. That's guilty, guilty, guilty!" Trudeau later explained that he was only trying to parody the hysteria of Nixon foes, but dozens of papers excised the panels. In an editorial, the Washington Post huffed: "If anyone is going to find any defendant guilty, it's going to be the due process of justice, not a comic-strip artist. We cannot have one standard for the news pages and another for the comics."

Last year Trudeau occasioned more backchat when he had Henry Kissinger appear on This Is Your Life while figures from his past reminisced. Said Sometime Date Marlo Thomas: "I'm reminded of the many children who were maimed and killed during the Christmas bombings of Bach Mai Hospital." "But . . . that's awful," sputters the host. Says Marlo: "You bet! Why do you think we stopped dating?" That strip has been nominated by Trudeau's syndicate for a Pulitzer Prize.

Any resemblance between Michael J. Doonesbury and his creator is more than a case of art imitating life. Garretson Beekman Trudeau can trace his ancestors back to the 1650s, when the first Trudeaus moved from France to Montreal. One branch of the family stayed in Canada (and eventually produced Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau); another moved south, eventually to New York City, where Garry was born in 1948. When he was five, his family moved upstate to Saranac Lake; there his father, Francis, 56, still practices medicine. Garry and Sisters Michelle, now 24, and Jeanne, now 31, enjoyed a crystalline childhood in that fashionable vacation area. "It was a real Christopher Robin existence," Trudeau has recalled. "I was well schooled in fantasy and Beatrix Potter."

The idyl ended in 1960 when Trudeau's parents were divorced. Garry, then 13, enrolled at St. Paul's School in Concord, N.H., where football skills were prized far above artistic flair. "It was an unbelievably bad climate to be an artist," recalls Classmate Joseph Wheelwright, still a close friend of Trudeau's. "Garry took a lot of grief." The grief included an incipient ulcer, friends say, but the sensitive, unathletic kid refused to stifle his artistic instincts. He served as president of the Art Association ("Twenty of us little wimps reading Artforum," says Wheelwright), became co-editor of the yearbook, won the senior-class art prize, and drew murals for the children's ward of a local state hospital.

Soon after Trudeau entered Yale, in 1966, he drew his first comic strip: a Feifferesque embarrassment about a freshman who bombed in New Haven--particularly at mixers. "The art was bad," Trudeau acknowledges. "Stylized." He put the scrawls away and went on to become editor of the campus humor magazine and write an occasional column for the Yale Daily News on a wide assortment of campus topics.

One epochal afternoon in his junior year, Trudeau showed News editors sketches for a proposed cartoon strip. In the fall of 1968 the first installments of Bull Tales appeared, poking sophomoric fun at mixers, campus revolutionaries, Yale President Kingman Brewster--but mostly at the football huddles of "B.D." Yalies recognized the jock as Brian Dowling, standout Yale quarterback who will play next season for Toronto. "I never knew Trudeau," says Dowling, "but I thought the strip was funny."

So did Jim Andrews, 39, who, with his partner John McMeel, was about to launch the Universal Press Syndicate. With considerable effort, Andrews talked the recent graduate into going national. Then 22, Trudeau signed a twelve-year syndication contract--which continues to give him 50% of Doonesbury royalties, the industry norm. In the fall of 1970, Trudeau's now familiar gang first surfaced in 28 papers. Andrews thought the title Bull Tales might offend some readers, so it was changed to Doonesbury, an amalgam of two words: doone, an old prep-school term for someone who is out to lunch, and Pillsbury, after Trudeau's roommate Charles Pillsbury, a flour-fortune heir now active in liberal Democratic politics in Connecticut.

Trudeau also erased the Y on B.D.'s helmet, clothed all the naked girls, deleted expletives, and completely redrew nearly an entire year's worth of strips to lend them a universal appeal. He enrolled in the Yale graduate School of Art, studying by day and sweating over the drawing board at night. "I nearly killed myself doing both," he recalls. Along the way, Michael J. Doonesbury started tutoring in the ghetto, B.D. went to Viet Nam and met Phred the Terrorist, and Mark Slackmeyer used his experience as a campus radical to organize a truckers' strike during the energy crisis.

Mark, like many of Trudeau's regular characters, is a composite of several flesh-and-blood figures, including former Yale Activist Mark Zanger, now a staff writer for Boston's Real Paper. The Reverend Sloan is an amalgam of former Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr. and a onetime roommate who became a minister and lawyer. Trudeau created Nichole, his first strong female character, while he was seeing Annie Hurlbut, a Yalie who later moved on to study anthropology at the University of Illinois--but not before turning Trudeau on to feminism. Last summer Garry donated close to 125 Doonesbury originals to raise funds for the National Women's Political Caucus. His greatest contribution remains Joanie Caucus, whose commitment to feminism resembles that of Mary Pearl, who is married to Charles Pillsbury. Joanie now has an identity that transcends the strip. She entered Berkeley law school after students at the university sent Trudeau an application in her name. "I've received so much mail addressed to Joanie," complains her inventor, "that my mother thinks I'm living with her."

Never married. Trudeau lives alone in New Haven in a red brick town house he bought about four years ago. (He also has an apartment in New York City, where last week he went out with Candice Bergen.) One floor of the town house is taken up by his cluttered studio, in which he outlines the strip with a pencil, often to the accompaniment of thundering Rolling Stones music. The lines are gone over in ink by an artist at the syndicate's Kansas City headquarters. Trudeau can be spotted most afternoons jogging around the park behind his house. "I'm a religious jogger," says Trudeau, who spends three hours a day at it. Doonesbury's characters could fill a catalogue with their bizarre tastes, but their progenitor has few weaknesses. Among them are junk food and Dr. Pepper. He is so casual about feeding habits that he keeps a can of frozen orange juice concentrate in his refrigerator and spoons out enough for one glass at a time. As a cook Trudeau is a great cartoonist. "I've moved rom Swanson's to Stouffer's," he says. "A sign of affluence, I guess."

More than any of his comic-page contemporaries, Trudeau is a true journalist. He often works only two weeks ahead of Doonesbury's deadline (v. as much as two months for some other cartoonists), and spends hours sifting through newspapers, magazines and government documents in search of inspiration. His timeliness and diligence were clearly demonstrated last spring as Southeast Asian refugees poured into the U.S. In Doonesbury, they arrived in Washington to testify at Senate hearings that resembled a TV quiz show. ("What do we have for the witnessess, Johnnie?" "Well, for the ladies, from Speidel, the latest in watch-bands...") The refugees were then taken in by upholstered Georgetown matrons, shown off at dinner parties and fed Minute Rice. To research that series, Trudeau not only followed press accounts of the refugee influx, but also read the staff report to Edward M. Kennedy's Senate Subcommittee on Refugees and Escapees. "He does his homework," says Playboy Cartoon Editor Michelle Urry. "Garry's on of the few intellectuals in the business."

Reporter-style, Trudeau often shows up at Senate hearings, conventions and other news events. Last fall he accompanied President Ford to China, where the cartoonist made diplomatic and aerodynamic history by tossing his Frisbee with NBC Correspondent Tom Brokaw atop the Great Wall. Reports the discus thrower: "The wall was too narrow to go for distance, and the wind currents were bad." Trudeau also wrote and illustrated a 3,000-word report on the trip for 75 client papers, and did prliminary sketches for Uncle Duke's arrival last month as Chinese envoy. This week, Trudeau will attend a Women's Political Caucus seminar for prospective candidates in preparation for Ginny congressional race.

Nineteen seventy-six will also see a more traditional form of expression from the Doonesbury man. After the Mayaguez incident last year (the inspiration for a series in which Kissinger, as part of "Operation Frequent Manhood," sends Marines to retake a cruise ship seized in American Samoa by Uncle Duke), Trudeau flew to the South Pacific. There he contracted a malady some tourists call the Banshee Two-Step and spent several days in the hospital on his rterun. An account of the misadventure, written with Washington Post Columnist Nicholas von Hoffman, appeared in Rolling Stone and will be published on April Fool's Day in expanded form as Tales from the Margaret Mead Taproom (Sheed & Ward; $6.95).

Though Trudeau pops up at certain public events, his passion fro privacy still makes J.D. Salinger look gregarious. He loathes interviews, rarely makes speeches, nor wil he sit still for photographs. Once he hid in his bathroom for four hours to avoid a Baltimore Sun reporter. American Somoa recently asked to use Uncle Duke as part of a tourism promotion, but Trudeau steadfastly refuses to license his characters for use in advertising campaigns or on trinkets--a proposition that could double his six-figure annual gross from the strip. He will, however, allow Ginny's face to appear on T-shirts and bumber stickers to boost her campaign. Royalties will got ot the N.W.P.C. Says Trudeau: "I don't like celebrification. Everything I have to share I share in the strip."

What he has to share is not always obvious. Trudeau was clearly appalled by the U.S. devastation of Southeast Asia; but foot-ball-helmeted B.D. was given plenty of space to rationalize. "A protective reaction strike is never having to say you're sorry." The strip was unmistakably anti-Nixon during Watergate, but also took whacks at the Ervin committee: The chair opens up the floor to innuendo and hearsay. In fact, Doonesbury is sometimes so Delphic that adherents of just about any point of view can find aid and comfort in it. For foes of school busing, there was a series in which a white boy in a newly integrated school is beaten up by blacks. Busing proponents, however, might note that the victim probably provoked the assault by mistakenly calling one of his black assailants a honky. ("I got mixed up. I'm new at this," he explained.) Champions of drug-law reform might be cheered that Trudeau mentions hallucinogens casually and frequently in the strip. But hard-liners can recall a sermonette by Zonker Harris after he was busted for possession: "It may or may not be wrong, but it sure is against the law."

Perhaps Trudeau's greatest gift is the ability to present such satire without bile, to put strong statements in the mouths of gentle characters--to demonstrate, as Mike Doonesbury says, that "even revolutionaries like chocolate-chip cookies." After all, who else but Trudeau could have made an attractive character out of a Viet Cong terrorist--or out of a woman who abandons her family? True, Doonesbury can often be held in contempt of public figures and just about all kinds of politics. But Trudeau also laments the passing of the idealistic 1960s. A melancholy Rev. Scot Sloan resigned his campus chaplaincy recently because "nobody cares about the issues any more," and when friends began mocking that decade of noble purpose, Mark Slackmeyer pulled his punch lines to wonder, "God, what's happened to us?"

The essential message of Doonesbury may be that inside even the most formidable public figures and the most vituperative public debates there are hard kernels of decency--and lunacy. They may not be immediately visible, but somehow Trudeau can extract the ludicrous truth and imprison it in his daily cages. Of what earthly benefit is such talent? For one thing, it may prevent Americans from taking their prejudices too seriously, as they have in the less laudable moments of recent history. Trudeau's rather formal answer: "To let the small meannesses and foolishnesses of life face each other in distortion, stretched, juggled and juxtaposed, but always lit with laughter, can ease the pain of self-recognition."

What will Trudeau do when he grows up? About the only major events in his near future are the fall publication of his Yale master's thesis, Blitzkrieg, an illustrated account of a Luftwaffe flight lieutenant's career, and the 1976 presidential campaign, which he has been asked to cover for Rolling Stone--and will lampoon in Doonesbury. Every month about a dozen more newspapers sign up to receive Doonesbury, and Trudeau is working on an animated half-hour television special based on the strip. He also talks in block-letter bromides of moving to Boston some day, and forsaking the killing regimen of drawing Doonesbury for travel, study and writing.

Until he does, Doonesbury seems likely to be the strip of the '70s, if any strips survive. Rising prices and chronic shortages of newsprint have driven editors to drop marginally popular panels and shrink survivors to the size of chewing-gum wrappers. That crunch may eventually catch up with Doonesbury, which needs plenty of space for its extended dialogues. A less immediate danger is that Doonesbury's following may shed the passive disillusionment and cynicism that Trudeau satisfies so wittily. Already some of Doonesbury's younger followers are finding the strip a bit bland and irrelevant. "The Establishment has decided that Doonesbury is a cute little expression of how clever kids are," says Harvard Senior Tom Hubbard. "It's been co-opted, and we're getting tired of it." Right now, however, that "we" is a tiny and humorless minority.

For most readers, to be tired of Doonesbury is to be tired of life. Throughout American history, the best comic artists have reminded their followers that politics and chaos are separated by a fine line. For the foreseeable future, when that line is drawn, Garry Trudeau will be holding the pen.

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