“For years,” he says, laughing, “I was blamed for my art, and then I couldn’t get credit for it.”
For the record, the art is his. I’m looking right now at Trudeau’s pencil drawings of a recent week of Doonesburys before they were sent to the inker. They are rich in detail, identical to the finished version, and every line is Trudeau’s, even the lettering.
“It’s serviceable, is the best I can say about it,” Trudeau demurs. “I will say this: It’s a signature style. It doesn’t look like anyone else’s.” Even this modest bit of immodesty does not go immediately unpunished.
“But my stuff’s amateur hour compared to this.”
Trudeau is pulling open a drawer. Inside are a few originals drawn by the great Walt Kelly, whose Pogo strips of the 1940s and ’50s were among the first to mine politics for humor. Kelly was a masterful artist. “Look at this—this one’s pure motion,” Trudeau says. “And look at this detail; look at the bugs.” It was a single-panel Sunday strip of the Pogo characters poling a raft through their swamp. Even the tiniest characters—insects a few millimeters high—had expressive faces.
Eventually, I did find some Doonesiana displayed in Trudeau’s studio. There were nine framed covers of major magazines—Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, etc., spanning thirty years, all either drawn by Trudeau or about him. And yes, Trudeau’s got ’em right up there, framed, on a wall, plain as day, inside a closet where he stores pushpins and computer paper.
ON THE MORNING of April 19, 2004, newspaper readers were served something startling with their morning coffee. The first panel of Doonesbury was completely black, except for the word “Hey!” Then, framed by the smoke of war, a soldier’s face. It’s Ray Hightower, B.D.’s buddy. He’s sweating, looking scared. He calls for a medic. Then black again, as though someone is drifting in and out of consciousness. The gut-punch line comes at the end, with a shouted name. “B.D.?”
And here is the image people saw two days later:
It was shocking for obvious reasons, but in another way as well: B.D. had never been seen without his helmet. It was as if Trudeau was declaring that something fundamentally and forever had changed.
Ask creative people where they get their ideas, and they will roll their eyes. It’s the most common question, but it’s also a bad one because the answer is inevitably disappointing. From the inside, creativity seems like an arduous task, often involving plebeian, imperfect choices, driven less by inspiration than by deadline. And Trudeau is a deadline junkie, always pushing it to the limit. (“Once a week,” he says, “I am a very desperate man.”)
So when you ask him why he decided to take B.D.’s leg, the answer isn’t very satisfying. Trudeau doesn’t regard his characters in romanticized terms, or even as people; Doonesbury has always been more about ideas than personalities, so Trudeau thinks of Mike and B.D. and Zonker and Joanie as puppets. He pulls the appropriate ones out of the closet when he has a point he wants to make. In this case, he says, he wanted to make a statement about the suffering in this war.
Originally, he was going to kill Ray, but Ray got spared when Trudeau decided that a death would not leave much of a storyline to pursue. So, with a bit of sang-froid, he amputated B.D.’s left leg, on the theory that he’d… think of something.
What happened next was unusual, to say the least. Within a day or two of B.D. lying broken on that stretcher, Garry Trudeau, bane of every presidential administration since Nixon’s (particularly the current one, which he has absolutely lacerated), got a call from the Pentagon. The brass was offering to help him figure out where to go next.
THE TYPICAL DAILY newspaper comic strip has a degenerative arc. The cartoonist’s best years come early, when the ideas are fresh, the gimmick is still a novelty, and the grind of daily deadlines has not yet taken its toll on creativity. Three years of excellence is a pretty good run before the inevitable decline, as the cartoonist runs out of new things to say and becomes content to imitate himself. It’s easy to forget, but many of today’s formulaic, intellectually listless strips, such as B.C., Cathy, and Dennis the Menace, were once lively and daring and different. They’re still around because their bland familiarity becomes a sort of comfort food, and newspaper editors are loath to drop them.
“Having a successful daily comic strip,” Trudeau says wryly, “is the closest thing to tenure that popular culture offers. But it doesn’t seem to have freed up creativity any more than tenure for professors has. It’s been an open invitation for complacency.”
Doonesbury has never become complacent, partly because Trudeau is no ordinary creative talent but also because the strip feeds continually off the culture it lampoons. Trudeau is very much a reporter—what Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter once called “an investigative cartoonist.” When two of his principal characters were homeless, Trudeau spent time working in shelters. When Doonesbury accompanied President Ford to China, so did Trudeau. When B.D. served in the Persian Gulf War, Trudeau briefly went to Kuwait. So when the new invitation came from the Pentagon—essentially, carte blanche to visit injured vets—the investigative cartoonist leapt at it, not sure what he would find.
The very first person he spoke to was a twenty-seven-year-old MP named Danielle Green. She had been a college basketball star, a left-handed point guard at Notre Dame. Green had just lost that hand in Iraq. She’d been on the roof of a police station, behind sandbags, trying to defend it from enemy fire, when she took a direct hit from a rocket-propelled grenade.
“This was an elite athlete, and she’d lost her whole professional identity,” Trudeau said, “but that’s not what she wanted to talk about. What she wanted to talk about was how her buddies carried her down, put her on the hood of a Humvee, where they stopped the bleeding, then went back up to the roof, against orders, and found her hand buried under sandbags. They took off her wedding ring and gave it to her. She’s telling me this with a million-dollar smile. This was not about bitterness or loss. It was about gratitude.”
And so Trudeau started taking notes.
DOONESBURY HAS DEALT with emotional subjects before, most notably when gay lawyer Andy Lippincott died of AIDS in 1990, wisecracking to the end. Trudeau was never entirely satisfied with that sequence, because Andy was two-dimensional—literally and figuratively. He became a bravely noble funnyman dying with bravely noble humor.
“Andy handled it with more grace and humility than any human would,” Trudeau says. The problem was, Trudeau hadn’t known people with AIDS.
The access he has had to injured vets has given him a sure-handedness he didn’t have then; the B.D. storyline has shown extraordinary emotional complexity.
At a VA program for posttraumatic stress disorder in Menlo Park, California, Trudeau was allowed to sit in on the treatment of a forty-year-old military truck driver who had been delivering a weapons system to Baghdad Airport when his convoy came under fire. He had to flee through a crowd—just as Trudeau would later have B.D. do.
“The guy was back home, living with his parents, isolated with his TV, his PC, and his alcohol,” Trudeau says, consulting his notes. “He hated public places and would only go shopping at night at twenty-four-hour stores, when no one was around. He told us he was late for a job interview, but he had an hour, and it wasn’t an hour away. It turned out he had to go by back roads, because he would not drive under an overpass. Overpasses freaked him out.” Overpasses could give snipers cover.
“He was a computer expert, but he decided to take a $10-an-hour job over a $25-an-hour job,” Trudeau said, “because he wanted to work at a nursery, with plants. It was only when he talked about working with plants that his face softened.”
HE’S GARRY, NOT Gary, because his given name is Garretson. Trudeau is a blueblood, albeit one of a strange sort. The boring summary is that he’s the end-of-the-line son of four generations of physicians. But to leave it there would be a grave disservice to the narrative arts.
Trudeau’s great-great-grandfather, James de Berty Trude
au, was a friend of John James Audubon, for whom he shot birds. He lived in the wilds with the Osage Indians in the Louisiana territories. Oh, and he was a medical doctor in nineteenth-century New York City who ran afoul of his peers over his hobby of sculpting amusing figurines of the most dignified medical men of his era. To this they did not take kindly, drumming him out of polite society and down to New Orleans.
During the Civil War, he was made a brigadier general in the Confederate Army, apparently more for his status as a gentleman than for his military prowess. In short order, he assisted in the mismanagement of not one but two enormous Confederate defeats—Shiloh, a turning point of the war, and the battle of Island No. 10, which left the Mississippi undefended clear to Vicksburg. Who knows how many more miserable, crushing losses he would have helped midwife had he not been captured, held under house arrest, and released to continue his medical practice?
Meanwhile, the general’s wife had left him and headed for Paris, where their son—Trudeau’s great-grandfather, a lad of just ten or so—distinguished himself by whapping the Confederate ambassador in the back with a pellet from a slingshot. (“Actually, I see a lot of myself in him,” Trudeau laughs.)
Tuberculosis ravaged the family, which brought the next generations of Trudeau doctors to the fresh air of Saranac Lake, New York, in the Adirondacks, where they set up the nation’s first TB research sanitorium. Garry’s father, Francis Trudeau, was the town’s family physician, a man with grave responsibilities and appropriately sober mien. He once informed his son: “Life is not something to be enjoyed, so just get on with it,” a statement so splendid and outrageous it would eventually find its way into Doonesbury.
Francis Trudeau was dignified and reserved, and a father figure to an entire city. “I would hear him leave the house at four a.m., sometimes in snowshoes. I knew even then that the sense of mission was too big for me to take on.”
Eleven years ago, Francis called his son into his den, handed him a medical book, and asked him to read an entry on a relatively rare illness called amyloidosis. “Now,” Francis said, “as you can see from the prognosis at the bottom of the page…” That is the way Garry learned his father was dying.
We’re sitting on the roof deck of Trudeau’s studio, talking about the cartoonist’s famous aversion to publicity. The conversation goes right to his father.
“Late in his career, he was sued by a patient. He didn’t share it with me for three years. It was nothing, just a nuisance suit that was thrown out, but it shattered him to have his integrity challenged in a public forum. I grew up in a household where reputation was placed above all else.”
So?
“So it helped me when fame was introduced into the mix.”
There’s a difference between reputation and image, Trudeau explains. “These get confused in people’s minds,” he says, but one involves character, the other public relations.
“I just refused to get entangled by issues of image maintenance that fame implied. I made a deliberate retreat from a publicly visible life.”
What resulted was an unusual guy with a wall between his public and private selves, a guy who is intellectually fearless but so personally unassuming, Jane Pauley says, “that he’s afraid to return a shirt that’s the wrong size.”
“Inside Garry, there’s a little boy and a man,” Pauley says. “And the little boy is secretive and vulnerable, and the man isn’t. It would hurt him if I made a joke at his expense, but if the president of the United States says something negative about him, he puts it on the cover of his book.”
“SUFFICE IT TO say that I hold him in utter contempt.”
This is John McCain, the former prisoner of war, speaking about Trudeau on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1995. He was angered by a Doonesbury strip suggesting that presidential candidate Bob Dole was exploiting his war injury for political gain. That was then. This past year, it was McCain who wrote the introduction to Trudeau’s Long Road Home, a for-charity book compiling the strips about B.D.’s injury and recovery.
A curious thing has happened to Trudeau’s image as a result of the B.D. subplot—nothing the cartoonist could have predicted. The predictable, in fact, happened almost immediately: Calling Trudeau a “committed leftist,” Fox News Channel host Bill O’Reilly wrote in an online column that “a case can be made that Trudeau is attempting to sap the morale of Americans vis-à-vis Iraq by using a long-running, somewhat beloved cartoon character to create pathos.”
O’Reilly doesn’t talk about Trudeau anymore. He can’t, really.
We’re in Tucson, at the National Leadership Conference of the Vietnam Veterans of America, where Trudeau is about to take the stage to receive the group’s award for excellence in the arts. These are fifty-and sixtysomething guys, many with ponytails, tattoos, ample guts, and an attitude. They weren’t treated right; they want better for new vets, returning home scarred.
This is a potentially tricky audience for Trudeau’s acceptance speech. As they’ve aged, their politics have moved rightward, and many of them have a lingering distaste for antiwar talk, particularly from people they might consider draft dodgers. (Back in 1970, Trudeau pulled a disastrously low draft-lottery number—27, which he later bestowed on his slacker surfer-dude character, Zonker, in the strip. Trudeau wound up getting a medical deferment because of old stomach ulcers that hadn’t given him trouble for years, and haven’t since. His dad the doctor suggested he try that.)
As apolitical as the B.D. story is, elsewhere in the strip Trudeau regularly unleashes his disgust for the Iraq War and the man who is waging it. Trudeau’s time at Yale overlapped with George W. Bush’s—he knew him slightly and disliked him even then, largely for what he saw as a sense of smug entitlement (“all noblesse and no oblige”). In the strip, often on Sundays, with maximum readership, Trudeau just kills Bush. One Sunday this year, Michael Doonesbury and his old friend Bernie were discussing the Iraq War and wondering whether it keeps the president awake at night because of its enormous human toll. In the final panel, Trudeau cuts to a signature exterior nighttime view of the White House. From inside come two dialogue balloons: “What’s wrong, dear?” And: “It’s the stem cells. I hear their cries.”
So is Trudeau going to play it safe in this speech and stay away from politics? I’m apparently not the only one wondering. The instant the cartoonist rises to take the mike, a large American flag behind him suddenly and inexplicably crashes to the ground. From a group of organizers near me comes a whisper, “Oh shit, not a good sign.”
The speech starts benignly, praising the courage of the soldiers he had met, but here’s how Trudeau wraps it up:
When I talk to wounded veterans, I usually don’t ask them what they think the mission was. I don’t presume, because their lives are wrenching enough without the suggestion that their sacrifices may have been without meaning. Moreover, if that is so, it will become apparent to them soon enough… The young men and women who we’ve repeatedly put in harm’s way are paying the price for this misbegotten mission, and as long as it continues, I, like so many of our countrymen, must walk this strange line between hating the war but honoring the warrior. I don’t know how long we can keep it up…
He finishes to a standing ovation.
If there had been any lingering antipathy to Trudeau in this crowd, the story of B.D. appears to have wiped it out. It’s as though he’s been in the jungle with these guys.
THE TUCSON HEAT has dropped all the way to 90 degrees at night. In a patio outside the convention hotel, Vietnam veterans are slow-dancing with their wives, in a mournful shuffle, to a live band’s version of “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”
She said, There is no reason, and the truth is plain to see…
If there is one thing this convention has made plain, it’s that plenty of Vietnam vets still live with the madness of that war, still suffer from PTSD. You can hear it in their stories, read it in their eyes. It won’t be different in this war. B.D.’s story is fiction, but it is true.
Trudeau claims that he never thinks about Doonesbury unless he is actually drawing it; it may be true, but it’s misleading. He’s a born listener, and, in a sense, he is always thinking about Doonesbury and filing things away.
At the table is a filmmaker named Chuck Lacy, who just produced a documentary called The War Tapes, which followed three National Guardsmen to Iraq and back home. Lacy is saying there is something about this war unlike any other in history. The Internet has made it possible for soldiers to be in country, in a theater of war, but still communicate daily with their families, in real time, sometimes with video.
Is that good or bad? Trudeau asks.
Both, says Lacy: The soldiers say it’s their lifeline, but it’s also a terrible drain on their emotions; they’re dealing not only with their own anxieties but also with the anxieties of their families 6,000 miles away. It can be surreal. They’ll come back from a firefight and then try to resolve a mortgage problem.
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