Joshua Kendall is the author of several biographies. His latest, “Trudeau and Doonesbury: A Biography: The Cartoonist Who Turned the News into Art,” will be published in May.
In March of 1974, the Nixon presidency faced an existential crisis. A month earlier, the House of Representatives had formally authorized the Judiciary Committee to begin an impeachment inquiry over his involvement in the Watergate scandal. Nixon’s approval rating was stuck at about 26 percent. So, in a desperate attempt to boost his sagging popularity with his base, the president began making visits to friendly states such as Alabama.
That’s when Garry Trudeau, a recent Yale University graduate and the creator of “Doonesbury,” the syndicated comic strip then appearing in about 350 newspapers nationwide, pounced. In a comic strip published that month, Mike Doonesbury and his college pal, Mark, are watching Nixon deliver a televised address in the fictional town of Fritters, Ala. Suddenly Mark blurts out, “I heard a rumor that the president’s speechwriters are actually warming him up to an ‘ill health resignation.’”
You would think that the Nixon administration would have done its utmost to intimidate or silence Trudeau, who had been lobbing barbs at the White House for more than a year. But that’s not what happened. As Ken Khachigian, then assisting Pat Buchanan on Nixon’s speechwriting team, told me for my biography of Trudeau, he wrote Trudeau to request a signed copy of the “ill health resignation” comic strip. And it hung in his office ever since. “Trudeau’s humor had a playful quality,” Khachigian said. “It was creative — not malicious. We expected that liberals would attack us. And Pat and I enjoyed punching back.”
Fast forward a half century. Today, political satire is on life support. Last July, after Stephen Colbert — who has cited Trudeau’s oeuvre as a source of inspiration — announced that his show was being canceled. In response, the president gleefully noted on Truth Social, “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings.” Over the past several months, Brendan Carr, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, has attacked both Colbert and fellow late-night host Jimmy Kimmel for their liberal bias.
Carr’s claim that the FCC has the authority to regulate the perceived bias of TV and radio stations has alarmed First Amendment advocates. Gabe Rottman, vice president of policy at the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, told me it could have a chilling effect on future political satirists. “This is dangerous because satirists often are effective communicators in the national conversation,” he said.
The world’s most thoughtful satirists have long had an endless supply of material to work with. But what distinguishes exemplary satirists like Garry Trudeau is their reluctance to attack the vulnerable. True satire, argued Trudeau, should “punch upward” and go after the powerful.
Trudeau also owes the success of his long-running strip, which reached 60 million Americans in its heyday, to his dogged reporting. In the spring of 1975, Trudeau became the first comic strip artist to win a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.
Trudeau would also impress leading conservative journalists, including William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review, who ended up writing a foreword to one of his books. As James Rosen, the author of a biography of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and who now serves as the chief White House correspondent for Newsmax, told me that as a teenager in the 1980s he devoured all of Trudeau’s cartoon collections. “I actually longed to be Trudeau because he somehow enjoyed establishment acceptance but yet maintained a hippie sensibility,” he said.
Trudeau has been spoofing the current president since 1987, when Trump was known solely as a self-aggrandizing real estate tycoon. In a cartoon published that September, Mike Doonesbury mentions Trump when musing about who might be the least-qualified American to run for president. As Trudeau later reflected on those early Trump strips, “The grandiosity was so over the top that it would have been comedy malpractice to ignore it.” Trump’s response was to label Trudeau “a third-rate cartoonist,” an insult that Trudeau proudly turned into a blurb for his collection of Trump strips.
In contrast, other presidents have acknowledged the value of Trudeau’s role to society at large. In June of 2000, President Clinton introduced the cartoonist at a White House event as someone who made fun of him for a living. “I felt so proud to be an American,” Trudeau said..
Like many baby boomer cartoonists, Trudeau never anticipated the day when the antics of the Nixon administration would seem mild. As Art Spiegelman, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic memoir “Maus,” put it, “We live in dark times when satire writes itself in every day’s headlines.”
On Saturday night, for the first time as president, Trump is scheduled to attend the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents’ Association, which traditionally brings the media, politicians, and the president together. If the evening passes without grievance or retaliation by Trump, it could mark a small step back toward a healthier political culture.
Throughout American history, most public figures have understood that satire goes with the territory, not as a sign of disrespect, but of a free and vibrant society. Rather than silence their critics, targets of the satire sometimes even laughed along.
That spirit is now at risk. Reviving it would do more than rescue political satire; it would help restore a basic democratic norm: the freedom to engage in verbal jousting, an exercise that has long made America great.
