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February 6, 2003
Remembering Mauldin
By Jeff DanzigerBill Mauldin once drew his World War II soldiers, Willie and Joe, clutching the ground to avoid incoming German fire, and Willie complains to Joe, "I can't get no lower, me buttons is in the way."
My father, a WW II veteran, had showed this to me when I was a kid, and tried explaining the idea of thinking of something funny when people were shooting at you. Some years later in Phuoc Vinh, a miserable town about 50 kilometers north of Saigon, I was at a dinner for a departing colonel, in a rather diaphanous mess hall, when Vietcong mortars began falling out of the sky. We all dove for the ground, scattering chairs, silverware and glasses. I wound up on top of the evening?s honoree.
While the windows were being blown out of the building and all sorts of detritus was being flung about, the thought flashed through my mind, "I can?t get no lower, the colonel?s in the way." I began to laugh, and prayed I would live through this so I could locate Mauldin and tell him of the upgrade in obstructions.
I did this some years later, when I was working for a friend of his, Kay Fanning, then editor of the Christian Science Monitor. Mauldin knew that we hadn?t had great respect for colonels in Vietnam, so he found my updating of his joke to be proof that history rhymes. By that time, Mauldin had stopped working regularly and filed only one or two cartoons a week from his ranch in Arizona. He admitted that politics had gotten cyclical and rather repetitive, and he wanted to do some other things with his life. His hobby then was repairing and restoring World War II vehicles, mostly the jeeps he made famous in his Stars and Stripes cartoons. (For a time he couldn't draw at all because a jeep fell off its jack and landed on his hand. He thought that was humorous.) But he hadn?t lost his disdain for authority, or his conviction that he was helping our leaders to make intelligent decisions by showing them how silly some of them looked from the viewpoint of their followers. That?s the best guidance for any political cartoonist.
There were two differences between Mauldin and most cartoonists today. One was that Mauldin had been there. He wasn?t making it up. He wasn?t applying standard comic structures to the news to come up with an obvious joke we can all harmlessly laugh at. In his post-war years, he was at his best on John Kennedy. He admired Kennedy and thought him heroic, if a little full of himself, and he drew Kennedy bordering on cocksure, believing his own publicity.
The other difference was that Mauldin could draw. He was a trained artist. He knew human anatomy. He knew how men stand when they are dead tired, when they are afraid, and how they physically cringe when they are lying. He knew how to draw things like the fall of light and shadow, architecture and perspective, and reflections in the rain-pocked surface of water. He had an eye for detail, for the bolts that hold tank tracks together, for the shaky little folding tables that the U.S. Army set up in the middle of the bombed out shells of Europe?s cities. These things are subtle, but he chose them the way a schooled writer uses words and syntax.
Mauldin used himself to draw from, posing in the exact position he needed and then taking a Polaroid. He was, after all, his own best model, knowing exactly the body language he had in mind. Fanning told me that she had been at a meeting with him at the Chicago Sun-Times the morning that Kennedy was shot. As the editors sat, stunned for the moment by the news, Mauldin excused himself and left the room. He went to his office and produced the most famous cartoon to come out of that awful day. It is of the interior of the Lincoln Memorial, and it will live forever. Lincoln is sitting, slumped, with his hand over his eyes in unspeakable grief.
Except of course, that it isn?t really Lincoln. It?s Mauldin.
He had gone to his office and put himself in the pose before the Polaroid camera, and then drawn himself, and the grief couldn?t have been more genuine. Years later, Fanning told him how much she admired that drawing and would like to purchase it. The original was gone, Mauldin said, but then he thought a minute and offered an even greater gift. He said he still had the Polaroid, if she wanted that.