Rolling Stone: Doonebury Goes to War article

Rolling Stone
Doonesbury Goes to War
Garry Trudeau talks about Iraq, the coming election and his old classmate George W. Bush
By ERIC BATES

In 1971, a year after he graduated from Yale, Garry Trudeau went on the game show To Tell the Truth. He had just launched a crudely drawn comic strip called "Doonesbury," but nobody knew who he was: Only one celebrity panelist correctly guessed his identity. "I don't remember which one picked me," Trudeau says with a laugh. "Orson Bean?"

If Trudeau repeated his appearance today, even hard-core media junkies would still have trouble identifying him. His work appears in 700 newspapers worldwide, he was nominated for an Academy Award for a "Doonesbury" special, he is the only artist ever to receive a Pulitzer Prize for a comic strip, and he is married to Jane Pauley. But Trudeau gives so few interviews -- he's appeared on TV only once in the past three decades -- that he has earned a reputation as the J.D. Salinger of cartooning. The low profile is mainly an act of self-preservation: His daily strip generates so much controversy that putting out fires could consume all his time. "I didn't need to do it," he says with a shrug, "so why not save myself the aggravation?"

Breaking his long silence, Trudeau sat down with Rolling Stone in the modest studio in Manhattan where he creates "Doonesbury." Despite the flecks of gray in his hair, at fifty-six he has the easygoing, curious manner of a grad student still fascinated by the world around him. It's no exaggeration to say that Trudeau revolutionized the funny pages, creating a space where reactionaries and radicals alike squabble over the issues of the day. His style is part Charles Schulz, part Charles Dickens. Over the years his characters have grappled with everything from AIDS and abortion to Alzheimer's. But with the election of George W. Bush, who attended Yale with Trudeau back in the Sixties, "Doonesbury" has taken on an urgency and relevance reminiscent of its early, gleeful assaults on Nixon. Trudeau offered a $10,000 reward to anyone who could verify that Bush fulfilled his duties in the Air National Guard, and he brought home the reality of the war by having his character B.D. lose a leg while fighting in Iraq. For the first time, Trudeau also drew B.D. without the helmet he has worn since the days when he enlisted in Vietnam to get out of writing a college term paper.

You're focusing a lot on the war in Iraq. I've noticed that your military characters, like B.D. and Ray, sound like real soldiers. Have you been talking to the troops for research?

Yeah. During the first Gulf War, I'd meet them because they contacted me. This war is a lot easier, because it's an e-mail war. I hear from soldiers who are actually in the field. That changes all the rules of the game. They can't censor soldiers with laptops -- it's literally impossible. It's a way for somebody like me, sitting in this office, to get a view of what soldiers are experiencing.

What did you do to prepare for B.D. losing his leg in combat?

In the case of B.D. suffering this grievous wound, I went down to Walter Reed hospital, in Washington, D.C., to talk to some of the amputees. It's important to me to get the details of his recovery right. There's a great deal of pain on Ward 57, where the amputees are sent. Most of the soldiers will admit to having bad days when they feel overwhelmed -- either by their physical pain or by the hard work of looking at themselves in a new way. But it's not as depressing as you might think. In fact, it's uplifting and inspirational. Part of it has to do with the fact that these guys are wrapped in a culture that is very positive, very can-do. Their whole mind-set is: This is a problem I can overcome. Almost all of them want to return to their units, which is a fascinating response to the crisis they're undergoing.

That's one of the first things you have B.D. say when he wakes up in the hospital -- that he wants to get back to his unit.

The soldiers I met in Ward 57 feel guilt about being away from their unit -- but mostly I think they feel great affection for their fellow warriors. I spoke with an MP in her late twenties who was tasked to defend an Iraqi police station. She was up on the roof, which was stacked with sandbags, and she took two RPG rounds, one of which blew off her hand and part of her forearm. She tells this story almost matter-of-factly, as if it had happened to someone else, and with a great deal of feeling about the response of her fellow soldiers. They came and pulled her out of the sand, took her down below and put her on the hood of a Hummer. Then her sergeant and another trooper went back up to the roof to recover her hand. They fished around in the sand until they found it, and they pulled off her wedding ring. She tells this story with tremendous pride and affection for these people -- that they would do something so important to her. She says, "I know it's just a ring, but it meant a lot to me." She's in this terrible situation, and yet in it she finds something to be grateful for.

Some writers regard their fictional characters almost as real people. But you don't seem very broken up about blowing B.D.'s leg off.

Well, the terrible truth about writers is, they create characters and then they put them in harm's way. That's what drama is about. As a writer, I don't have an emotional link to the characters. I have to summon them up -- I have to pull them out of the toolbox and put 'em to work. They don't live in my head. So I was overwhelmed by some of the letters that came in about B.D. It was so emotional. People wrote that it made them feel they had a personal stake in the war -- like someone they knew had been harmed. People were even more astonished when B.D.'s helmet came off. It signified his vulnerability and made it all the more difficult for them to accept. I was talking to a soldier in the hospital, and I said, "I draw this comic strip, and I have this character named B.D. who lost his leg." The soldier's eyes widened: "B.D. lost his leg?!" Here's this mangled, broken hero lying in his bed, and he's concerned that this character he knows had such a terrible thing happen to him. It was very moving.

Do you see parallels between Iraq and Vietnam?

Both were discretionary wars entered into under false assumptions, and you could argue that both initially had worthy goals. The Iraq adventure, however, was crippled by a fatal arrogance from the onset. The Powell doctrine of using overwhelming force to reach achievable goals with a clear exit strategy -- conceived in reaction to mistakes made in Vietnam -- was summarily discarded, inviting nearly all the consequences the doctrine was designed to avoid.

You came of age during Vietnam. Who were your political heroes as a kid?

I wasn't particularly politically attuned growing up. There wasn't much debate at our dinner table. My parents were Republicans, so the GOP was my team, and Ike was our genial manager. In '60, I was too young to really respond to JFK's charisma as intuitively as I was repelled by Nixon's sleaziness, and in 1964, I was so disengaged that I actually designed placards for both parties at my high school. Later I came to admire Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, but more as pop figures than as visionaries who changed the world. Vietnam was the wake-up call. That's when I really started paying attention, and by then heroes were in scarce supply. Besides, who needed role models? We had the certainty of youth. It's amazing what an authority you can become on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution during one four-hour bus ride to visit your congressman.

You were two years behind Bush at Yale?

And four years behind Kerry. Joe Lieberman was also at Yale, and Howard Dean was in my class. My feeling is, there should have been a cap this year on Yale graduates running for president [laughs]. Howard Dean I knew quite well from boyhood. We'd gone to a summer camp together. When Howard became governor, he told some reporter that he'd gotten his sense of humor from me. I wrote him and said, "That's utter bullshit. When you knew me as a teenager, I didn't have a sense of humor. Life was much too grim."

I think Howard did an astonishing thing with his campaign. When people look back at 2004, it'll be obvious just how much he turned an election that Bush could have walked away with into a real competition. He forced everybody to take on the war issue. And his fine, righteous anger got the base motivated, in a way that might not otherwise have happened.

Did you know Bush as a student?

We both served on the Armour Council, which was the social committee for our residential college. Nobody in my freshman dorm knew what the council was. But I apparently had shown some leadership qualities in the first three or four days of school, so I was elected unanimously. George Bush was chairman. Our duties consisted of ordering beer kegs and choosing from among the most popular bands to be at our mixers. He certainly knew his stuff -- he was on top of it [laughs].

Even then he had clearly awesome social skills. Legend has it that he knew the names of all forty-five of his fellow pledges when he rushed Deke. He later became rush chairman of Deke -- I do believe he has the soul of a rush chairman. He has that ability to connect with people. Not in the empathetic way that Clinton was so good at, but in the way of making people feel comfortable.

He could also make you feel extremely uncomfortable. He was very good at all the tools for survival that people developed in prep school -- sarcasm, and the giving of nicknames. He was extremely skilled at controlling people and outcomes in that way. Little bits of perfectly placed humiliation.

(Excerpted from RS 954)
(Posted Aug 05, 2004)