THE ART OF POLITICAL CARTOONS
10/24/04
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DEBORAH LEFF: Welcome, we are going to do a little dancing here. It will be a little adventurous. I’m Deborah Leff. I’m director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. And on behalf of myself and John Shattuck, who is CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation, we’re so pleased you could join us during this 25th anniversary week of the library. I must note that the Red Sox did their part in making this anniversary more special.
And I’d like to thank our local sponsors, the Lowell Institute, Fleet/Bank of America, Boston Capital, The Boston Globe, which also brings us Dan Wasserman today, WBUR and Boston.com.
In 1963, President Kennedy spoke to members of The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. He began by kind of looking at them and saying, “I want you to get this much thinner than you gentlemen have-- I mean I took five pounds off before this meeting.” And the president then summarized what makes editorial cartooning such a wonder. “You entertain and instruct us,” President Kennedy told the cartoonists. “And I must say the ability to place in one picture a story and a message and do it with impact and conviction and humor and passion, all that, I think, makes you the most exceptional commentators on the American scene today.”
Of course, President Kennedy wasn’t completely awestruck. “I’m going to examine what you’ve done to us with some concern,” he said. “You see the hair is much less than you have it.” I’m sure you’re familiar with those complaints. We are joined by three of the nations top practitioners of the art today, three guys who make us laugh and hoot and really think about the issues.
Mike Peters in the middle is the editorial cartoonist for The Dayton Daily News. I’m going to skip over the fact that he was born in St. Louis.
MIKE PETERS: I know. I know.
LEFF: I know that he won the Pulitzer Prize for his work in 1981. His cartoons regularly appear in more than 400 papers worldwide. He also draws the Mother Goose and Grim comic strip, which consistently appears in the top ten most popular ratings. Now, when I talked to Mike Peters and asked him who should join him on this panel, he said, “You’ve got to get Luckovich. He’s the best.” So we listened to him.
I’m pleased to introduce beside me Mike Luckovich of the Atlantic Constitution.
MIKE LUCKOVICH: Thank you. Thank you.
LEFF: Mike won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 as he noted at the time, “It’s the ultimate coloring contest.” And when you see reprints of cartoons in Newsweek and the Sunday New York Times, you almost always see Mike’s marvelous work there. He’s won virtually every major award in his field.
LUCKOVICH: Thank you.
LEFF: Now those of us in Boston, it’s absolutely an incredible feat to be joined by our very own Dan Wasserman of The Boston Globe. Dan Wasserman joined The Globe in 1985 and he delights all of us with his terrific work. His editorial cartoons are regularly also featured in The New York Times “Week in Review” section, and Time and Newsweek and The Economist and a number of television shows.
And hopefully, tearing in from the airport shortly will be NPR’s Scott Simon. It’s always great to have him at the Kennedy Library. He’s the anchor of NPR’s “Weekend Edition Saturday.” And in these days of kind of an icky proliferation of tabloid coverage, Scott remains a true journalist with deep and committed reporting from all 50 states and from around the world. He’s covered presidential campaigns and international events. He’s won the George Foster Peabody award, the Robert F. Kenney journalism award and so many other honors. And, of course, he is a baseball fan.
So the way we are going to work this is, while Scott is coming in from the airport, we’ve asked each of the three cartoonists to begin by showing five minutes or so of their work. That will take 15 minutes. And if Scott doesn’t come then, we’ll wing it and you’ll be responsible for giving us your questions and we’ll go from there. So Dan, let me turn it over to you.
DAN WASSERMAN: Thank you. See, if I show drawings-- I’m going to talk for five minutes about caricature, which most people see as central to the art of editorial cartooning. And I think later on we may do a little actual drawing, maybe. We can’t draw without Scott. So let me just show a few of my favorites about caricature and a few of the caricature characters who have inhabited my recent drawings. This is cartoons from the point of view of the subject of the cartoon. [Laughter at cartoons displayed]
In going through my old cartoons, I picked one out, which is actually-- most of it is recent work. This goes back about-- I was fairly new to The Globe. But I thought because I was speaking here at the Kennedy Library, it was appropriate that I bring this. And it’s Gary Hart early in the campaign for 1988. [Laughter] Now even those of you who are long-time readers of The Boston Globe have never seen this cartoon because it did not run in The Boston Globe and therein lies a terrific Boston story.
I was new and naïve and I drew this cartoon based on the fact that it was well-reported that Gary Hart had a wandering eye at the time that he was touting his vision and his political compatibility with the lions of the Democratic Party. So I drew this cartoon. I took it to my editor and he said, “You can’t put that in the paper.” I said, “Why not?” He said, “Because it’s a rumor. You’re smearing this guy. Nobody’s proven anything and it would be irresponsible to put this in, even as an opinion piece. You may not put it in the paper.”
So I said, “Okay.” I took the cartoon, which was finished-- I didn’t show him a sketch. I liked the cartoon so much that I just did it up as a drawing. And I figured, “Sooner or later this is going to make an easy day for me,” and I stuck it in the drawer. Well, not less than two weeks later, The Miami Herald had Donna Rice, the monkey business all over the front page. And I said, “This is a good short day.” So I opened up the drawer. I got it out. I ran it upstairs.
I said, “I’m in.” And the deputy editor was there and she looked at it and she said, “You can’t put that in the paper.” I said, “It’s all over the front page of every paper in the country. It’s on the news reports. He’s not denying it. How could this be unfair to Gary Hart?” She said, “Oh, it’s not unfair to Gary Hart. It’s unfair to FDR and JFK.” [Laughter]
PANELIST [interjection]: Oh, my God. Isn’t that amazing.
WASSERMAN: She wasn’t joking. And so that’s one of the cartoons that never ran. So these are just a few of my favorite personages, some of them national, some of them local. I thought I would bring this. James Levine just took over the Boston Symphony Orchestra night before last and he’s a terrific character to draw. He came up from New York. [Laughter] So you just like to dig into a face like that. This is a personality that you really just have to admire. This is Kim Jong Il over there. [Laughter]
PANELIST: That’s very funny. That’s great.
WASSERMAN: But I think the main focus of most of our drawing is usually on the U.S. administration. I mean if you did any kind of-- Come on up, Scott.
[APPLAUSE]
PANELIST: What a joy. What a joy.
LEFF: So what we did is, we took 5 minutes, - we asked each of them--
[Side conversations on baseball as moderator settled in.]
WASSERMAN: We’re doing five-minute intros. You can just relax.
SIMON: Well, then.
WASSERMAN: I was just getting to Bill Clinton, [laughter] who aside from his transgressions, his resilience, it seemed to me, made him a terrific target. I mean no matter how hard you hit this guy, politically, cartoon-wise, he kept coming back. This was during the winter Olympics. [Laughter] And it’s another Clinton cartoon that uses a device that cartoonists do from time to time, which is to pay tribute to those who have gone before us. This is a Chuck Jones adaptation here. [Laughter at cartoon]
I started telling you about caricature. So I’m just showing some of my favorites here. This is Bill upstaging Al Gore for yet another time. This is when Al was wandering in the wilderness, growing his beard. It was the same time that Clinton opened his office in Harlem. [Laughter] Bush -- You hate to see someone like Clinton go but Bush has not been a disappointment. [Laughter]
And his cabinet has added to the… And his vice president here. This is the Cheney-Edwards debate that I did. [Laughter at cartoon] I left a few of the debates out but I will get to them later. I want to show a few local ones because I think this is an important part of cartooning. And we’ve not been… Why don’t I just start with Ted Kennedy? I don’t think anything is going to happen, right? [Laughter] He was challenged by [Mitt] Romney for his Senate seat before Romney ran for governor.
And it was a fairly hard-hitting campaign. In the middle of it, it was revealed that Ted had hired some investigators to look into Romney’s background to see if they could find anything compromising. I thought that Ted was probably the wrong candidate to be doing that sort of thing. [Laughter] Romney, of course, has since taken over the gubernatorial spot in the state and seems to be defining his administration through his opposition to gay marriage. [Laughter]
And this is sort of a downer to end on but I think an important part of the Boston story that… We have repeat child molester [John] Geoghan here. [Cartoon featured]
PANELIST: Oh, my. Wow.
WASSERMAN: And [Cardinal] Law who has since departed. I’m a little confused here because I had a bunch of other drawings to show you. Aha. Aha. Aha. I’m going to take too much time. So I’ll end with two here and come back to these others. I think Mike and Mike would agree with me that as cartoonists we get attached to these characters. They start almost to be characters in your own script. They tend to be simplified and be icons so you get attached. And when they leave office, it’s traumatic.
Two years ago in December there was a particularly traumatic week when we lost four of these guys all at once, [Trent] Lott, Gore, Cardinal Law, Henry Kissinger, all departed at the same time. [Laughter] I try not to do too many self-referential cartoons but this one seemed… And then sometimes we are caricaturing not so much a person as a culture. And given the week and fears of all of us who are Red Sox fans, this was after game seven of the American League Championship series last year. [Laughter]
PANELIST: That’s great.
[APPLAUSE]
LUCKOVICH: Hi. I’m Mike Luckovich. I’m the editorial cartoonist for The Atlanta Journal Constitution. And you can hear me, right? All right. Excellent.
WASSERMAN: I don’t think you have to lean into it. I think it picks up pretty well.
LUCKOVICH: I just kind of like to lean into it, if you don’t mind.
WASSERMAN: I don’t mind.
LUCKOVICH: Dan says I can use this machine. So this is really great. This is really great. Now you know what I did, I chose cartoons… Did you hear there’s an election coming up, November 2nd. So be sure and vote. But you know this election, and I’m sure Dan and Mike agree, - it’s been like no other in our lifetime. And it’s been, - it’s been to me… Previous elections, I’ve always favored one candidate or another. But I always thought they were all sort of in the main stream.
But see, I don’t really think that this year. And I think that it’s a very important election. And so I’ve been trying to get that across in my cartoons. One thing about Bush is, Bush believes that God is sort of there acting through him. And so I did this cartoon, saying, “Almighty is guiding me. God’s lousy at post-war planning.” [Laughter]
PANELIST: That’s great.
LUCKOVICH: This one, [is from] the VP debates a couple of weeks ago. It was amazing to me because Cheney, for one thing, he’s been repeatedly trying to connect Al Qaeda and Saddam. And he flat out denied it in the debate. And then he also talked about that he never met Edwards before. So I did that. [Laughter at cartoon shown.]
PANELIST: This is good.
LUCKOVICH: Thank you. Thank you. I did this just a couple of days ago. I live in Atlanta in the suburbs. I live in a place called Sandy Springs. And everyone, - I’m a Democrat but around me everyone else is Republican. And they are all really happy with the tax cut. And I think they can forgive Bush for a lot of things because they are getting this tax cut. So I’ve been trying to think of a way that I could do a cartoon to kind of show that this is maybe not a good idea to feel that way. So, this guys got a… [APPLAUSE]
PANELIST: That’s great.
LUCKOVICH: You know what? I really haven’t done-- I kind of like Kerry and I really haven’t done many cartoons on Kerry. However, you know, Kerry does have… He’s not like a guy that people naturally want to have a beer with. And so during the South Carolina primary, I did this cartoon. Kerry is saying, “National Association of Stock Car Racing Aficionados, I beseech you. Support me.” Hey, call them NASCAR fans. [Laughter]
This was from a couple of weeks ago. This is Bush at a rally. [Laughter at screen] [APPLAUSE] You know another thing in this election that I just don’t get, you know, the whole brouhaha about gay marriage. You know, I just don’t have a problem with it. The way I look at it, if you get married, as long as you keep your yard cut, that’s the only thing I have. I don’t care what you do in the privacy of your own bedroom. Just keep your yard nice.
So anyways, after Bush announced they wanted to amend the constitution to disallow gay marriage, I drew this. Osama saying, “Here’s my plan for destroying America. We sneak in and marry each other.” [Laughter] Thank you. Now, if you notice, these two guys are looking at each other. [Laughter] Now this guy does not have a soul in my opinion. I used to think he was a great guy. This is Ralph Nader [depicted in bed with an elephant, smoking a cigarette]: “Yeah, but I don’t enjoy it.” [laughter]
Now what’s amazing to me is I’m watching all this election stuff going on and Bush and Cheney don’t really have anything positive to run on so they keep talking about how Kerry is just going to screw up everything once he gets in, like they’ve been doing a good job. I don’t get it. And so this last week, Cheney was talking about how, “Oh, well, if Kerry gets in, someone might have nuclear weapons and Kerry won’t know what to do. They might blow up our cities.”
He is just making crap up, basically. And it is so frustrating to me. So I did this cartoon in keeping with the season. [Laughter] Now, the whole Abu Ghraib prison thing… I did this one. It’s Rummy and Bush saying, “Court martial the horses.”
PANELIST: That’s great. That’s great. That’s great.
LUCKOVICH: At the Republican convention, the way that the whole crowd of them went after Kerry night after night, I kept thinking, wouldn’t it have been great if they had gone after Osama like that. They are running. Kerry went that-a-way. [Laughter]
PANELIST: I love that. Oh, my God.
LUCKOVICH: You notice Bush in the baby carrier. And I really enjoy drawing Zell [Miller] as Yosemite Sam. I drew Karl Rove here. He is saying, “We attacked Iraq, when it was actually Iran with Al Qaeda ties. Should I appoint a spell-check czar?” I was at the Republican convention recently. And I saw this commotion outside the studio. So I sort of hung out there, and then out walked Karl Rove.
And it was the day that Bush had announced that the war on terrorism couldn’t be won. And he had previously said that it could be. So as Karl Rove walked by I started walking up next to him. And I said, “Mr. Rove, wouldn’t Bush’s statement today be considered a flip-flop?” And he actually put his arm around me and we are walking together. And he asked me who I am and he said, “We were talking about cartoons.” And he said, “No, that wouldn’t be a flip-flop.” And then we walked a little farther and he said, “And you know what, Mike, you have Satanic eye-brows.” [Laughter]
PANELIST: I’ve got to get a good look at this.
LUCKOVICH: You know, I think they are more demonic. They are more demonic than Satanic. Now, you know, sometimes politicians are just great when they are themselves. And Bush refusing to appear before the 9/11 commission without Cheney was a perfect thing for us cartoonists.
PANELIST: Oh, yeah.
LUCKOVICH: “Where’s Cheney. I’m not going this alone.” [Laughter] This is sort of off the topic but fun. It’s a guy. You hear a voice mail, “And then I want to spray cheez whiz on your sexy”-- “Honey, voice mail from Bill O’Reilly.” [Laughter] You all heard about it. This all came out on the Internet. The thing on Bush’s back, whatever that little box was. And so I did this: Bush is saying, “My husband is not home. Make me your love slave.” And the wife says, “Bush’s hidden wires picking up “Desperate Housewives.”” [Laughter]