The Press: In War & Peace

For millions of American G.I.s. the most vivid symbols of their lot in World War II were Sergeant Bill Mauldin’s cartoon dogfaces, Willie and Joe. Appearing up front in Stars & Stripes and widely syndicated in newspapers back home, they captured the frustrations of the combat infantryman fighting his lonely war against filth, fatigue, his own generals and, occasionally, the enemy.

Willie and Joe won for. Mauldin a great reputation—but the peacetime conversion came hard. He has had his ups and downs. the corner, shows all the signs of taking his place in the top rank of U.S. political cartoonists.

Pretty Bad. Last week Cartoonist Mauldin, now an impish-looking, salty-talking 38-year-old, recalled his bitter years. He had originally planned to have Willie and Joe killed on V-J day. “They were characters who belonged to a time and place,” he explains. ”The infantrymen they had been patterned after had been killed.” But he didn’t do it: “I chickened out.” Instead, accepting a handsome offer from United Feature Syndicate, he put Willie and Joe in mufti—and set them to deciding the fate of the postwar world. Where the syndicate wanted simple panel gags, Mauldin insisted on drawing political cartoons that were sometimes murky, often naive. Where Willie and Joe in wartime had been marvelously sardonic, now they merely seemed shrill. Client papers canceled by the score, which only made Mauldin defiant. “Every time an editor bitched about my drawing a race-relations cartoon,” Mauldin says, “I drew eight or ten of them in a row. I was sore and frustrated. I did a few good cartoons, but the general output was pretty bad. I was floating around with my feet about 20 feet off the ground.” When his contract with United Feature Syndicate ran out in 1948, Mauldin quit.

He spent the next ten years roaming the country, taking up flying, free-lancing in an aimless way. His second chance came in 1958, when Mauldin’s early hero, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s famed political cartoonist Daniel R. Fitzpatrick, left on an extended vacation after 45 years at the drawing board. The paper hired Mauldin as a fillin. Fitzpatrick, now retired, says, “Mauldin compares with Herblock, and that’s as high a compliment as you can pay.”

The Post-Dispatch was a fine place for Bill Mauldin: “There’s no screws on the back of your neck.” In that atmosphere Mauldin took a new and deeper look at his peacetime craft. “I had done Willie and Joe in a bold brush,” he says, “and it was too stark a technique for political cartooning. The damn drawings jumped out of the page at you. They were as subtle as a punch in the nose. In the end. I finally realized the cartoon had to recede into the page and complement it.”

Like any truly good political cartoonist, Mauldin puts his own politics into his work. A diehard Stevenson backer, he now describes himself as “an ill-disguised Kennedy man,” but adds of the 1960 presidential campaign: “I’ll be damned if I’ll give up my privilege to kid the pants off both those guys.” For Mauldin, kidding Republican Richard Nixon is easy. Elongating the prominent Nixon nose into a bird’s beak, he has depicted “Dickybird” Nixon as the “quick-footed helmsnatcher.” Says Mauldin of this rare bird: “He’s like a sandpiper. You’re always sure the wave’ll catch him, but it never does. He’s not mean. He’s not evil. Just a quick-footed little bird in search of titbits.” Mauldin insists that: “I deal more in people than in symbols. If I ever do an Uncle Sam, I hope I drop dead.” As for poor old Willie and Joe, they are gone. Mauldin used them for the last time in a cartoon after the 1959 death of General George Marshall.

Easier at Night. The Mauldin style does not come easily. Mauldin’s day begins in a steaming hot bathtub at 7:15, a brimful king-size coffee cup resting on the rim. In this saunalike atmosphere, the seeds of cartoon ideas that were born during his bedtime hours begin to sprout. “Ideas come easier at night,” says Mauldin. “But my sense of discrimination is no good. I need the light of day. That’s why the bathtub.” A meticulous craftsman, Mauldin poses himself before a Polaroid Land camera with an automatic tripping device to catch just the right face wrinkle, the proper aspect of a menacingly uplifted arm, the authentic grip of a fist on a club, for his cartoons. Once at the drawing board, he is just as painstaking: a lefthander, he draws from the bottom up and letters from right to left to avoid smearing the wet ink.

Some 60 papers now carry Mauldin’s cartoons, and the list is growing. After all those ups and downs, Bill Mauldin is on top again, and he is happy. Says he: “This is exactly what I’ve wanted to do all my life.”