CSotD: Speaking of Bad Years …
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It's always fun and instructive, on New Year's Day, to look back at how cartoonists have dealt with similar times in the past, and I chose New Year's 1969 because it followed a year that was about as bad as any we've had since the Civil War.
Here's a quick summary of what we'd just been through:
As you can see, it wasn't all bad. Jackie got married and Apollo 8 was definitely one of our coolest space missions, with the photo of the Earth from space and such. And not all of us thought forcing LBJ out of office and halting the bombing of North Vietnam were such bad things, either.
As for Abe Fortas failing to move up to Chief Justice, 1969 would see him step down entirely from the Court, for a matter that, a half century later, would look more like a qualification for office than a reason to resign.
But that's getting ahead of things.
Let's take another look at the year just survived through a somewhat more detailed monthly summary by Gene Bassett:
(Yes, back in those days, we had to pay for wars. Not only with tax money, but with tax money based on gold. I guess you had to be there)
(I saw Bobby Kennedy the day MLK was killed, on the first stop of an Indiana Primary campaign tour that put him in Indianapolis that night. As for the "shoot to kill" order, it came from Mayor Daley and was somewhat on our minds later that summer.)
(A guy I knew was visiting Prague when the tanks rolled in and he took some pictures on film the Soviets confiscated. He refused to sign a paper that was written only in Czech and Russian, neither of which he could read, but which the Soviets assured him was only a receipt for the film. Back then, we didn't trust Russians.)
(Both Donald Trump and George W. Bush rank higher on the list of squeakers. Three fellows who never felt handicapped by having received an historically slim mandate.)
So there's your stage, with, as Bassett notes, the late news that the Pueblo crew was released on December 23 bracketing the year, and perhaps providing some relief to the gang at Time Magazine who had felt it necessary to point out that the crew flipped the bird in propaganda pics released by the North Koreans.
Because, while every American already knew what the gesture meant, the North Koreans had not, until they read Time's explanation.
Time might have done a better service to reveal that Nixon had sabotaged the Paris Peace Talks in order to protect his aforementioned razor-thin election margin, at the cost of another four years of fighting and some 21,000 additional names for the wall.
Okay, we didn't know that then.
Let's get back in period and look at some cartoons:
We may not have known all the details swirling around, but, as this Bill Crawford cartoon suggests, we were well aware of the world young 1969 was walking into.
This was one of the cartoons I saw most frequently as I went through newspapers, but, lest you credit editors then with more noble intent and sharp insight than today, here's the other I ran into most often:
Because golly gee, you just have to love the way a New Year is filled with fresh starts, and everything was just hunky-dory.
Sgt. Mike was perhaps less enthusiastic about things. Sgt Mike had a very loyal following, a lot of whom got his cartoons mailed to them in Vietnam from relatives who found his commentary in their newspapers back home. Here's more about him, including a note from the actual Sgt Mike.
This Ed Kudlety cartoon also got a lot of play, and he wasn't the only cartoonist to use the transition from LBJ to Nixon as emblematic of the New Year. Note that it doesn't make any judgment beyond the fact of the swap itself, though the notion of Nixon as an innocent babe must have given at least some people a case of the collywobbles.
This is more of a filler-type cartoon for the editorial page than front-row commentary, but he does highlight more of the transition — LBJ's attempt to combine social reform and an unpopular war having resulted in a couple of messes whose time is running out. (Not sure why the Pueblo is on its side; perhaps the fate of the crew was actively up in the air when he drew it.)
Berry's World was another filler-type, by which I mean it would appear on the editorial page, but only when there was a space and then only at the bottom of the page, never the top. I always liked Berry's World, but it was more a forerunner of Doonesbury's topical gag format than something in the tradition of Nast.
Crawford combines with Dan Dowling for a juxtaposition of sorts, as LBJ apparently didn't leave a lot of leeway for Nixon's promised programs.
Again, it was a different economic world: These days, any sort of surplus would be welcomed.
In fact, this Warren King cartoon had me flummoxed, and I searched in vain for some connection between Ted Kennedy — the surviving brother — and the gold standard.
Silly me: It was incoming Treasury Secretary David Kennedy, who had made some remarks about the price of gold on December 19.
I don't know which is more astonishing at this date: That we were still operating on a gold standard (which does help to explain that odd concept of paying for your wars) or that Nixon had his Cabinet officers lined up a full month before he took office.
Well, anyway, it explains Auric Goldfinger's cunning plot to turn Fort Knox's reserves radioactive.
And if Bond hadn't taken care of him, Nixon foiled him completely two years later by going to bitcoins fiat money.
I don't know if Herblock himself was puzzled by the transitional issues and overall uncertainties, but he evidently felt a lot of other commentators were having trouble sorting it all out.
And Mauldin suggested that Nixon's new communications director was going to face a real challenge in filling in the credibility gap.
While Pat Oliphant, bless his nasty little heart, greatly countered that earlier "little baby Nixon" cartoon by welcoming in a whole cadre of diapered caricatures of Nixon, Agnew, Romney and Ford, each clutching their portfolios.
Oliphant — having little patience for inaugurations and changes at the top — being already somewhat on record as questioning a proposed Congressional raise that was clearly happening independent of who got to sign the thing.
And when I say "somewhat on record," I am exaggerating for comic effect, there being no icon of Americana so sacred that Oliphant was not willing to bring it in if it helped make his point.
I'm sorry he has retired, because he helped get us through what was to come.
And, yes, we knew what we'd just been through and we knew how little we wanted to go through any more of it, as John Milt Morris said.
Here was our moment of zen:
Finally, this dropped on January 12, early enough to be considered a New Years comment on things in general, or at least a respite from them:
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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