When Garry Trudeau Took BD to Hell And Back in Doonesbury
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For Yale Alumni Magazine Joshua Kendall ’81 offers what I believe is an excerpt from his forthcoming book about Garry Trudeau ’70. This concerns the Doonesbury comic strip during the second Gulf War:
In the early years of his long-running strip, Trudeau repeatedly railed against the Vietnam War. “I got some hate mail for these anti-war strips,” he says. The cartoonist also skewered those who supported the unpopular war, including his central character, B. D….
But in recent decades, Trudeau’s relationship with the American military establishment has taken a one-eighty. As retired General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President George W. Bush ’68, tells me, “I’m a huge fan of Garry’s many strips on America’s armed forces. They have done an enormously valuable public service.”
The reason that the peacenik of yesteryear has managed to receive such kudos from the military’s top brass—including leaders of wars that Trudeau has adamantly opposed—is that for the past thirty-five years, the cartoonist has been documenting the plight of America’s soldiers with increasing seriousness and empathy. When asked in 2006 why his approach to covering America’s wars had changed, Trudeau replied simply, “When I was writing about Vietnam, I was 22. Now I’m 58. I know more.”
The entire article can be read here.
Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography by Joshua Kendall is scheduled for a May release from Abrams Press.
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