Drawing on War : Journalism: Editorial cartoonists are rising to the occasion of the Gulf crisis as they stir controversy and tweak consciences.

“I’m glad Walter Lippmann can’t draw.”

--Lyndon B. Johnson

Tony Auth, editorial cartoonist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, remembers being swept along by the fury and euphoria of the first offensive. “So Far, So Good,” bragged the caption on his panel for the next morning.

“Then, all of a sudden, Israel is attacked with what they were saying was probably nerve gas,” he recalls. “So I yanked that cartoon. ‘So Far, So Good’ would not have been good at all if headlines the next day were: ‘2,000 Israelis Dead in Chemical Attack . . . ‘ “

M. G. Lord drew the corpse of an oil-covered cormorant wearing a Purple Heart medal. Calls to her office at Newsday in New York were many and positive.

“What is literally funny from a propaganda standpoint, is the way that Americans respond to the images of animals much more than they respond to images of people,” Lord says. “You would think that all the footage of the gassed Kurds would be a lot more resonant than a little bird limping around on the beach. . . . “

Los Angeles Times editorial cartoonist Paul Conrad has drawn the deaths, satires, whimsies and victories of three wars. But there’s a small uncertainty about this one.

“I have no idea how I am going to handle nerve gas if it occurs,” he says. “But . . . here, in the back of the head, something tells me I’d better have something ready.”

So goes the war for the nation’s cartoonists and their ungentlemanly art that has been adding anger, sadness, satire, irony, accusation, insight and excitation to the dark side of America’s editorial pages since Benjamin Franklin drew the original colonies as a snake cut into eight pieces.

Bill Mauldin: He drew his way through World War II, visited Korea, Vietnam and now Saudi Arabia and continues to see raw conflict through the sad eyes of American dogfaces.

Jeff MacNelly: The subtle, self-described conservative whose work says we will survive this one by laughing gently together and at ourselves.

Garry Trudeau: B.D. and a new cast of Doonesbury characters are in the Gulf where there continue to be no issues, no frailties, no cartooning holds barred.

Herblock: The consummate Washingtonian is now doing to Saddam Hussein what he did to Richard Nixon who once said: “I have to erase the Herblock image.”

Yet after an 18-year peace since Vietnam (“We really can’t count Grenada and Panama,” says Conrad), some cartoonists are having trouble drawing lines in their editorial sand.

Even Conrad, winner of three Pulitzer Prizes, had a Gulf War cartoon pulled from publication and syndication this month. It was titled “Moon Over the Middle East” and showed Saddam Hussein with his pants at half-mast and mooning the West.

“I thought it was funny,” Conrad said. “But it got killed, it absolutely bombed.”

Explained Shelby Coffey III, editor and executive vice president of The Times: “It was just a question of taste. I looked at it, (Los Angeles Times publisher) Dave Laventhol looked at it and we both decided that it was not really appropriate on grounds of taste, not on grounds of sentiment, one way or the other, on the war.”

Trudeau, a veteran of cancellations for excessive criticism and borderline libel, saw another Doonesbury cartoon spiked by the Naples (Fla.) Daily News. It was not a Trudeau original, but a guest panel of military life in Saudi Arabia drawn by Tommy Rominger, a 33-year-old Air Force sergeant serving in the Gulf.

“One shows a soldier committing suicide . . . another shows a soldier being hit by a missile and converted into an angel,” said Alan Horton, editor of the Naples Daily News, one of the 1,400 newspapers that publish Doonesbury daily. “I saw it and was offended.”

Trudeau, maintaining his traditional reclusion, refused to comment.

Bill Schorr, creator of the comic strip “Phoebe’s Place” and editorial cartoonist for the Kansas City Star and 40 other newspapers, said the Los Angeles Times Syndicate has “killed a whole bunch” of his work and “some of it is war-related.”

One involved a Saudi sheik preparing for combat and asking an American soldier to deliver a written farewell to his wife Fatima--and to all the other wives in his harem.

Explained Schorr: “When you get to cultural, you get to the point: Am I slamming Islam? Which I wasn’t. I was trying to do a thing on the differences between the societies.”

Said Jesse Levine, president of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate: “I think it was just a cheap shot . . . we felt it was kind of inappropriate in the context of the time. It is a question of taste and what we feel are the norms for treating people in a non-discriminatory way.”

And MacNelly of the Chicago Tribune, creator of the comic strip “Shoe” and an editorial cartoonist with 400 clients, thinks one of his upcoming commentaries may be in peril.

“I’ve just got a message asking: ‘Can you substitute other words for nose-picking?” MacNelly says. “I’m not going to call back. I’ve lost that message.”

What’s happening here?

Younger, post-Vietnam cartoonists say the cancellations and criticism could stem from their searching for form and new limits in drawing war after being secure for so long with safer and more familiar themes: the recession, Exxon Valdez, gun control, Pete Rose and S&L; failures.

But to old sweats like Mauldin, no cartoonist should ever adjust to his editor.

“It is up to the editors to adjust to the cartoonists,” explained Mauldin, now 69, still crusty, a little arthritic, but ever the living legend for creating Willie and Joe during World War II. “I personally regard editors as natural enemies anyway . . . which is one of the reasons I am probably one of the most unemployable cartoonists in the country.

“I just won’t take that (editing). The day they pull one on me is the day I’m gone. But nobody ever called me on it.”

MacNelly objects to editorial culling--even when taste and stereotyping might be issues--because life is easier if we take ourselves “a little less seriously.

“That really has been my message over the years: Hey, we’re all in this together so let’s laugh about it a little, please. It adds perspective to an argument if you know where you’re coming from.”

And Bill De Orr of the Dallas Morning News--described by a spokesman for Universal Press Syndicate as “our one true conservative”--says that anyone preferring pro forma over risque protest will fade into “a safe cartoonist . . . and that doesn’t get you three Pulitzers.”

Stirring controversy by tweaking decency while drawing previously unspoken truths, of course, has been the cartoonist’s lot since before Ramses. Crude and comic were certainly the ingredients of early Egyptian carvings showing a night on the pyramids, legless masters being carried home by their servants and a Cleopatra character spitting up her wine.

Then as now, the cartoonists’ field days were the moments when politics became criminal and diplomacy degenerated into war. Franklin parodied the American Revolution. Thomas Nast drew with eloquence during the Civil War but found immortality as the political cartoonist who helped topple Tammany Boss Tweed.

Emancipation, Prohibition, Watergate, civil rights, suffragettes, McCarthy, Northern Ireland, school busing, Richard Nixon, the arms race, abortion, Kennedy assassinations, world wars, civil wars and island wars . . . nothing has escaped the poison brush of the editorial cartoonist.

“I sort of blame Bill Mauldin for (my) becoming an editorial cartoonist,” says Newsday’s M.G. (“for Mary Grace”) Lord. “I was drawing for the Yale Daily News . . . Mauldin taught a seminar and said: ‘Look, sweetheart, you’re funny and there are no women doing this and I’ll get you a job.’

Lord, who grew up in La Jolla, describes her work as “loose-cannon malice” produced by “a gag writer with hand-eye coordination.” She finds the Gulf War morally ambiguous, is appalled by its euphemisms (“the liberation of Kuwait . . . that’s nice”) but is more inclined to criticize her profession for its “screwy, macho ethos that demands that you draw every day . . . rather than sitting back and being a little more interpretive.”

So she draws only three times a week. Anything more, Lord says, forces “an unfortunate definition of the practice: That it is a performance skill.

“It is not truly analytical and interpretive. It is reactive. So doing three a week is great. It gives you a day to think about the stuff that CNN threw at you.”

CNN. Auth, like all cartoonists interviewed, watches Cable News Network to the point of cerebral saturation. “It hurls endless amounts of raw data at you . . . but there is little or no analysis or putting it in perspective,” he says.

Enter, he believes, the editorial cartoonist and his own role: “Looking for ironies wherever they exist and commenting on the vicissitudes of this conflict.

“I have no problem in painting Saddam Hussein as an absolute, maniacal tyrant, and then the next day being critical of us spending money on a war when our cities are going to hell,” Auth continued. “If people see a conflict in that, my response is: ‘I’m not a propagandist. I just look for truth wherever I find it.’ ”

Since the Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait and the Jan. 17 move to reclaim the Arab state, Auth has backhanded the enemy and the coalition.

“Here’s one that shows a general briefing an audience and saying: ‘We’ve destroyed their roads, bridges and infrastructure and the economy is on the ropes.’ Then you see an American landscape that’s a mess and he says: ‘That makes us even.’

“Here’s another. ‘Wars fought but not declared . . . Korea, Vietnam, Nicaragua. Wars declared but not fought . . . war on poverty, war on drugs.’ ”

Auth says his adrenaline is rushing.

War, like Watergate, is an intense topic that should bring out a cartoonist’s best work: “It’s a profoundly important topic and therefore much more interesting to comment on and much more challenging because of that.”

For 40 years, the nom de plume Herblock has belonged to Herbert Lawrence Block, editorial cartoonist first with the Chicago Daily News, now of the Washington Post and in syndication to 200 newspapers.

He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who resists labels on his political preferences. Sometimes he’s liberal, other days he’s conservative. But always, he says, “keeping your opinions honest, whatever they are.”

In this war, in Block’s honest opinion, President Bush should be blamed for “paying no attention” to Saddam Hussein’s gassing of Iraqi tribesmen, his nuclear drive and eventual massing against Kuwait.

“My criticism was that they should have sized this guy up earlier, or warned him sooner, instead of waiting until the fat was in the fire,” Block said.

So his cartoons berate Bush for rejecting an early proposal for economic sanctions against Iraq; for delaying alternate energy studies until oil became a motive for war; for not ever recognizing Hussein as a bloodstained butcher.

Two days before the coalition forces’ first air attacks on Iraq, Block drew fleets of tanks in confrontation. A cross on a map of Saudi Arabia tells allied troops: ‘Your Are Here.’ It added: ‘Too Late To Think About How You Got Here.’

Block has no formal measure of the effectiveness of his cartoons. He doesn’t think he exists to convert world opinion, “but you hope that people see them and give them a little think.”

De Orr takes this war by the horns and Hussein by his tail and draws fighting cartoons where the themes, he says, are “punchy, topical and go right for the jugular.”

Fairness doesn’t count. “ Fair is that thing you go to in the fall. It doesn’t have jack to do with right, but with how you feel and how your newspaper feels.”

De Orr and his newspaper--due in part to oil industry links between Texas and the Middle East--feel very conservative these days.

“I personally take a stand that Saddam is a madman,” De Orr says. “In my most recent cartoon I have him coming out of the manhole where his bunker is.

“There are some Iraqi troops around the outside, all charred and burned and he’s saying to them: ‘Hang in there, baby.’ In another, Saddam is saying that this war will be another Vietnam. And a camel is saying: ‘Yeah, and I’m a water buffalo.’ ”

So De Orr’s cartoons support Bush, the war, our fighting forces--and anyone who remembers the length of 1974 gas lines.

“I feel we should have done this (attack Hussein) a long time ago,” he continued. “You’re basically talking about some despots who need to be dealt with. It’s only a matter of time before one of them gets his hands on a nuclear weapon.

“Do we have an interest over there? You’d better believe it. Because if it isn’t stopped there, next will be Saudi Arabia and then you’ll be paying $150 for a gallon of gas.”

MacNelly says his cartoons are “leaning on Saddam as one of those people who is causing a lot of grief, not just for us and our GIs but for all the Arab world . . . he is not the champion of the Arab world.”

At the moment, he adds, the cartooning is easy. The issue is clearly of a 20th Century-style dictator invading another country. The good guys and the bad guy are in clean focus.

“But if the bombing goes on and civilian casualties mount up and it gets really hideous, and if American casualties start mounting and the war protests get much larger, and if this thing turns into a slogging trench war . . . “

Then, says MacNelly, he will have problems fulfilling his professional purpose “which is make fun of a situation.”

Schorr, of Kansas City, says his sights are set squarely on several war themes. “The anti-Arab backlash, the energy policy, that the press is so controlled over in the Middle East, that we don’t see body bags, that we don’t see any horrors of war. . . .

“The thing that amazes me, and I don’t know how to do a cartoon about it, is how much they hate us in the Arab world.”

Even after 40 years in the business, blunt, bludgeoning Paul Conrad retains enormous enthusiasm for his work.

“I’ve got one here,” he says. It is a cartoon showing heaven’s inhabitants wearing gas masks. “It’s based on a quote from Saddam: ‘I pray that God won’t force me to use unconventional weapons.’

“Isn’t that a nice concept? It was fun to draw.

“And I’m still going to do six GIs, dressed in all their gear, carrying a flag-draped oil drum. Which I think will be just marvelous. . . . “

Such marvelously biting themes, however, have kept Conrad on the spit of public anger for most of his professional life. In fact, the flag-draped oil drum produced hundreds of irate calls. So did his cartoon of a huddle of body bags representing homeless on the streets of America.

It doesn’t bother him.

“Not in the least,” he says. “I get bad telephone calls, bad mail, but I really don’t care. I do what I think is correct, that’s all.

“And if I don’t know what I’m doing at this point, 40 years worth of it, if I can’t reason out in my own mind that I am not betraying any of my principles by drawing that sort of thing (the body bag cartoon), by apparently being against our involvement . . .

“Well, for those who agree, fine. For those who disagree, too bad.

“But think about it.”