12/17/2018
Mallard Fillmore bids farewell to President George “Home Work” Bush, who was the comic’s biggest fan:
Bruce Tinsley, creator of the conservative comic strip Mallard Fillmore, remembers feeling stunned when the fan letter showed up in February 1998. After all, his strip— featuring a right-leaning TV newsman or, more accurately, newsduck—was still in its relative infancy. Yet here was George Herbert Walker Bush declaring that he and Barbara turned to Mallard, “sage duck that he is,” first thing every morning. Even more gratifying, the former president thanked Tinsley for taking on “that horrible Doonesbury” and its creator, liberal icon Garry Trudeau, “a guy that tore me up in a vicious, personal way strip after strip.”
I didn’t realize Bush’s distaste for Doonesbury ran so deep until I read this article by Matt Taibbi. Nowadays newspaper comic strips are thought of as this weird relic of a bygone era so it’s wild to learn about, like, Mort Walker being ambushed by a feminist on Phil Donahue or that four panels could reduce The Most Powerful Man On The Face of the Earth into a fuming volcano of rage:
A few weeks later, the Doonesbury comic strip — which was a big deal in an age when everyone read newspapers — ran a cartoon playing on the theme of Bush’s “manhood problem.” Cartoonist Garry Trudeau had newsman character Roland Hedley Jr. doing a standup outside the White House, announcing, “In a White House ceremony today, Bush will formally place his embattled manhood in a blind trust.”
The Bush family never got over the Doonesbury thing. “He’s been reduced to a cartoon,” fumed son Jeb in a 1987 Newsweek cover story called “BUSH BATTLES THE WIMP FACTOR”…
After the “Wimp” cover, Doonesbury doubled down — among other things, depicting Bush as literally invisible, which caused the Bushes to overreact in historic fashion. Bush himself admitted in an interview that he wanted to “kick the hell” out of Trudeau dating back to 1984, and his sons George and Jeb actually reached out to the cartoonist, who was a Yale classmate of W. This is in Poppy’s recollection:
″Trudeau says to our son, ‘Well, I hope your family doesn’t take this personally.’ And George says, ’They don’t take it personally, but my brother (Jeb) wanted to come up and kick your ass all over New York.”
This all seems absurd now, but Bush spent the rest of his political career beating back the wimp/manhood thing.
