DEBORAH LEFF: Welcome, we are going to do a little dancing here. It will be a little adventurous. I’m Deborah Leff. I’m Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. And on behalf of myself and John Shattuck, who is CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation, we’re so pleased you could join us during this 25th anniversary week of the Library. I must note that the Red Sox did their part in making this anniversary more special.
And I’d like to thank our local sponsors, the Lowell Institute, Fleet/Bank of America, Boston Capital, The Boston Globe, which also brings us Dan Wasserman today, WBUR and Boston.com.
In 1963, President Kennedy spoke to members of The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. He began by kind of looking at them and saying, “I want you to get this much thinner than you gentlemen have. I mean I took five pounds off before this meeting.” And the president then summarized what makes editorial cartooning such a wonder. “You entertain and instruct us,” President Kennedy told the cartoonists. “And I must say the ability to place in one picture a story and a message and do it with impact and conviction and humor and passion, all that, I think, makes you the most exceptional commentators on the American scene today.”
Of course, President Kennedy wasn’t completely awestruck. “I’m going to examine what you’ve done to us with some concern,” he said. “You see the hair is much less than you have it.” I’m sure you’re familiar with those complaints. We are joined by three of the nations top practitioners of the art today, three guys who make us laugh and hoot and really think about the issues.
Mike Peters in the middle is the editorial cartoonist for The Dayton Daily News. I’m going to skip over the fact that he was born in St. Louis.
MIKE PETERS: I know. I know.
LEFF: I know that he won the Pulitzer Prize for his work in 1981. His cartoons regularly appear in more than 400 papers worldwide. He also draws the Mother Goose and Grim comic strip, which consistently appears in the top ten most popular ratings. Now, when I talked to Mike Peters and asked him who should join him on this panel, he said, “You’ve got to get Luckovich. He’s the best.” So we listened to him.
I’m pleased to introduce beside me Mike Luckovich of the Atlantic Constitution.
MIKE LUCKOVICH: Thank you. Thank you.
LEFF: Mike won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995. As he noted at the time, “It’s the ultimate coloring contest.” And when you see reprints of cartoons in Newsweek and the Sunday New York Times, you almost always see Mike’s marvelous work there. He’s won virtually every major award in his field.
LUCKOVICH: Thank you.
LEFF: Now those of us in Boston, it’s absolutely an incredible feat to be joined by our very own Dan Wasserman of The Boston Globe. Dan Wasserman joined The Globe in 1985 and he delights all of us with his terrific work. His editorial cartoons are regularly also featured in The New York Times “Week in Review” section, and Time and Newsweek and The Economist and a number of television shows.
And hopefully, tearing in from the airport shortly will be NPR’s Scott Simon. It’s always great to have him at the Kennedy Library. He’s the anchor of NPR’s “Weekend Edition Saturday.” And in these days of kind of an icky proliferation of tabloid coverage, Scott remains a true journalist with deep and committed reporting from all 50 states and from around the world. He’s covered presidential campaigns and international events. He’s won the George Foster Peabody award, the Robert F. Kenney journalism award and so many other honors. And, of course, he is a baseball fan.
So the way we are going to work this is, while Scott is coming in from the airport, we’ve asked each of the three cartoonists to begin by showing five minutes or so of their work. That will take 15 minutes. And if Scott doesn’t come then, we’ll wing it and you’ll be responsible for giving us your questions and we’ll go from there. So Dan, let me turn it over to you.
DAN WASSERMAN: Thank you. See, if I show drawings… I’m going to talk for five minutes about caricature, which most people see as central to the art of editorial cartooning. And I think later on we may do a little actual drawing, maybe. We can’t draw without Scott. So let me just show a few of my favorites about caricature and a few of the caricature characters who have inhabited my recent drawings. This is cartoons from the point of view of the subject of the cartoon. [Laughter at cartoons displayed]
In going through my old cartoons, I picked one out, which is actually… Most of it is recent work. This goes back about… I was fairly new to The Globe. But I thought because I was speaking here at the Kennedy Library, it was appropriate that I bring this. And it’s Gary Hart early in the campaign for 1988. [Laughter] Now even those of you who are long-time readers of The Boston Globe have never seen this cartoon because it did not run in The Boston Globe and therein lies a terrific Boston story.
I was new and naïve and I drew this cartoon based on the fact that it was wellreported that Gary Hart had a wandering eye at the time that he was touting his vision and his political compatibility with the lions of the Democratic Party. So I drew this cartoon. I took it to my editor and he said, “You can’t put that in the paper.” I said, “Why not?” He said, “Because it’s a rumor. You’re smearing this guy. Nobody’s proven anything and it would be irresponsible to put this in, even as an opinion piece. You may not put it in the paper.”
So I said, “Okay.” I took the cartoon, which was finished… I didn’t show him a sketch. I liked the cartoon so much that I just did it up as a drawing. And I figured, “Sooner or later this is going to make an easy day for me,” and I stuck it in the drawer. Well, not less than two weeks later, The Miami Herald had Donna Rice, the monkey business all over the front page. And I said, “This is a good short day.” So I opened up the drawer. I got it out. I ran it upstairs.
I said, “I’m in.” And the deputy editor was there and she looked at it and she said, “You can’t put that in the paper.” I said, “It’s all over the front page of every paper in the country. It’s on the news reports. He’s not denying it. How could this be unfair to Gary Hart?” She said, “Oh, it’s not unfair to Gary Hart. It’s unfair to FDR and JFK.” [Laughter]
LUCKOVICH: Oh, my God. Isn’t that amazing.
WASSERMAN: She wasn’t joking. And so that’s one of the cartoons that never ran. So these are just a few of my favorite personages, some of them national, some of them local. I thought I would bring this. James Levine just took over the Boston Symphony Orchestra night before last and he’s a terrific character to draw.
He came up from New York. [Laughter] So you just like to dig into a face like that. This is a personality that you really just have to admire. This is Kim Jong Il over there. [Laughter]
PETERS: That’s very funny. That’s great.
WASSERMAN: But I think the main focus of most of our drawing is usually on the U.S. administration. I mean if you did any kind of… Come on up, Scott. [APPLAUSE]
PETERS: What a joy. What a joy.
LEFF: So what we did is, we took 5 minutes… We asked each of them…
[Side conversations on baseball as moderator settled in.]
WASSERMAN: We’re doing five-minute intros. You can just relax.
SCOTT SIMON: Well, then.
WASSERMAN: I was just getting to Bill Clinton, [laughter] who aside from his transgressions, his resilience, it seemed to me, made him a terrific target. I mean no matter how hard you hit this guy, politically, cartoon-wise, he kept coming back. This was during the winter Olympics. [Laughter] And it’s another Clinton cartoon that uses a device that cartoonists do from time to time, which is to pay tribute to those who have gone before us. This is a Chuck Jones adaptation here. [Laughter at cartoon]
I started telling you about caricature. So I’m just showing some of my favorites here. This is Bill upstaging Al Gore for yet another time. This is when Al was wandering in the wilderness, growing his beard. It was the same time that Clinton opened his office in Harlem. [Laughter] Bush… You hate to see someone like Clinton go but Bush has not been a disappointment. [Laughter]
And his cabinet has added to the… And his vice president here. This is the Cheney-Edwards debate that I did. [Laughter at cartoon] I left a few of the debates out but I will get to them later. I want to show a few local ones because I think this is an important part of cartooning. And we’ve not been… Why don’t I just start with Ted Kennedy? I don’t think anything is going to happen, right?
[Laughter] He was challenged by [Mitt] Romney for his Senate seat before Romney ran for governor.
And it was a fairly hard-hitting campaign. In the middle of it, it was revealed that Ted had hired some investigators to look into Romney’s background to see if they could find anything compromising. I thought that Ted was probably the wrong candidate to be doing that sort of thing. [Laughter] Romney, of course, has since taken over the gubernatorial spot in the state and seems to be defining his administration through his opposition to gay marriage. [Laughter]
And this is sort of a downer to end on but I think an important part of the Boston story that… We have repeat child molester [John] Geoghan here.
LUCKOVICH: Oh, my. Wow.
WASSERMAN: And [Cardinal] Law who has since departed. I’m a little confused here because I had a bunch of other drawings to show you. Aha. Aha. Aha. I’m going to take too much time. So I’ll end with two here and come back to these others. I think Mike and Mike would agree with me that as cartoonists we
get attached to these characters. They start almost to be characters in your own script. They tend to be simplified and be icons so you get attached. And when they leave office, it’s traumatic.
Two years ago in December there was a particularly traumatic week when we lost four of these guys all at once, [Trent] Lott, Gore, Cardinal Law, Henry Kissinger, all departed at the same time. [Laughter] I try not to do too many self-referential cartoons but this one seemed… And then sometimes we are caricaturing not so much a person as a culture. And given the week and fears of all of us who are Red Sox fans, this was after game seven of the American League Championship series last year. [Laughter]
LUCKOVICH: That’s great.
[APPLAUSE]
LUCKOVICH: Hi. I’m Mike Luckovich. I’m the editorial cartoonist for The
Atlanta Journal Constitution. And you can hear me, right? All right. Excellent.
WASSERMAN: I don’t think you have to lean into it. I think it picks up pretty well.
LUCKOVICH: I just kind of like to lean into it, if you don’t mind.
WASSERMAN: I don’t mind.
LUCKOVICH: Dan says I can use this machine. So this is really great. This is really great. Now you know what I did, I chose cartoons… Did you hear there’s an election coming up, November 2nd. So be sure and vote. But you know this election, and I’m sure Dan and Mike agree, it’s been like no other in our lifetime. And it’s been, it’s been to me… Previous elections, I’ve always favored one candidate or another. But I always thought they were all sort of in the main stream.
But see, I don’t really think that this year. And I think that it’s a very important election. And so I’ve been trying to get that across in my cartoons. One thing about Bush is, Bush believes that God is sort of there acting through him. And so I did this cartoon, saying, “Almighty is guiding me. God’s lousy at post-war planning.” [Laughter]
PETERS: That’s great.
LUCKOVICH: This one, [is from] the VP debates a couple of weeks ago. It was amazing to me because Cheney, for one thing, he’s been repeatedly trying to connect Al-Qaeda and Saddam. And he flat out denied it in the debate. And then he also talked about that he never met Edwards before. So I did that. [Laughter at cartoon shown.]
PETERS: This is good.
LUCKOVICH: Thank you. Thank you. I did this just a couple of days ago. I live in Atlanta in the suburbs. I live in a place called Sandy Springs. And everyone… I’m a Democrat but around me everyone else is Republican. And they are all really happy with the tax cut. And I think they can forgive Bush for a lot of things because they are getting this tax cut. So I’ve been trying to think of a way that I could do a cartoon to kind of show that this is maybe not a good idea to feel that way. So, this guy’s got a… [APPLAUSE]
PETERS: That’s great.
LUCKOVICH: You know what? I really haven’t done… I kind of like Kerry and I really haven’t done many cartoons on Kerry. However, you know, Kerry does have… He’s not like a guy that people naturally want to have a beer with. And so during the South Carolina primary, I did this cartoon. Kerry is saying, “National Association of Stock Car Racing Aficionados, I beseech you. Support me.” Hey, call them NASCAR fans. [Laughter]
This was from a couple of weeks ago. This is Bush at a rally. [Laughter at screen] [APPLAUSE] You know another thing in this election that I just don’t get, you know, the whole brouhaha about gay marriage. You know, I just don’t have a problem with it. The way I look at it, if you get married, as long as you keep your yard cut, that’s the only thing I have. I don’t care what you do in the privacy of your own bedroom. Just keep your yard nice.
So anyways, after Bush announced they wanted to amend the constitution to disallow gay marriage, I drew this. Osama saying, “Here’s my plan for destroying America. We sneak in and marry each other.” [Laughter] Thank you. Now, if you notice, these two guys are looking at each other. [Laughter] Now this guy does not have a soul in my opinion. I used to think he was a great guy. This is Ralph Nader [depicted in bed with an elephant, smoking a cigarette]: “Yeah, but I don’t enjoy it.” [laughter]
Now what’s amazing to me is I’m watching all this election stuff going on and Bush and Cheney don’t really have anything positive to run on so they keep talking about how Kerry is just going to screw up everything once he gets in, like they’ve been doing a good job. I don’t get it. And so this last week, Cheney was talking about how, “Oh, well, if Kerry gets in, someone might have nuclear weapons and Kerry won’t know what to do. They might blow up our cities.”
He is just making crap up, basically. And it is so frustrating to me. So I did this cartoon in keeping with the season. [Laughter] Now, the whole Abu Ghraib prison thing… I did this one. It’s Rummy and Bush saying, “Court martial the horses.”
PETERS: That’s great. That’s great. That’s great.
LUCKOVICH: At the Republican convention, the way that the whole crowd of them went after Kerry night after night, I kept thinking, wouldn’t it have been great if they had gone after Osama like that. They are running. Kerry went that-a-way. [Laughter]
PETERS: I love that. Oh, my God.
LUCKOVICH: You notice Bush in the baby carrier. And I really enjoy drawing Zell [Miller] as Yosemite Sam. I drew Karl Rove here. He is saying, “We attacked Iraq, when it was actually Iran with Al-Qaeda ties. Should I appoint a spell-check czar?” I was at the Republican convention recently. And I saw this commotion outside the studio. So I sort of hung out there, and then out walked Karl Rove.
And it was the day that Bush had announced that the war on terrorism couldn’t be won. And he had previously said that it could be. So as Karl Rove walked by I started walking up next to him. And I said, “Mr. Rove, wouldn’t Bush’s statement today be considered a flip-flop?” And he actually put his arm around me and we are walking together. And he asked me who I am and he said, “We were talking about cartoons.” And he said, “No, that wouldn’t be a flip-flop.” And then we walked a little farther and he said, “And you know what, Mike, you have Satanic eye-brows.” [Laughter]
SIMON: I’ve got to get a good look at this.
LUCKOVICH: You know, I think they are more demonic. They are more demonic than Satanic. Now, you know, sometimes politicians are just great when they are themselves. And Bush refusing to appear before the 9/11 commission without Cheney was a perfect thing for us cartoonists.
PETERS: Oh, yeah.
LUCKOVICH: “Where’s Cheney? I’m not going this alone.” [Laughter] This is sort of off the topic but fun. It’s a guy. You hear a voice mail, “And then I want to spray Cheez Whiz on your sexy--” “Honey, voice mail from Bill O’Reilly.”
[Laughter] You all heard about it. This all came out on the Internet. The thing on Bush’s back, whatever that little box was. And so I did this: Bush is saying, “My husband is not home. Make me your love slave.” And the wife says, “Bush’s hidden wires picking up ‘Desperate Housewives.’” [Laughter]
I’m going to end on this one. Like I said, what I love is when politicians do something kind of unscripted. And recently the Vice President made a comment to Patrick Leahey on the floor of the Senate. I said, “Wouldn’t that be a fun thing to do a cartoon on.” So in this cartoon I’ve got John Edwards saying, “Go blank yourself. Please, go blank yourself. Hey, go blank yourself.” And someone is saying, “John Edwards trying to seem vice presidential.” I will wrap that up and thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
PETERS: This is a treat. What a joy being here. I don’t think… I actually took a tour downstairs, had never done that. That’s a fabulous museum. What a joy. What a joy. [APPLAUSE]
What you were saying on caricatures, Dan, about doing them and they sort of turn into almost cartoon characters. A lot of times my cartoons, when I do like Bush, like W, or when I did Reagan, it became sort of a symbol. It didn’t really look like Bush or Reagan. It was sort of then my symbol. But this one time, back during when Carter was just running and I was doing cartoons and it was so funny. It became understood that his smile was the big thing.
And I came up… I was the first cartoonist to come up with this idea of Carter as the Cheshire cat. And he dissolves and just the smile is there. So I did up this cartoon and I was so excited about doing this cartoon. And I did it up and I gave it to my editor. And my editor loved Carter. And he said, “No, we can’t run this.” And I said, “Why? This is great.” And he said, “We just can’t,” and he gave me some ‘editor’ reason for not running a cartoon. They love having reasons.
And so I was crushed. And my newspaper was The Dayton Daily News and the other newspaper there was The Dayton Journal Herald. And that was… Bob Englehardt was the cartoonist down there. And nobody would… I couldn’t do this, so I called up Bob and I said, “Listen, can I bring the cartoon down and see if you want to do it?” And he said, “Sure.” So I brought the cartoon. “God that’s a great cartoon.” And I said, “Yeah, and my guy doesn’t want to do it.”
And Bob says, “Well, can I do it?” And I said, “Sure. Of course you can.” So he did a fabulous thing. The next day he did this cartoon and the smile. And I didn’t know I was doing something wrong. You know, this was just doing somebody a favor and kind of I wanted it to be seen. My editor almost fired me over this. He said, “How dare you give the opposition an idea?” And I learned a big thing about newspapers and competition and all that kind of stuff. I had no idea. But it was just kind of a learning experience, which I’ve had many at The Dayton Daily News.
But I will show you some of my cartoons. And some are cartoons that actually have not been printed in my newspaper and I thought that might be kind of fun. And then some silly things that I brought. This is just a cartoon about, well, about Cheney. And it’s got Bush sitting there like little orphan Annie saying, “Gee, Daddy, I mean how did you get to be Daddy Warbucks?” [laughter]
And now this is one of these cartoons that was not shown. I still don’t know why. It was during the Wal-Mart thing where the women were suing Wal-Mart because they were not being treated well and stuff and it was during Abu Ghraib. And I said, “Which one endures eight hours of pushing, grabbing, verbal abuse while standing perfectly still.” And it says, “Gitmo detainee, Abu Ghraib, and the Walmart female.” And my editor said, “No, we can’t run that.” And I said, “Why?” And he couldn’t give me a good reason but somebody up above said, “No. No. We can’t do that.”
Oh, and this is just a silly cartoon. Do you remember a couple of weeks ago, no, about a month and a half ago, a guy in a Batman outfit showed up at Buckingham Palace to do some sort of protest. And so I had a couple of guards saying, “There’s someone dressed in a Cruella DeVil dress. No. That’s Camilla Parker Bowles.” [Laughter] Now this next one is something I brought just because Mike Luckovich liked it. And so I did this. I brought three cartoons during the Reagan funeral.
It’s real hard doing cartoons during that time because you either have to draw something about Reagan dying, Reagan the person, and then what else are you going to do? You’re going to do more cartoons of Reagan dying. He is still dead, you know, that kind of thing. And so we had to try to find ways of making use of that with it being acceptable. And so I had Bush there behind the casket, [with the cartoon] saying, “Finally, one funeral Bush would let us photograph.” [Laughter]
And then this next one was another Reagan. Yeah, no. I got two Reagan cartoons. One says, “To commemorate the Reagan years we are going to put his image on currency, the debit card.” [Laughter] This was… We all enjoy doing obit cartoons. And sometimes they’re good and sometimes they are bad. And I didn’t see a lot of people… I didn’t see a lot of the cartoons during [the death of] Christopher Reeves but I just did that thing, which I enjoyed. So.
This next one is… Now, I did this about, right after Bush made his last speech at the U.N., which was about a month ago, something like that, a month and a half ago. And he said, “Well, I’m not exactly a nation builder. But I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.” And it was a horrible speech… They were showing photos of people actually sleeping at the U.N. during that time.
And then this next one is, well, this is about a month ago [caption reads]: “My job went overseas and all I got is this lousy t-shirt,” and it’s a Bush-Cheney thing. Hang on now. Let me see. This is about what is probably going to be coming up. [President Bush] saying, “I don’t need the NAACP. I’ve got the Black vote locked up. Clarence Thomas says he’ll vote for me when the case comes to the Supreme Court.” [Laughter] And this one is… Oh, this is one of those cartoons that was not printed at my newspaper. And [the President] says, “I executed 144 Texas convicts. I choose to have a war that’s killed 14 thousand Iraqi civilians, 40 thousand Iraqi enemy, and 1,080 American soldiers. So vote for me. I’m prolife.”
And then this was right after the vice presidential debates. And it’s, “So ends tonight’s vice presidential debates.” [Laughter] And then this is just the last cartoon. I mean I did it two days ago. And it’s just got a polling place, and a little boy says, “I see dead people registering.”
LUCKOVICH: That’s good.
PETERS: Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
SIMON: Now there are microphones that have been set up and, of course, we are going to invite your questions. But let me, if I could, begin by asking this distinguished panel some questions. Many years ago I had the pleasure of spending some time with Mike in Dayton. And he told me something that I never forgot when I came to looking at cartoons everyday, the pressure of having to do five cartoons every week. Oh, we think of them as maybe one a day. The idea that every day people look at your work, expecting something special…
Now you told me, remember, you were taking a scuba diving class. Was it the Dayton YMCA?
PETERS: Right.
SIMON: That’s fairly hilarious in and of itself. But while they were trying to explain scuba diving to you, you kept getting ideas for cartoons.
PETERS: It was horrible. It was horrible.
SIMON: Well, if we could hear from all of you. Tell us something about the daily pressure that you feel to come up with one singular idea because it can’t be scatter-shot. It’s like you can’t say, “Okay, we’ll run three or four today and we will see if any of them work.” If you could all just describe…
PETERS: I’ll tell you, it is interesting when you have to come up with a cartoon every single day. I find that all my ideas usually come from without. The editorial cartoons all come from without. I’ve got CNN on. I’ve got your wonderful voice on. I’ve got two or three newspapers that I get at my house and then I can read, and then a number of papers online. For me it’s always putting down little blips, not ideas.
A blip is just a little thought, just a thought that comes through my mind that may be interesting about a certain subject. And I’ll put down like 20 or 30 of those blips during the day, just topics that I hear or read, and then try to think more on those things. But the idea of having a daily pressure job, you can feel it early in the morning. My stomach knots up. I know I have to get something done.
Sometimes what I’ve tried to do is to work at night, trying to get ideas right before I go to bed. So that when I wake up, I don’t have that knot that you get from that pressure, you know. But it is fascinating. Every once in a while you hit a home run and it makes it all worthwhile. And other days you suck and yet you have to show everybody the cartoon and you go, “Oh, God. I’m ashamed of it.” But it is fascinating.
WASSERMAN: We talked about this a little bit when we were upstairs getting ready and one of the interesting things is knowing when you have an idea, not letting it go by. I mean there is a whole kind of process of churning and notetaking and drawing. And sometimes you will actually have a pretty decent idea and not recognize it. And it happened to me the other night. The worst pressure that I’ve felt… The daily cartoons seem like a luxury compared to drawing off the presidential debates.
They are over at 10:30 and there is a midnight deadline at The Globe to get into the next day’s paper. So, by the third debate I didn’t really feel like I had a lot of ideas left. And half an hour before I’m supposed to have something in the paper, I remembered an idea I had had a week before that I dismissed that saved me. I really had no idea what I was going to do. And then after the third debate I remembered the question from the second debate and… [Laughter]
PETERS: Oh, that’s great. That’s great.
WASSERMAN: I mean I think a lot of these ideas are born of the compression of the time. I think without that adrenaline, they don’t emerge.
LUCKOVICH: You know that’s how I work. Well, you know what, what I do is I get in around 11:30. And because we are artists, everyone else at the newspaper pretty much writes and so they kind of view us mysteriously. And we try and nurture that. [Laughter] And so I get in at 11:30 and the first thing I do is I have lunch. And then after lunch I go back to my computer and I’m reading various newspapers. I’m reading various websites, various blogs. I love the blogs, if you are aware of those things.
And I’m really following the news. But I’m also checking out eBay, too, just because I found that my… I have kind of high and lows throughout the day. And that’s why I don’t get in in the morning because my whole morning is basically a lull. And if I get in, I’m just going to waste the whole day kind of sitting there being in a crummy mood. So what I do is get in later, and then I have lunch and then I sort of fart around and I’m sort of writing topics down.
And then around three o’clock, I liken what happens to me to what a runner has when they’ve been running for a while, runner’s high. Only I get a silliness high. And so at that point I’ve been reading things and I’ve been writing down topics. But then I get this goofy feeling going. So at that point I try and take what I want to get across and I try and get it across in a humorous, interesting way. And so I’ll come up with a couple of ideas. And then what I do is I bring them to this guy in the office. I’m not even sure what he does. I think he designs the page or something.
I know for sure his name is Pete. And Pete’s a younger guy and what I like about Pete is Pete kind of enjoys telling me my stuff stinks. [Laughter] So I like to go to him because when I show him the first one or two cartoons, he almost always says, “No.” And you know what? I love the rejection. It’s like this psychological thing. I need him to reject me. I need Pete’s rejection so I can go back into my office and it just gets my adrenaline going. And within 15 or 20 minutes I’ve come up with two or three better ideas.
Then I’ll bring those back to Pete. And then Pete may or may not like those. And if Pete doesn’t like those I’ll go back in. And then eventually I’ll come up with a couple that he’ll like. And then I’ll bring them into my editor and she’s very good with me and she lets me do what I want. So she will OK the cartoon. Then I’ll go back. Now my deadline is six or 6:30. So maybe by then it’s around 4:30. So what I’ll do is I’ll just kind of sit and I’ll think, “Maybe there is just a way that I could come up with something a little better than the ones they’ve approved.”
So I will just wait until the very end and then, right when it gets so late, I may come up with another one because it just really focuses my attention. And so then once it gets really late, I just draw really quick. And I don’t pencil anything in when I draw. I just ink. I go through a lot of Wite-Out. I have one of those rollers that I put the Wite-Out… But I draw very quickly and then I just draw it…
But what is so great for us is that unlike 99.9% of the population, every day we get in, we look at a blank sheet of paper. And then we come up with an idea and then we draw it out. And so we have started and we have completed a task completely, usually without much human interference. So that is so amazing. I don’t have to go to any meetings. I don't know about you guys, but isn’t that fabulous, not to have to deal with other people. [Laughter] It is so great. So we are really lucky, the jobs we have.
SIMON: With most ideas, do you think you begin to think like an artist or like an editorialist? You begin with an idea, a statement you want to make, or are there just some images that are so affecting they are irresistible and you begin with that?
WASSERMAN: I don’t think there is any predicting. I mean part of what’s interesting about the job is sort of watching yourself do this. And I have cartoons that develop out of one word. I have cartoons that develop out of a doodle. I have cartoons that come off of TV ads or a headline in the paper. So I don’t… Usually one goes searching for things that you feel strongly about.
It’s got to be topical. You’ve got to have a point of view. Then how that emerges, it seems to me, is a wonderful accident. I don't know whether you guys can predict it. I can’t.
LUCKOVICH: I’ll just start out with a… I’ll come up with an idea that I think might be good. And then, before I show Pete, I will sit there. I will sit there with it and then I’ll maybe go check out eBay for a little while or something. But then I will come back to it and I’ll think…
WASSERMAN: Are you shopping for ideas there or…
LUCKOVICH: No. No. It’s something to do.
WASSERMAN: A used cartoon idea?
LUCKOVICH: You know what it is. It’s like I concentrate very hard but then I need a break from concentrating. And so I’ll just do something goofy like that. And then I will go back to it. And then I will think it will be much better if I made this guy stay in this and just simplified it and made it one panel instead of two. And then I’ll do it and I’ll think, “Man, that is actually better.” But then maybe I’ll go back to eBay or something or whatever.
And then five minutes later I can come back and look at it and I keep tweaking it. And what I’ll do is I use pen for some reason when I’m doing my rough sketches. But then I’ll draw it out and I will use my white out. I will put it on with my finger and I’ll Wite-Out the caption. And then I’ll redo… So pretty soon it is a big mess. And then I’m rubbing my face. And so a lot of times I will come home at night and I’m pointing at my wife because I’ll have white out all down my face.
I’ve actually given speeches. And I’m up giving my speech and then I come home and I look in the bathroom and I’ve got this big white thing going down my face from the Wite-Out. And no one has said a darn thing. It’s a job hazard.
PETERS: One of the things… About two or three years ago… I live in a couple of places and they’re not where my newspaper is. And so I’m always trying to suck up to them and trying to do things that make them keep paying me money. And so, I usually come up with like two or three, no, five or ten little sketches during the day, just five or ten little bitty sketches that suck. Most of them are horrible. They’re just germs and whatever.
But I told my editor, I said, “I always have like a bunch of sketches at the end of the week.” She said, “We would love to run those on Saturday as like your reject ideas.” I said, “Oh, God. This is good.” And it is a way to ingratiate myself and stuff like that. So I would take some of these sketches that I thought really were horrible and then I’d just draw them a little bit tighter and put the caption a little bit better.
And when you go through that process, and I was telling Dan, when you go through that process, you realize… I mean I realize I’ve been throwing away a lot of good ideas that if I had just taken them one step beyond that little thumbnail sketch, it would make a better cartoon. And sometimes after I take a sketch and then bring it one step beyond I go, “God, this is good. I can actually use this for a real live cartoon in my editorial page.”
But on Saturday on my newspaper they always have like three or four of my ideas that I sketch up. But that’s how I work. I usually do a ton of little bitty sketches and then I see which one. I show them to Marian. I don’t have a Pete. I just have Marian. So showing it to your wife is interesting because if she’s got a thing about a candidate or if she’s got a thing about a topic, and I show her a cartoon, she will sometimes judge that cartoon if she likes the guy a lot or something.
She’ll say, “Oh, God, that’s a wonderful thing. You ought to do that.” “But is it good?” “No, but I love this guy. Do him.” So I don’t have a Pete who says, “God. This sucks. Go back.”
WASSERMAN: Yeah, the Petes of the world are really valuable. The number of people that you can find who will give you an honest evaluation about a cartoon. I mean a lot of people feel like they have to laugh, “Oh, you’re the cartoonist. This is going to be funny.” You get absolutely no feedback. It’s terrible.
LUCKOVICH: But it depends on the cartoonist because we know… There are cartoonists in our profession, they don’t really want you to tell them if something stinks because they have got… It is like a fragile ego. And we, I think, we know…
WASSERMAN: We’re tough.
LUCKOVICH: Yeah, no. It is just different people. And we know that to get to our better stuff, someone has to tell us the first stuff stinks.
PETERS: One of the best things an editor, which Teepen used to do to me all the time, which was our editor, one in Dayton and then he moved to Atlanta, and what Teepen used to do to me… And it’s hard for an editor. And God, these guys who shoot three ideas to the editor… Oh, God, that’s painful because… And many cartoonists do. They show three ideas to the editor and have the editor pick it, which is horrible because you gravitate to one idea.
But then you have to show three to him. And then the editor usually picks the wrong one and then you start playing mind games by doing two, really bad ideas. But it’s stupid. But what Teepen would do with me, he would say… He would look at an idea and say, “You know, Mike, you could do better.” That’s a great way of doing it. He didn’t say, “I don’t get it,” or he didn’t say, “This sucks.” “You can do better.”
And that’s exactly what little Pete does. You try to find people like Pete who have no emotion, no personality, but just look at the cartoon and will tell you the truth if it sucks or not.
SIMON: I noticed a couple as you folks were showing your cartoons. Is there, for a cartoonist, a particular satisfaction in coming up with a cartoon, no words, no caption, you don’t need to put somebody’s name on them. No words underneath, just an image?
LUCKOVICH: Yes. Absolutely.
SIMON: The Christopher Reeve cartoon is what made me think of that.
LUCKOVICH: On September 11th, that was a terrible thing. And normally, with me, I prefer to do cartoons on politics, on regular issues, where I can use humor and still be hard hitting. In that case, I don't know about you guys, but those kind of cartoons, obituary cartoons, they’re a little more difficult because it takes... You lose the humor element. And so in this case, September 11th was just this terrible thing.
And so I went into work and I was feeling so many different emotions. I was angry and sad and confused, just like everyone else was. And so I spent all day trying to come up with a great cartoon. And so I finally came up with one just because I was running out of time. And I started to draw the cartoon and at that point the head editor of the paper came by to see what I was doing. And I showed him what I was doing. And I could feel myself. I was blushing because I thought the cartoon wasn’t good.
And then I brought it home and I showed my wife and she liked it. And so the next day it ran in the paper and people liked it. They found a lot of comfort from it. Of course I didn’t bring it but I’ll describe it. I just drew the Statue of Liberty up close. And then in her eyes you see the planes hitting the towers, and then a tear coming out of the Statue of Liberty’s eye.
PETERS: Great cartoon.
LUCKOVICH: Thank you. So people found comfort in that cartoon. And then my newspaper was so great because within a day they had color posters of this thing and they sold it in local grocery stores all around the city and they raised thousands and thousands of dollars for the September 11th fund. So it was really just an amazing thing. And there was no caption there.
And looking back at it, the reason why I didn’t like the thing was because I was feeling so many different emotions. And with a cartoon you can only kind of say one thing with a cartoon. And so I wanted to say a million things and I couldn’t. I could only say one thing. And looking back on it, it turned out okay.
PETERS: When you have an obit, when you have something like that, 9/11 or the shuttle crashing, one of those really traumatic world events that we all feel the same thing, what you have to do is you’ve got to go with your gut. You’ve got to show in those first two or three days what people are feeling, what you’re feeling, not what people are feeling but what you’re feeling. And you’ve got to show the shock or the horror or the sadness or the pain that is going on.
And after three days, then you can start asking why did this happen and who is at fault and stuff. Jumping shift, what you said, Scott, about doing a cartoon without a caption, probably one of my most favorite cartoons, and it was so sad to see Clinton leave, I just had a picture of Clinton. There is no caption but he was just wearing a t-shirt and it said, “I was stupid,” with an arrow pointing down. It was great. It was great. [Laughter] And people went nuts. It was wonderful but you love those kind. You love those kind.
WASSERMAN: This is taking us back to the sadness and tragedy. I think part of the reason that those work as caption-less cartoons is you are trying to get across a very simple, unadorned emotion. And number two is they usually are things that focus everybody’s attention. And to do a cartoon on anything else would seem totally irrelevant. So you don’t have the problem that you have to remind people about somebody’s position on medical care or the gaffe that somebody committed.
Everybody is thinking about only one thing. This is a cartoon [shown]. It is probably the quickest cartoon that I’ve ever done. It was done the day of the Oklahoma City bombing. And I had something on Clinton’s budget ready to go. And news came over and there was just nothing else you could do. And it was the news of the daycare center being blown up that all of a sudden just kind of washed everything away.
And a cartoon that under any other circumstances I would have thought was kind of maudlin and sappy and so on just caught everybody’s feeling.
PETERS: Oh, that’s great. That’s great and you don’t have to put a caption.
WASSERMAN: No. Everybody knew. There was no referent needed. And what happened was exactly the same thing as you described on 9/11. People started calling me up and saying, “Can we get copies of this?” And I said to the paper, “Why don’t we have a thing, anybody contributes any amount of money, whatever they want, whether it’s a dollar or 500 dollars, we will send it out to Oklahoma City.”
And it was a similar thing. We raised 65 thousand dollars that went to the relief fund off the reaction to that. I mean it was not something I was looking for. I was just trying to express some feeling there.
PETERS: People often ask us, and I know you have a question, but people often ask us, what our job is or what the strength of a cartoon is. And I’ve always thought that through our lives we read fabulous editorials. You’re having Maureen Dowd coming here on Monday or Tuesday, a great editorial writer. And you’ve had fabulous people that we’ve all read as editorials. But the strength of a cartoon is maybe once or twice in your life you can do a cartoon, that whenever you think about, whenever we think about an issue, a situation, a moment, that image will last forever in our life.
We may not be able to quote from a Maureen Dowd, you know, a great editorialist, 20 years later or ten years later or five or one day later, but if you do the right image, like Lincoln crying for Kennedy…
SIMON: Was that Bill Mauldin…
LUCKOVICH: That was Bill Mauldin. If you do the right image, it will last in your mind forever. And that’s the strength of a cartoon.
SIMON: At the same time, are there cartoons you’ve done over the years that you regret, just in a personal way? And I mean less because they were not funny or successful, but that you said something in the heat of artistic creation that you have cause to regret.
LUCKOVICH: I can address that. [laughter]
SIMON: I thought somehow you would jump in.
LUCKOVICH: You know what? Normally, when I’m working and we spend hours thinking about our ideas, normally… at least I’m always satisfied. I may not be satisfied with the cartoon but I’m satisfied with what I’m saying. But editorial cartooning is just like anything else. You have to learn it kind of and you have to learn to not… You need to learn how to direct your fire. And when I was in high school, believe it or not, I was very short in high school, very short.
And the cheerleaders in my high school were very big, very big. And so I did some stupid cartoon about a freak museum.
SIMON: A what?
LUCKOVICH: A freak museum. And I had the cheerleaders as one of the main attractions. And it was not funny. I mean I thought it was funny being a little dweeb. At the time I thought it was funny. But after it ran, the class was… They were not allowing it… The teachers were not allowing it in the classrooms. And then I got scared because those cheerleaders were mad. And they were big. And so I had to… I went up and I apologized to each cheerleader.
PETERS: That’s a riot.
LUCKOVICH: But you really learn from those things.
PETERS: That’s the funniest thing. Oh my God.
SIMON: Anything vaguely more contemporary than high school?
LUCKOVICH: Well, you know what… You know I did one recently on… You know I never did with… Who was Bill’s kid?
PETERS: Chelsea.
LUCKOVICH: Chelsea. I would put her in the cartoon but I would never do anything hitting her because she hadn’t really done anything untoward and she was young at the time. Now when the Bush twins came in, the first time they were like 19 or something and they had been drinking. And so I thought, well… And they got in trouble and there was some press coverage on it. Well, I never did anything on it. I felt the same way as with Chelsea that I wouldn’t comment on that.
But then like a year later they got in trouble again. And I thought, “You know, I gave them a grace period.” So I did something at the time where you see people...
Or the president is arriving with his daughters and the Marine corps band is saying, “Okay, start out with “Hail to the Chief,” and go into “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer.” [Laughter] And then, recently, they were… And there have been other incidents since then involving drink.
And so they recently joined the campaign trail and they were of age. And since they were part of the campaign trail I thought that they shouldn’t be off-limits. So I drew the Bush-Cheney campaign bus. And you don’t see who’s inside the bus but in the back of the bus there are two sets of captions and somebody saying, “Tastes great. Less filling.” “Tastes great. Less filling.” And somebody up in the front of the bus says, “You know, all those Bush twins do is argue.” I got a lot of response from people saying, “How can you hit those twins.” And I thought, they’re 21. They’re part of the campaign. They’re fair game at that point.
PETERS: Of course they are. Usually, the cartoons that you regret, and this is true, are the ones that you laud over politicians. I can remember after Nixon, I did this Gerry Ford who is this fabulous guy and this sweet man and stuff. But I did this laudatory cartoon… It was a stupid cartoon but it was… I had these Martians or something. And Gerry Ford is walking in the White House and these Martians are coming out of a Martian thing and they are saying, “Finally, a leader,” and stuff.
And about a day after that is when he pardoned Nixon and then his polls went scorching down and I was eating that cartoon. But usually it’s the cartoons that you do something real positive about somebody, like, “Finally, this guy is going to save us,” and they never do. They never do. Now our job is to be attack dogs. Our job is not to be doing “Happy Birthday, Martin Luther King.” Our job is to say, “God, this guy sucks,” and “This situation sucks.”
And whenever we deviate from that, and obit cartoons deviate from that, we’re making a mistake.
WASSERMAN: I think the cartoons I regret are the ones I didn’t draw. I mean I think, if anything, we have a tremendous amount of freedom and we don’t exercise it all the time as well as we could. I think we could be tougher on these guys. I think there are huge mistakes being made all the time, local government, national government that we could really dig into in a tougher way. I’m not saying that I had a cartoon on the drawing board that I didn’t run because I thought it was too tough, but I think sometimes we don’t push ourselves enough.
And under the pressure of the deadline, under the pressure of trying to be funny and on top of the news, sometimes we’re too soft. So I mean… I don’t have a cartoon that sort of hangs over me like, “Oh, I shouldn’t have.” I have a few that I did that weren’t clear and that confused people and caused huge uproars as a result. I did a cartoon comparing Reagan’s treatment of senior citizens to the way Reagan demonized the Soviet Union.
And I got weeks of mail from enraged members of the AARP who thought I was calling them communists. So it was…
SIMON: How often does it happen that you’ll do a character and... Say you do the cartoon with Senator Kennedy in his underpants looking in the trash. Snow ball’s chance in Hell he’ll call you up and say he loved it?
WASSERMAN: It varies from politician to politician. Senator Kennedy would never call up. I don’t even think somebody on his staff would call up. But a friend of somebody on his staff might call up. I will tell you, however, and this is absolutely true, that Senator Kerry’s office calls for a copy of every single cartoon in which he appears.
PETERS: Interesting. Interesting. It says a lot about Kerry but maybe not in a good way. Rumsfeld does the same thing.
WASSERMAN: You do a cartoon of Rumsfeld, making him look like the most reprehensible, unprincipled savage guy and, “Hi, this is Don Rumsfeld’s press secretary. And the Secretary was really pleased with your blah, blah, blah.”
SIMON: Do they have a good sense of humor or are they merely obtuse when something like that…
WASSERMAN: I think they have egos like this. This is a sign that they are important. I think that is what it is. It is validation.
LUCKOVICH: But it really depends on the person because when Newt Gingrich from Georgia… He was very thin-skinned. And I did a crappy cartoon. It was in ’94, when the House and the Senate were both becoming Republican and Newt was on his way to becoming the House speaker. And I had done a cartoon. It was a take off on… It was a really bad cartoon but it was a take-off on his first wife. He had presented her with divorce papers while she was recovering from cancer in the hospital.
So I did a crappy cartoon with Newt with a couple of babes on his arms and they are labeled “DC High Rollers,” a lot of labeling in this cartoon. And the woman in bed is Georgia constituents. And he is saying, “I want a divorce,” because he was going to become House speaker. Crappy cartoon. But anyway, it ran I think the day before the election. Well, election night, he was with his supporters and they were televising this nationally and he was bitching about the cartoon.
And they would bitch about the cartoon and then his supporters [grumbles]. They were very angry. And then he would bitch about the paper for running the cartoon. And he banned the paper from covering him for four months. But that night I was watching this thing and I was thinking, “This is so great that he would take the time and the energy to be pissed off like that.” But you mentioned Rumsfeld, I had done numerous cartoons knocking Rumsfeld because I’m not a fan of his policies at all.
But there is something about Rumsfeld, he’s got a very thick skin I think and I just don’t think he gives a damn. So he or someone in his office would ask for these cartoons. So I did two or three and this happened. One in particular I had done and a general called for it. And he said, “Hey, if you send an extra copy, he’ll be happy to sign it for you and send it back,” and “O-oh, great.” So I said, “Okay.” So I thought about it and I thought, “You know what? Let me think about this.”
So what I did is I wrote this… I made this official looking document and I did it in my cartoon style. But it had a seal with Rumsfeld’s face on it that says, “Rummy.” And at the top it says, “From the desk of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.” And it said on it, “This entitles super patriot Mike Luckovich unlimited use of an M-1 Abrams tank plus free lunch at the Pentagon.” Then I had an X for his signature.
So a week or two later I get it back and he’s signed it but he’s left a couple of addendums under it. He wrote, “Number one, the lunch wouldn’t be at taxpayers expense, and number two, the tank would be in a country of their choice.” [Laughter] So I thought that was very interesting. But the story doesn’t end there because I sent him another one that they had requested and then the first week of the war, Torrie Clarke, who was then one of the assistant defense secretaries called up and said, “Could you come and visit us at the Pentagon?”
Now I didn’t agree with the war but I wanted to go and see what was going on. So I went to the Pentagon and she had actually sent me a little follow up letter saying, “Well, you can come and have some fun at the Pentagon. Spend the day seeing how things really operate around here. And we’ll have you in a one-arm push up contest with a Marine. And you can have lunch at the Pentagon.” So I get there and Torrie Clarke comes out of her office into the main area and there’s all these people around, generals and things.
And she says, “Okay, let’s have the one-arm push up contest.” So I said, “Okay.” And so this burly Marine major, African-American, very strong man came up and he said, “Okay, let’s go.” And we did the one-arm push up contest. Now I had all these people around me so my adrenaline was really high. And so I did about four of them and I noticed he had stopped. And so I did two more than he did. So you know, you shouldn’t underestimate short cartoonists, especially when their adrenaline is going.
SIMON: I bet those cheerleaders really--
WASSERMAN: I got a little something here from the Clinton White House; I don’t know if you guys remember getting this. It was a letter that they sent out.
I’m not making this up. This came on White House stationery. This is in ’94. It said, “Dear Cartoonist”-- This just speaks to their people’s desire to see themselves in cartoons-- “Every week the White House news department compiles and distributes political cartoons to key White House officials. These, in quotes, ‘Clin-toons’ provide comic relief for many White House staffers.
“Numerous interns and volunteers gather and collect the cartoons from various newspaper nationwide and this process can become highly time consuming and tedious. To make this process more efficient, we are asking cartoonists to submit copies of political cartoons directly to our office. If you agree to do this, please have your cartoons mailed”-- And the White House office, blah, blah-- “Should you have any questions please contact… She’ll get in touch with you. We also encourage you to ...(inaudible). Thank you for your assistance and we look forward to working with you in the future.”
I thought it was a little odd that the White House is calling up and asking cartoonists to submit their cartoons directly to the government, even if it was for their own amusement. So I wrote them back and we published both these letters together on the op-ed page of The Globe. “Dear Mr. Boykins, Thank you for your letter of March 18th. I would be happy to comply with your request provided we can work out a reciprocal agreement. Every week cartoonists across the country sort through numerous news outlets to identify the Clinton administration’s latest gaffe, mis-step and broken promises in order to assemble the material for what you refer to as ‘Clin-toons.’
“As you can no doubt appreciate, this process can become highly time consuming and tedious. To make this process more efficient, cartoonists are asking that you send advance notice of White House blunders and bungling directly to our offices. We also encourage you to inform other offices of the Executive Branch of our interest. Thank you for your assistance. We look forward to working with you in the future.”
[APPLAUSE]
WASSERMAN: Small footnote. The poor guy who was asked to write that letter resigned from the government within several months and has a new career. I actually know somebody… I didn’t know him at the time but I know somebody who knows him and he was just humiliated. I actually feel a little bit bad about that part of it.
SIMON: Let me ask those of you with questions to advance on the microphone.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: (inaudible)
SIMON: Let me just restate that so all folks can hear that. And if you have questions please line up at one of the other microphones. How often will an editor spike one of your cartoons?
LUCKOVICH: That’s a great question.
SIMON: And for what reason?
PETERS: Well, for me, I just showed two cartoons that were not run. You know, I’m not at my newspaper to fight for my cartoons. I mean I’m not there to fight for them. I call up and they may tell me or they may not… I’m thinking that they didn’t run these two cartoons because I didn’t see them on the website. And that’s how I kind of thought. I’ve been with my newspaper for 35 years and I know their policy and I know all their stuff. But I do not know the politics, whatever is going on, the politics at the paper with the citizens.
I know I brought them a lot of hell and so… I had just done a Jesus cartoon a week before that everybody got mad about. So they might have not run one of those cartoons because of that reason. My newspaper, I think, with us, Dan and Mike, they allow us to do anything we want. Now whether my newspaper says, “We’ll allow you to do anything but we may not want to run everything.” And that’s their deal. I’m still syndicated and seen all over.
SIMON: If they’re candy stored…
PETERS: Right.
SIMON: But I mean I’m guessing that the three of you… There’s a difference between somebody spiking a cartoon because they think it just doesn’t work or while you’re entitled to express an opinion, they’re worried about, let’s say, an insult in the cartoon that they think is gratuitous and therefore artistically unsuccessful and...
LUCKOVICH: Here’s the thing that we’re struggling… At least I’m not struggling with it but my paper is struggling with it. It’s a liberal editorial page but the population is fairly conservative, fairly Republican in Georgia, as you may know. And so my cartoons sometimes generate a lot of controversy. And right now with this election and the polarization in this country, people are so P-O-ed in general. And my paper has not said a darn word to me about my cartoons.
And there are times I’m really so mad at Bush that I could do a cartoon every single day knocking him. And sometimes I almost have. But they haven’t said anything to me, but I know that they are feeling some heat. And I know that the publisher is fairly conservative. And so, on the one hand I’m cognizant of what’s going on. But I really respect my paper for not telling me I can’t do anything. But I keep thinking it might be coming.
SIMON: Let me ask you a contrary question because I’m not familiar. I read The Washington Post editorial today that in a sense, not surprisingly, endorses Senator Kerry. The three of you might work for newspapers that will wind up endorsing Senator Kerry. Could you do a pro-Bush cartoon?
WASSERMAN: Yes. Yes. Absolutely. I don’t think my editor… I think if I did a pro-Bush…
SIMON: No correlation between the editorial page policy and your cartoons.
WASSERMAN: They may not run it on the same day that they endorse Kerry. And I think if I did a pro-Bush cartoon everyday for The Boston Globe there would be a discussion. We would be sitting down. [Laughter]
SIMON: Maybe Salt Lake City?
WASSERMAN: Yeah, right. I’ll show you a funny cartoon. The short answer to your question is very rarely. I’ve been with the paper 20 years and I have a good sense of what the boundaries are. And a lot of cartoons get spiked because of questions of taste, not mine but I mean around the country. It’s just family papers; they have limits. And it’s not MTV and you have to know that if you are working for a newspaper. This was an odd one. This happened during the National Football League strike in 19… Where is the date on there? ’87.
And the New England Patriots decided to hire replacement players. And Doug Flutie, big, local, Boston College hero, agreed to come and play for them. And I did this cartoon and it happened to coincide with the labor dispute at The Boston Globe. And they would not run this cartoon.
So you don’t always know what it is. It is not always sex and religion.
SIMON: But in Boston…
WASSERMAN: That’s right.
SIMON: A cartoon like that about Doug Flutie. Your editor may have saved your life. [Laughter]
WASSERMAN: That’s right. [Laughter]
PETERS: If I were going to do… I thought of this last week. And I thought, God, a pro-Bush cartoon. If I were going to do a pro-Bush cartoon, I would do him holding the deficit and it says, “Bush, we will forever be in his debt.”
LUCKOVICH: Oh, how nice.
[APPLAUSE]
SIMON: You can’t run that.
Let’s go to questions.
STEVEN GOODE: My name is Steven Goode and I’m a history teacher here in Boston at the John D. O’Bryant School of Math and Science. My question for you today is for the entire panel. So anyone can answer it. You mentioned that you were attack dogs, that the media should be attack dogs. And you also mentioned sometimes you feel like you are too soft. So my question is, what evidence do you have to support that you haven’t been too soft and that you have used your power as a watchdog for the democracy to editorialize the real issues of this current campaign, current presidential campaign?
LUCKOVICH: Well, I think that editorial cartoonists are really one of the few… This may not answer your question. I’m going to try my best, but I think the editorial cartoonists are one of the few groups that have been out there really trying to show what’s going on and trying to take stands. So much of the media to me, it seems like, are interested in balance, not in… If one side tells an out and out lie, they treat it like it’s well, “They said this. This is the response from this side.”
That’s not how it is. This side is lying. We need to show that this side is lying. It’s not a “they said.” So I think we are trying to do that. We’re trying to bring the truth out. Now whether it’s having an impact, I don't know. Mike and I, we were at dinner the other night. And we were walking back and Mike was… As you know, Mike can project. And so he was talking about… He was frustrated with Bush. And these women were walking with us. And all of a sudden our wives turned around and Mike and I are having a discussion with these women.
And they’re big supporters of Bush. And we were so frustrated because it’s almost like a religion, and rationality and logic are thrown out the window. And they are talking about, “Well, Bush went into Iraq to get the Al-Qaeda terrorists out.” There were no damn Al-Qaeda terrorists in Iraq. But that’s what Cheney keeps saying because Cheney knows that if you’re not that informed, there’s going to be a certain percentage of people that just take that as gospel.
And so we’re trying to show that. Now whether we’re having any impact or not, I really don’t know. Because they can run an ad that is just totally misleading but people sitting home at night are seeing it. That’s why we have all these negative attack ads, especially in the battlegrounds. So I think that just overwhelms everything. I may not even have answered your questions.
GOODE: Well, I was really looking for a real issue. I mean I have a lot of students here in the audience. So, for example, I’ll help you out here a little bit. A real issue, I’m an educator.
LUCKOVICH: Maybe something Boston local--
GOODE: No. No. To me education is throughout the country, all 50 states.
LUCKOVICH: Oh, you are talking about an education issue?
GOODE: No, it’s not just education because when I leave the classroom and the school, I actually go out in the public and I have to deal with that, too. So, for example, I notice that the general public, one of the issues that I thought should have been editorialized by the cartoonists would be, here you have a president whose vilifying Kerry about his war medals, about his coming back from a war and he criticized the war. I thought that he would have a right since he actually fought it.
LUCKOVICH: Right.
GOODE: And you have a president who never fought the war who actually went to work on a political campaign.
LUCKOVICH: Oh, sure. Yeah. Well, we’ve been doing cartoons--
PETERS: I mean we did those things all the time.
WASSERMAN: I don’t think you would find three cartoonists who would have been tougher on Bush and his falsification of Kerry’s record. We haven’t brought them all here but I think we stand okay on that issue. And another issue…
LUCKOVICH: Yeah, all those lies… We have cut into Bush and the group about that.
GOODE: Then I thank you because I’m trying to get my students to create political cartoons on the real issues. But they need a paradigm and if you are the paradigm we will be okay if those are the real issues that you are promoting.
PETERS: You will find that we do cartoons on things that most people know about. If a topic is not…
GOODE: On the radar…
PETERS: On the radar, that nobody’s talking about, often we won’t do a cartoon on that because it would be so hard explaining what that nuanced issue is. But most of the issues that come to mind about Bush and Kerry and anything that has been fairly large that most people know about, we’ve done many cartoons on that.
GOODE: Thank you.
SIMON: Yes, sir.
LEO STOLBACH: My name is Leo Stolbach. I have to comment on the fact that your political views, all three of you are on the side that I’m on and I enjoy your political cartoons. I was wondering if there is any requirement that the editorial staff feels that the other side needs to be given a cartoon voice the same way that on the op-ed page, there usually are some counter-balances to it. And the other question is, an extension of what you were talking about before, is if the paper, for instance if The Boston Globe would have come out for Bush, could you, Dan Wasserman, continue to do political cartoons for them?
WASSERMAN: Yeah. I disagree with the paper on a number of subjects. We have here in Massachusetts the MCAS test, which is the big, standardized testing push for students from elementary to high school, which I think is misguided. And I do frequent cartoons about how I think it is distorting the way the kids are educated. The Globe is very gun-ho on this and thinks that this is the solution to education in the state.
So we disagree vehemently about that. I tend to be much more suspicious of socalled free trade agreements than The Globe. So I think if we consistently disagreed on every issue, if there was no overlap, there wouldn’t be much point in my working for the paper or for them having me there. But I don’t have to march in lockstep with The Globe. On the question of having balancing cartoons, we run cartoons on the op-ed page, which frequently have points of view that are not mine and not The Globe’s editorially.
Do I feel a need to be balanced? No. My job, as I see it, is to be unfair. [Laughter] No, seriously. But not to be unfairly unfair. And that’s the calibration that you have to go through. I should be able to defend the position. People look at cartoons for opinions, not for somebody who’s debating themselves. They have plenty of politicians who can straddle both sides of an issue. They don’t look for a cartoonist to do that.
SIMON: Are there cartoonists that you admire that you often disagree with, the same way it must be said for years that Bill Safire and Tony Lewis, writing from different perspectives on The New York Times editorial page, respected each other and looked forward to reading each other’s columns?
LUCKOVICH: Go ahead, Mike.
PETERS: No, you go ahead, Michael.
LUCKOVICH: Well, here’s the thing. Maybe it’s because we’re artists, but there aren’t that many conservative cartoonists, are there.
PETERS: A great one passed away a couple of years ago, Jeff MacNelly
LUCKOVICH: He was the best.
PETERS: He was the best. And he was a conservative…
LUCKOVICH: But he could get his point across with humor. And he was a beautiful artist. And there were a lot of times I would look at his cartoons and think, “God, I don’t agree with that man, but can that guy draw.”
WASSERMAN: Pat Oliphant is not exactly conservative. But he is sort of a
Libertarian. I disagree with him a lot and I think he’s a brilliant cartoonist. Steve Kelly who is a conservative and I think has a beautiful, economical style, often very funny.
SIMON: I don't know him.
WASSERMAN: He’s…
PETERS: S. Kelly.
WASSERMAN: S. Kelly. He’s now in New Orleans, right?
PETERS: Yeah.
WASSERMAN: Used to be in San Diego. But I mean I look at his stuff and admire it. I don’t think you have to agree with somebody’s politics to see that they’re a talented cartoonist who knows their craft.
LUCKOVICH: Another guy is at The L.A. Times, a guy named Mike Ramirez. And The L.A. Times, I believe, is fairly liberal but he is very, very conservative.
PETERS: No, he is probably the most conservative I’ve seen. It’s so funny, you guys, because I hated this guy. I mean, you know, I’m this anal, arch conservative, I mean arch liberal… Is there an arch liberal? I don’t think so. Well, this extreme liberal. And whenever I saw this guy’s cartoons I [said], “God this guy sucks. I hate this!” And then I met him. He’s the sweetest guy in the world and now I see it and I go, “Boy! Mike really did a bad one on us today, you know.” It is so funny. After you meet these guys and they’re so cute but their opinions are totally opposite. But it’s funny.
STOLBACH: Keep it up and let’s hope it helps in the election.
PETERS: Oh, you’re great.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I know Mike Peters just drew a cartoon and I understand you have some blank transparencies and if it doesn’t take too long, I was wondering if one of you could just like draw a cartoon and we could see it come to life?
WASSERMAN: Of course.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Of Kerry or Bush or anything.
PETERS: I’ve got extra stuff. Oh, good. Okay.
SIMON: Do you guys draw and answer questions at the same time?
WASSERMAN: Draw over there and I’ll draw over here. Dueling drawings.
SIMON: Yes, sir?
LUCKOVICH: Are you a lefty or a righty?
WASSERMAN: I’m a righty.
LUCKOVICH: How about if you stand on this one and I’ll do this one.
WASSERMAN: Are you going to do Bush and I’ll do Kerry next to him?
LUCKOVICH: Okay.
WASSERMAN: All right.
PETERS: Yes, us guys will do that, Mike.
SIMON: Do you have a question for Mr. Peters, then?
PETERS: No, now don’t give me ideas. This is fine. Get Dan up here.
LUCKOVICH: Let Mike answer questions so we will all have something to do.
PETERS: He is leading this discussion. It is so funny.
SIMON: That’s my job. Sir?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: About reject cartoons…
PETERS: Oh, God, that would be cool. I love that. Wouldn’t that be weird?
LUCKOVICH: That would be. I’ll draw Bush, all right?
WASSERMAN: Go ahead.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Is this on?
SIMON: Yes. Go ahead.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: About rejected cartoons, it would be interesting to hear more about the kinds of reasons you’re given and, in particular, the one that was, “Bush, I’m pro-life.” Was that rejected? The cartoon that one of you showed…
PETERS: Right.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: About Bush’s mayhem and then, “I’m pro-life.”
LUCKOVICH: That was Mike’s 14 thousand.
WASSERMAN: Yeah that was Mike’s 14…
PETERS: What was that cartoon?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Was that rejected?
PETERS: Which one, which one was that?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: The one where Bush…
SIMON: Vote for me, I’m pro-life.
PETERS: Oh, pro-life. I don’t think they were… The only way I can see it is if it’s on the computer page of our newspaper and I see which ones are on there. I might have been mistaken. They might have run that. But it’s one of those cartoons that is real close to the edge of, “Gee, do we want to get our… Is this fair,” or whatever, whatever editors do when they edit. I’ve found that I like Luckovich and Dan, we do way too many Bush cartoons and so few Kerry cartoons, mainly because we can’t find much…
There are areas like the hunting thing with Kerry and stuff like that. It’s fun to make fun of and you say, “Oh, God, he shouldn’t have done that or whatever.” But it’s not about people getting killed in Iraq. It’s not about these huge issues that we’re finding ourselves with. So we find ourselves doing so many more Bush cartoons because it’s dangerous. It’s dangerous out there. I’ve never been as worried as I have been about an election about this next four years.
Because I think the next four years are going to be like your cartoon, “Four more wars! Four more wars!” where we are going to have more wars going on and not enough kids to fill it.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: That was a great cartoon and I would think you would want very much to have that get out there.
PETERS: Well, no. I sent it out to all the syndicates. So it went to 400 newspapers and so… They might have run it but, look, once again, I’ve been with this newspaper all my life and so I know these people. They are the most fair people in the world. And I’m not going to quit my job over a cartoon or something like that.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, look, when you come up with something that you really feel strongly about and the editors will not let it go, do you have some other thing to do with it? Is there an Internet place [where] you can run them?
PETERS: No. No. I send them out. I’m syndicated to 400 other newspapers so…
AUDIENCE MEMBER: So it doesn’t get rejected everywhere.
PETERS: No. No. No. No, it’s printed in those other places, which is a great thing because often some of the cartoons will be run in Newsweek and my newspaper then feels obliged and says, “Okay. I better run this thing,” if
Newsweek or some large magazine runs it. It’s great. Or some big newspaper runs it. I’m doing pretty well. That’s only a handful of cartoons a year do I ever have that problem. And we have a new publisher and stuff.
SIMON: Let me just follow up briefly on something. If Senator Kerry is elected, you have to start doing cartoons about him.
PETERS: Oh, yeah. Then we will start finding things that’s going on. But usually we all are dealing with things about life and death. Is this war fair? It’s so interesting you guys, these women that we met last night. And they were spouting all this stuff that they usually hear on FOX about, “Oh, Saddam did have something to do with 9/11,” and oh, gosh, what were some of the things that they were saying?
LUCKOVICH: They kept saying, “Bush has made us safer.”
PETERS: I said, “I’ve got two kids. One is going to be 18. One just turned 16, our two oldest kids. I’m worried to death about the draft because our Army right now, that’s in Iraq. So what if a real threat comes up? What if one that they didn’t just gen up comes up? Well, we can’t make them. So we are going to have to start the draft. People say, “Well, there’s not going to be a draft. Bush said there is not going to be a draft.”
PETERS: And you can trust Bush.
LUCKOVICH: Yeah. Yeah. Bush has said a lot of things.
SIMON: Who’s next? Or is it her turn? Please.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you. Well, one thing you said about the draft, the prelude to my question is being 16, I’m also worried.
LUCKOVICH: Yeah.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Which reminds me, I was with my brother recently at a theatre and they had a display of all land mine photographs. And he said, “Well, you should look at these, be familiar with them.” I said, “Jay, I’m not going to Iraq any time soon… Well, okay, maybe the draft comes soon… I might have to go to Iraq, but hopefully not.”
So, anyway, this is a bit about the cartooning profession, just more itself. The first question I wondered is, being a cartoonist, it seems like people always seem to have these pre-defined notions, expectations of you. Do you ever get those people who come up to you and say, “You know, I can’t draw, but you should. Here’s an idea: you draw Bush in a cowboy…” You know, something like that.
LUCKOVICH: Well, I don't know about you guys but when I get people calling me or emailing me with their ideas, I always say, “Man, that’s a great idea.” But I always tell them, “It’s just a matter of personal pride. I don’t like to use other people’s ideas.” But a lot of time people will call up and they’ll say, “Okay, you got Bush here. You got 30 elephants and you got a walrus. And the walrus has a little hat on. You make the hat have a bird coming out of it.” And you know what I’m thinking, “Well, you know, that’s a damn good idea but sorry, I can’t use that.”
WASSERMAN: “Draw a wave in the background, labeled ‘inflation,’ coming over just as the beehive is being hit...” [Laughter]
LUCKOVICH: But then other times someone will call up, and it doesn’t happen too often, but they’ll call up and they will give me some tremendous idea and I will think, “Crap. I wish I could have come up on that on my own,” because I won’t use it. It’s just a pride thing. I just don’t want to use somebody else’s ideas.
SIMON: Anyone else here want to admit to stealing ideas?
WASSERMAN: No. I don’t steal them but a colleague could give me ideas or germs of an idea, “Here, take a look at this. What do you think?” And I’m not too proud. I mean as long as they are not shopping it around to Mike and Mike.
LUCKOVICH: And as long as you don’t have to draw 30 elephants…
WASSERMAN: And the tidal wave. I can’t draw a tidal wave.
PETERS: I’ll tell you, my kids are the ones who come up with great ideas. And boy I’ll use them if they’re great. “Are you kidding? That’s fabulous.” What’s that?
WASSERMAN: If you reject them, they call me. [Laughter]
PETERS: No. No. No. But I’ve never used an idea of somebody calling me up or accosting me on the street because they are exactly what Mike said. They are always, “Okay, you know, you know you are going to have a glass and it’s labeled “The economy.” And then you have Bush stepping out of it,” and it’s not… It may be a good idea but…
LUCKOVICH: You did that cartoon last week…
PETERS: Well, you’re right.
LUCKOVICH: Quiet. Quiet.
PETERS: But it’s not something that we would want to be remembered for, so we don’t do it.
SIMON: You had a question. Oh, he had one more?
AUDIENCE MEMBERS: Yes, there’s one more. The other is just for Mr. Peters. Being an editorial cartoonist and also doing a daily strip like “Mother Goose and Grimm,” I know you talked about this earlier but the pressure of it and even Mr. Wasserman saying how a daily strip can almost be a luxury in some ways. But for you, having to do the editorial cartoons and having to do daily “Mother Goose and Grimm,” do you just come to the point and say, “Oh, not this again.”
PETERS: Well, I’ll tell you. I found, and it was really fascinating, this wonderful great cartoonist named Doug Marlette. And he had been doing a strip named “Kudzu,” along with doing his political cartoons. And I was concerned because I had… When I got syndicated then I knew I had to do two cartoons today. And then two cartoons tomorrow and then two cartoons the next day. And that first week I was laying in bed thinking, “I’ve got to do all this stuff.”
And I said to Doug, I said, “How do you deal with that?” And he said, “It’s like brushing your teeth. You don’t say, “Gee, I’ve got to brush my teeth twice today and twice tomorrow and twice on Wednesday. I’ve got to brush my teeth six times.” You just kind of get up and do it without thinking. You just start working and don’t think about it and go through the process.” I found that doing a comic strip, and I don't know if you found this when you were doing yours but, eBay for you, it’s the comic strip for me.
I come to that point wherever during that day when you can’t think of something, I just switch over and start working on the comic strip. And it’s a totally different part of the brain. Even though it’s cartoons, totally different part of the brain, all the editorial ideas all come from without for me and all the comic strip ideas all come from within. I just look at a blank sheet of paper. So I find that it’s a good refreshing way of getting away from editorial cartooning to do the other one.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you.
SIMON: Yes, ma’am.
SOPHIA MCCLERLAND: Hi. My name is Sophia McClerland and I’m 17 years old and I go to the John D. O’Bryant. My teacher is Mr. Goode. He had a question earlier.
LUCKOVICH: Oh, yeah.
MCCLERLAND: I was just wondering, well, we’re starting to do political cartoons and I was wondering if you guys ever look at other techniques from the past political cartoons and use them to do your new political cartoons? Because I know that time is different so you have to keep to date, but just the techniques and stuff.
PETERS: Sure. That’s great. Well, I know there are certain cartoonists in the history of cartooning who, I think, have dominated the field when they were at it. One is Paul Conrad, who is a fabulous cartoonist and still works for The L. A. Times. But when Paul was on, he could do that thing I said earlier about leaving a lasting image in your mind. He would come up with these fabulous images and wonderful opinions and be able to express it.
And when I’m influenced by somebody, it’s people like that who can take an image, especially at a Challenger crashing or a 9/11 crashing. He could take an image and solder it in your brain that you would never forget it. And those are the people that I wish I were like it and I’m not like it. I’ve tried to be like them and I’m like a tenth grade person like this. And so those kinds of people for sure I get inspiration from.
LUCKOVICH: I have to say something now?
PETERS: Yes, you have to say something now.
LUCKOVICH: Okay. You know, editorial cartooning has changed a lot over the years. From way back they have always been really strong, strong images. And humor has really come into editorial cartoons more and more because we are competing with the culture out there, Letterman and the “Daily Show.” And people have so much more to look at now than they used to. Before they were the three networks and your local paper. Now you’ve got all this stuff so you really want to capture people’s attention. You want to give them a reason to come back and look at your cartoons.
We use humor more than we used to. So I think that the editorial cartoon has evolved and while I still feel that you really need to make a hard point, if you can do it with humor, that’s what keeps people coming back.
WASSERMAN: I think there are a lot of sort of giants of American political cartooning that every cartoonist looks at as they’re developing a style and then refers back to. If you look at Thomas Nash, if you look at the French cartoonist Daumier, a lot of people look at that. If you look at the cartoonists who were leftwing cartoonists during the depression and used to contribute to a publication called The Masses you’ll see some of the best cartooning in the history of American cartooning, and some of it quite funny.
The classic cartoons like a headless soldier at an induction station for the draft and the sergeant is going, “Aha, at last the perfect soldier,” really cutting, hard hitting and beautifully rendered drawings from the period. Art Young, Robert Minor, a lot of those people. So, I wouldn’t say I look at them all the time but there are periods when you go back and you study the masters. I think Pat Oliphant revolutionized cartooning in the post-war period.
Bill Mauldin kind of exemplifies the pinnacle of World War II and immediately post-war cartooning. So all of us I think look to them for inspiration and take things out of that, that we incorporate in our own individual style.
SIMON: Yes, sir.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: My name is… (inaudible) and I have a question. I think Dale Carnegie once wrote a book How to Make Friends and Influence People.
LUCKOVICH: Right.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Now you certainly… All you fellows certainly make friends because we are already pre-programmed to like your political opinion. However, if you threw all of us out now and had a thousand Republicans come here, heaven forbid…
LUCKOVICH: We’ve be beaten senseless.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I guess what would happen, some of them would just close their eyes and just walk out. Okay? But would there be some who would be influenced by your cartoons and is it…
LUCKOVICH: He wants to know if by looking at our cartoons, I believe, if a group of Republicans came in, some of them might leave but might we influence…
WASSERMAN: Do we really change people’s minds?
LUCKOVICH: Yeah. I don't know. Especially right now where it has become religion to people, I think it is very hard. I think the only way that people’s minds are going to be changed are through repeated arguments that the war doesn’t add up, the arguments that Kerry is making or we have to let enough time go by where people will see, “Well, this isn’t what we were told.” I don't know if at this point we can change that many minds. I don't know.
WASSERMAN: I think we are part of an ongoing debate and I think if our cartoons are good, people will look at them. I think the humor that Mike is talking about is kind of the little Trojan horse that gets inside of people’s heads. That’s the way I like to think about it. So I have Republican friends who look at my stuff and enjoy trying to figure out what’s wrong with my cartoon. I mean they are laughing at it but they don’t like that and they want to figure out how they can turn it around and what’s in it that they can argue with.
So I don’t think any cartoon by itself is going to suddenly change somebody’s votes, but it is part of the process of the political debate and if they’re good, I think they stick with people in the way Mike is talking about.
SIMON: Let me… I want people who have been standing in line to get a chance to ask their questions but we are getting a little past the deadline now and I know these men all have cartoons to do.
LUCKOVICH: And Scott has a shuttle to catch.
SIMON: No. I’m fine. I’m willing to stay here for your company alone. Yes, ma’am.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I just have a quick question. I was wondering if you already have two cartoons planned for the day after the election?
LUCKOVICH: No.
PETERS: No. We haven’t. We haven’t done that at all.
WASSERMAN: I don't know about these guys but we don’t have cartoons planned for the next 24 hours. Do you ever have anything in your back pocket?
LUCKOVICH: No.
PETERS: No.
WASSERMAN: No, this is tightrope without a net.
PETERS: And that’s one of the joys I think of doing this business. I was thinking of being an animator or something when I was a kid. And then I was thinking of comic strips. I prided myself that I knew all the names of the comic strips when I was a kid. And then when I was about 13 I met Bill Mauldin and I saw the joy of having that blank sheet every single day. And you can just look at the newspaper and then say something about, make a point about it, and make a point that people talk about and they show it to each other and stuff and it just blew me away.
I thought, “Oh, God, that’s what I want to do.” And so that’s the reason why I’m in the business is for that surprise, that thing that’s going to happen tomorrow.
SIMON: Let me ask, if I can borrow that question… Any of the three of you sitting here, do you know what tomorrow’s cartoon will be? Do you think you know what tomorrow’s cartoon will be?
WASSERMAN: I haven’t a clue.
LUCKOVICH: I don’t even know what the topic is.
PETERS: No. I haven’t anything. No.
SIMON: I believe you, too. Yes?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: You’re all artists, obviously, and you must love the process of putting images down, using a medium and putting an image down. But you are working within confines, again, obviously. Do you ever wish you were Jackson Pollock or Marc Rothko or do you ever wish you could blow the lid off it and do a deconstructivist cartoon?
PETERS: Oh, sure, and I think a lot of guys do. Both Paul Conrad and Pat Oliphant are fabulous scuplturists. McNelly was a great painter. And I think we would love to break away, to express ourselves in another medium would be a fun experience.
LUCKOVICH: I finger paint, so… [laughter]
WASSERMAN: Yeah, I look for the time to be able to do that. I do some drawing outside but most of my energy goes into the cartooning.
SIMON: Yes, ma’am.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Mr. Peters you mentioned before that among the cartoons that you regret are the ones that are extremely laudatory towards politicians.
PETERS: Yes.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: So I was wondering, and this is a question for the whole panel, how much does cynicism come into play while making your cartoons?
PETERS: Cynicism? It’s…
LUCKOVICH: Daily.
PETERS: Huge. It’s huge. That’s what… Many of the ideas are… If you can’t find the humor there, something to laugh about, you can surely find the cynicism. And this country right now is filled with… I feel right now… I was telling Michael earlier, you know, there was a show called, hang on now, it was a thing about UFOs, and there was a program… Oh, “Alienation,” called “Alienation.” And there was a whole group of aliens that came down to America and they were walking around and a few people could see through the mask, their screen looking like a human and they are all lizards inside.
And that is almost the way… I mean I’ve never felt like this before but it is almost the way I feel like right now, where half the country or more than half are saying, “Bush is fabulous. Don’t you love this war? He’s keeping us safe. He’s doing great for the economy and aren’t we blessed having him?” And I’m thinking, what lizards are these? I don’t understand this thing [APPLAUSE] I can’t even comprehend what they are talking about. And, you know, it is very sad.
So cynicism on my part or on all of our parts if we believe the same thing, it’s pure cynicism.
WASSERMAN: I would disagree a little bit. I mean I don’t think it’s cynicism. I think cynicism suggests a lack of hope and a lack of ability to see how things could be different. I think this profession, despite what people think, is actually quite hopeful.
LUCKOVICH: Yeah, Mike.
WASSERMAN: Negative art form… No. No. [laughter] I used a different word. I think there is a difference between ardent skepticism and cynicism. People will say to me sometimes, don’t you think that you are contributing to a cynical atmosphere by constantly making fun of politicians? I don’t think so. Because nested in the negative art form is a suggestion that things could be different. Politicians don’t have to be on the take. Wars don’t have to be started for stupid reasons.
And that’s the subtext of what we are saying, even though the way we are drawing it is in a negative form. So, skeptical, highly skeptical, we’ve earned the skepticism. We have every reason to be skeptical. But I don’t think we’re cynical because you wouldn’t be doing this if you didn’t think that the country could change in a positive direction. Is that fair?
PETERS: No. That is true. [APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you.
SIMON: I hope this was your cartoon I’m remembering. And if I’m wrong forgive me. But the Lech Walesa cartoon you did when he first came to the United States… Do you remember what I’m…
PETERS: Yes, about how many Poles does it take to change the world? And I had Lech Walesa standing there. That’s great. Thank you for remembering that.
SIMON: No. No. It was just wonderful. But in a very hopeful cartoon…
PETERS: Yes, and Dan is completely right. Most of us got into this job… Well, I got into the job because my mom had a TV show in St. Louis and that’s how I grew up. And she was talking to thousands, hundreds of thousands of people everyday. And she would have poor people and people who needed help on her show. And she would be talking about what that issue is and she would have politicians on. And I was raised seeing my mom changing things, actually doing things on the air, talking to people and changing things.
And that’s why I think all of us got into this job, to be able to hopefully be one little blind guy feeling the elephant and saying his opinion of it to maybe change it. And that is true.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I just want to say, I’m not sure how many minds you are changing, but I do know you are saving a lot of minds.
PETERS: You are sweet. That is so sweet of you.
LUCKOVICH: Thank you.
PETERS: So sweet.
SIMON: All right. If you guys are all right, I notice someone with their hand up.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: ...(inaudible)
SIMON: Have you done anything since Brigadoon?
PETERS: Wait a minute. Get out of here. We have to talk after that. That is a hoot. This is a thing I did in high school and I was in a play and I never forgot it. And you are so sweet?
SIMON: Brigadoon?
PETERS: It was a city-wide play and I was the bartender at the-- It was kind of like this and stuff. I was so scared and I stuttered. I had this horrible stutter. I was worried about doing my lines. You are just a dear and I want to see you afterwards. Oh, this is a treat.
SIMON: Look, this has been a wonderful way to spend a Sunday afternoon.
Thanks everyone for being here.
PETERS: You have been wonderful as well.
SIMON: Mike Luckovich, Mike Peters, and Dan Wasserman. Thank you.
WASSERMAN: Thank you, Scott, for making the trip.