Trying to Be Vicious

The Uncle Sam hat and costume and the forcefully extended index finger easily evoke the World War I recruiting poster. The face, though out of context, is similarly recognizable: the gimlet eyes, bowling-pin nose and mashed-potato jowls could only be a particularly cruel caricature of Richard Nixon. And the message boldly lettered around the cartoon character provides a jolt that shakes the drawing's dissonant elements into place: YOU NEED ME.

The drawing is the work of Miami News Cartoonist Don Wright, 40. The President has been getting roughhouse treatment on many editorial pages since Watergate began, but no one has been harder on Nixon than Wright. Along with the Denver Post's Patrick Oliphant, the Washington Post's Herblock and the Los Angeles Times's Paul Conrad, Wright is now one of the nation's most widely published editorial cartoonists. Whether he is shown carrying on both ends of a phone conversation (and listening in on earphones in the middle) or provoking hysterical laughter in a Martian seeking earth's leader, Wright's Nixon is an unvarying emblem of sinister paranoia or clownish ineptitude.

No Guilt. His cartoons are syndicated in 32 papers, and Wright admits that much of his mail taxes him with cruelty to the President. "I try to explain," Wright says, "that the only weapon I have is distortion and exaggeration, and I ask them whether they agree or disagree with the point that I was trying to make." But Wright, a Democrat who lampooned Lyndon Johnson, harbors no guilt: "I don't believe it's possible to be too rough on President Nixon or on any Administration that has sought to get away with some of the things that this Administration has."

Wright was not always so politically engaged. He joined the News as a copy boy after graduating from high school in 1952. During stints as a photographer and picture editor, he dashed off cartoons for the paper's editors, who frequently posted them on newsroom bulletin boards. In 1963 he was persuaded to seek a wider audience by drawing full time. "I had no idea what an editorial cartoonist was or what he was supposed to do," says Wright, "except that he was supposed to have an opinion." Having few firm views on current affairs, he was forced to educate himself rapidly. Wright also faced tough competition from Bill Mauldin and Herblock, whose syndicated work was available to News editors. Wright proceeded to mimic their styles "because they were supposed to be the best." Looking back on his early efforts, Wright wonders "why the hell the paper ever stuck with me."

One good reason occurred three years after his debut, when Wright was awarded a Pulitzer Prize; the winning cartoon showed two survivors of a nuclear holocaust in a bomb-pocked landscape and was captioned: "You mean you were blurring?" Since then, Wright has abandoned the pencil-and-charcoal effects favored by Mauldin and Herblock. He has developed his own pen-and-ink style, in which faces and forms are distorted past realistic limits. His decisive lines and elongated figures are reminiscent of the technique of British Caricaturist Ronald Searle. Wright's characters, with their ballooning eyeballs, pinprick pupils and ramshackle poses, seem to have stepped out of a Road Runner animated cartoon.

Wright's visual effects are often striking: a consumer trapped between the buns of a "Nixonburger," two modest chairs labeled "Legislative" and "Judicial" dwarfed by an "Executive" throne. And he does not mind demanding considerable reading time. Under a cartoon showing Uncle Sam and a small boy strolling through a smudged wasteland, Wright placed the caption: "Well, our spacious skies got dirty when we cut back on clean air standards and we sold the amber waves of grain to other countries. The purple mountain majesties were gutted for strip mining and the fruited plain was leased to Exxon, not to mention the oil derricks offshore from sea to shining sea."

The humor Wright injects into his five cartoons a week is chiefly black. His work schedule is no laughing matter either. He gets to the office each day by 10 a.m., hoping to settle on a subject by noon and an idea of treatment by midafternoon. After showing a preliminary sketch to his editor, he often labors over the drawing past midnight to meet his 7 a.m. deadline. "I'm very slow," he says. "I've had no formal art training at all, so I'm still struggling with my style." Lacerating though he and some of his rivals have been to the Administration, Wright makes a candid and astonishing confession: "I'm afraid we've lost our capacity to be vicious. We don't seem to get cartoons with explosive impact any more, the kind that slams somebody right between the eyes with no subtlety at all." He is too modest about his ability to slam. In fact, his work should satisfy the keenest appetite for cartoons that bludgeon.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.