The Great American Adventure of Reading Doonesbury

G.B. Trudeau often skewered politicians at their stupidest. But his primary subject has always been the range and variety of everyday life.

Across the last half-century or so, Doonesbury has been one of those rare institutions that could always be counted on—even while the political world it described seemed to be run by people who couldn’t be counted on at all. Whether it was following the daily trials and pleasures of the lovelorn, the divorced, the dying, the homeless, the enlisted, or those Zonker-like individuals who felt estranged from the whole ugly process that calls itself civilization, G.B. Trudeau’s comic provided a dependably absurd chronicle of American life. It may turn out to be the most reliable record the United States will ever have about itself—at least one that, despite the horrors and hypocrisies it depicted, almost never failed to raise a laugh.

Rarely has such an inauspicious personality been raised in such auspicious circumstances. Born in 1948 in New York City, Trudeau grew up in a large home atop Mount Pisgah in Saranac Lake, where the streets and local landmarks (such as a sanitarium for tuberculosis patients, founded by his grandfather) often carried the Trudeau name. “You could imagine what that does to a kid’s sense of himself,” Trudeau recalled. “I was a big fish in a little pond.” For many years, the telephone number for his father’s medical practice “was simply 1.” As Joshua Kendall describes in his new history Trudeau & Doonesbury, the biggest and possibly sole challenge of Trudeau’s childhood was his parents’ separation in 1959; otherwise, his upward trajectory was firmly assured.

And yet he found inventive ways to stray from his assigned path—such as departing the normal studies of a Yale art major to draw spiky caricatures for the school humor magazine, and to turn his personal anxieties about being drafted into a self-illustrated song, sung to the tune of “When I’m Sixty-Four”:

If I got shot up during the war,Many months from now,Would you still tie my shoe for me and help me eatPre-strained prune juice, finely chopped meat.If I pass out at quarter to three,Pick me off the floor.Will you still knead me, will you still feed me,When I’m twenty-four.

If I got shot up during the war,Many months from now,Would you still tie my shoe for me and help me eatPre-strained prune juice, finely chopped meat.If I pass out at quarter to three,Pick me off the floor.Will you still knead me, will you still feed me,When I’m twenty-four.

In many ways, Trudeau spent his years at Yale like the famous British double agent Kim Philby did at Cambridge: He never fit in among the nation’s future leaders as much as he appeared to, and nobody got to know him as well as he got to know them. Among classmates like biographer Ron Chernow, future Vice President Al Gore (and Gore’s roommate, actor Tommy Lee Jones) and the even-then unlikable George W. Bush—who, as frat president at Delta Kappa Epsilon, endorsed branding new enrollees with coat hangers—Trudeau was shy, maybe less by disposition than in an act of judgment. In a 2008 interview with The Washington Post he called Bush “all noblesse and no oblige,” and decades after graduation, he wrote some of his funniest strips about the frat-boy Bushes being admitted to top-secret society (and CIA-feeder) Skull and Bones. Growing up with these entitled, keg-loving, spoiled elites, Trudeau managed to never feel intimidated by them; instead, he treated them like tawdry relations he could cheerfully expose to the rest of us.

Kendall’s new pictorially rich book is appreciative bio more than a grand argument........

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