The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
One man’s role in ’72 Doonesbury, Kent State flap
I inadvertently helped get the cartoon Doonesbury thrown out of the Akron Beacon Journal 44 years ago in the politically inflammatory 1970s.
Doonesbury wasn’t famous in 1972 like it is now. It had been a cartoon in the student newspaper at Yale University, The Yale Daily News, from 1968-70 and was just getting off the ground as a national comic strip in 1972 when it got banished from the Akron Beacon Journal, for one particularly political cartoon.
Zonker — a main character in Doonesbury — in effect sarcastically thanks President Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, for not doing anything about the Kent State shootings, in which four students were shot and killed and nine wounded by Ohio National Guardsmen May 4, 1970, during what became an antiwar protest at Kent State University.
The Akron Beacon Journal is published 10 miles from Kent State. The governor of Ohio, James A. Rhodes, made the decision to send the troops into Kent State, which led to the shooting. Can you smell the politics?
I was afraid the comic strip’s creator, a Yale student named Garry Trudeau, would be angry with me because he created the Kent State strip at my suggestion. To quote a later story in the Akron Becaon Journal about the controversy:
“Trudeau admits the strip was politically motivated. He says he was moved to do something on the Kent State affair by a letter he received from KSU graduate student Paul Keane, who had been active in pushing for a federal investigation of the shootings.”
Actually, I had called Trudeau — who I did not even know — after sending a letter. According to him it was the phone call which prompted the cartoon. “I wrote this after I talked to you,” he penned in a handwritten note to me enclosing a glossy of the cartoon.
Doonesbury got censored by many more newspapers after that until its popularity forced the papers to reinstate it. But many papers “reinstated” it by positioning it on a page other than the comic page, as a way of implying it is not a comic strip, but a political strip.
Like all forbidden fruit, this new location in newspapers just made people aggressively sift through the pages to hunt for the quarantined Doonesbury even more than before it had been isolated by editors and publishers.
I guess I need not have worried that Mr. Trudeau would be angry with me for getting him censored in Akron. In fact, editors isolating Doonesbury became one of its trademarks.
I suppose I should feel proud that I helped make Doonesbury the pariah of newspaper comic pages in the 1970s, but I have a confession to make. Except for the one cartoon Garry Trudeau wrote after talking with me on the phone for 25 minutes about Attorney General John Mitchell refusing to convene a federal grand jury investigation of the Kent shootings, I have never read another Doonesbury cartoon in all these 44 years.
It just doesn’t interest me. I have read articles about Doonesbury’s success, however. But the thing itself ? No.
I have it on good authority that the cartoon banished from the Akron Beacon Journal infuriated Gov. Rhodes. I only hope it irritated Attorney General Mitchell too.
By the way, in a freak series of political absurdities, when President Nixon fired his Watergate special prosecutor and his Attorney General Elliot Richardson ( a successor to Mitchell) resigned in protest at the firing in 1973 , the ultra conservative Solicitor General Robert Bork became acting attorney general for three months. On the final three days of his brief time in office he did the unthinkable for a conservative: he convened a federal grand jury to investigate the Kent State killings.
It was the first and only time Ohio National Guardsmen would testify under oath about the shootings. Halfway through the trial, the judge dismissed the case for insufficient evidence.
Bork had brought the case under title 242 section 18 of the U.S. Federal Code which says no one under color of law shall conspire to deprive someone of their civil rights (in this case their lives). The judge ruled that there was insufficient evidence to prove that the guardsmen decided “beforehand” to “willfully” deprive the Kent State students of their civil rights.
The only thing that could be proved absolutely to this very day is that the National Guardsmen shot them: Nine wounded and four dead in Ohio.
In 1968 after the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, but before the 1970 Kent State killings, President Johnson created the U.S. Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence headed by Milton Eisenhower.
One of its conclusions 48 years ago was that America was in danger of becoming a nation of armed camps.
No comment.