From the pencil rough that eventually became this week's cartoon:
With self-styled Secretary of War Pete HIC!seth's Leave No Survivors rules of engagement in the present regime's gratuitous War in the Caribbean, Graphical History Tour takes a look at war crimes of the past.
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| "Das Ende" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. Dec. 1, 1945 |
80 years ago on November 30, a German U-boat commander and two of his subordinate officers were executed for war crimes.
It was during World War II, in the South Atlantic. The German submarine U-852 under the command of Captain Heinz-Wilhelm Eck torpedoed the Greek-flagged ship Peleus on March 13, 1944.
The submarine commander Eck feared the steamer’s debris would be observed by a passing airplane, and give enough information to Allied reconnaissance to enable it to find his ship. He therefore surfaced and attempted to have the debris field eliminated by machine-gunning and grenading it into the watery deep.
Per German rules of engagement:
No attempt of any kind should be made at rescuing members of ships sunk, and this includes picking up persons in the water and putting them in lifeboats, righting capsized lifeboats and handing over food and water. Rescue runs counter to the rudimentary demands of warfare for the destruction of enemy ships and crews … Be harsh, having in mind that the enemy takes no regard of women and children in his bombing attacks of German cities.
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| "Spectator" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dec. 3, 1945 |
The execution of Captain Heinz-Wilhelm Eck, August Hoffmann, and Walter Weisspfennig, was overshadowed by the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi high command, accused of the systematic murder of 6 million Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and Socialists.
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| "Nuernberg" by David Low in London Spectator, ca. Dec. 2, 1945 |
The Nuremberg trials came to pass because the Allies were triumphant in the War. Germans did not bring the Nazis to trial.
Nobody was put on trial for the carpet bombing of Dresden. Or for immolating the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The rules of war were followed there.
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| "My Lai?" by Paul Conrad in Los Angeles Times, March 31, 1971 |
A generation later, in another war, the world was shocked by the March 16, 1968 massacre of hundreds of unarmed civilians by U.S. soldiers in the Vietnamese villages of My Lai and My Khe. Expecting to find a Viet Cong battalion there, two Companies of U.S. Army soldiers gang-raped, mutilated, and slaughtered women and children when they couldn't find any men of military age in the town, then burned their homes to the ground. It was the largest confirmed massacre of civilians by U.S. ground forces in the 20th Century.
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| "Another Victim of My Lai" by William Roberts in Cleveland Press, March 30, 1971 |
The massacre had been documented in horrific photographs which were printed in national newsmagazines and on television.
The My Lai Massacre was an egregious, but not isolated case, according to an October, 1968 letter from Tom Glen, a 21-year-old soldier of the 11th Light Infantry Brigade, to General Creighton Abrams:
"What has been outlined here I have seen not only in my own unit, but also in others we have worked with, and I fear it is universal. If this is indeed the case, it is a problem which cannot be overlooked, but can through a more firm implementation of the codes of MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) and the Geneva Conventions, perhaps be eradicated."
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| "Guilty" by Don Wright in Miami News, March 30, 1971 |
The responsibility for the massacre was taken all the way up to an Army Lieutenant, William Calley, Jr.. Calley's court martial became national news after a whistle-blower's letter prompted Congress to open an investigation. Calley testified that he had been following orders from his superior, Captain Ernest Medina. One witness testified that Medina's orders were that "anybody that was running from us, hiding from us" was to be shot.
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| "Murderer" by Leonard Borozinski in Wisconsin State Journal, March 31, 1971 |
Calley received a guilty verdict in March of 1971 and sentenced to life in prison; yet, as the above cartoons suggest, emerged as a sympathetic figure. He was paroled in 1974 to very little public outcry.
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| "Time to Come Out of Hiding" by Wally "Trog" Fawkes in Punch, London, April, 1971 |
Meanwhile, in separate courts martial, Captain Medina and Captain Eugene M. Kotouc were acquitted of all charges. Commanding officer of Americal Division, Major General Samuel W. Koster was charged with covering up the massacre and acquitted, but demoted to Brigadier General.
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| "It's Not So Difficult Once You Get the Hang of It" by Bill Sanders in Milwaukee Journal, March 31, 1971 |
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| "This in a Land Where One Humiliation Is Worth a Thousand Retributions" by Mark Streeter in Savannah Morning News, May 3, 2004 |
In 2004, the U.S. was embarrassed by its soldiers staffing the military prison at Abu Ghraib torturing prisoners of war. The soldiers had even posted photos on the internet of themselves humiliating naked Iraqi prisoners, chaining them like dogs, and piling them up on top of each other. The most widely circulated photo was of one hooded prisoner standing on a box with arms outstretched while hooked up to electrical wires.
Punishment was limited to the lowest level grunts.
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| "Chain of Command" by John Sherffius in Boulder Daily Camera, August 20, 2004 |
What the Dubya Bush administration learned from this fiasco was to rely more and more on outside contractors, like Blackwater, whose civilian paramilitary employees massacred 17 Iraqis at a traffic roundabout in 2007. Said employees were not invited to the Blackwater annual Christmas party that year.
Two years later, the outside firm was ArmorGroup, hired by the U.S. State Department to provide security at the American embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. CBS broke the story that ArmorGroup guards and supervisors engaging in what can only be described as a combination of the worst fraternity hazing with spring break at Fort Lauderdale.
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| for Q Syndicate, Sept., 2009 |
Hazing victims included Afghan nationals employed at the base, according to a Sept. 1, 2009 letter from Project on Government Oversight (POGO) to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:
"There is also evidence that members of the guard force and their supervisors have drawn Afghan nationals into behavior forbidden for Muslims. For example, photographs show guards posing with Afghan nationals at the U.S. facility at Camp Sullivan as both the guards and nationals consume alcoholic beverages in scenes that suggest drunkenness, and one photo shows a near-naked U.S. guard who appears to have urinated on himself and splashed an Afghan national."
And again, there were plenty of photos, posted to the unit's social media page. It's always the pictures that get people into trouble.
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War crimes have been committed by many countries other than the United States. Is it even possible to have a crime-free war, fought strictly according to the Geneva Accords?
Seemingly not. That, however, takes us into Current Events, which are not in our Graphical History Tour's itinerary.
Not yet, anyway.
From time to time, I devote these Graphical History Tours to reports of books I have recently bought.
Having taken my sister to the airport in Milwaukee this week, I was obliged to stop in at the Renaissance Book Store in the concourse. I frequently find old books of editorial cartoons there, and this visit was no exception.
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| Cover cartoons by Karl Hubenthal, Paul Conrad, Robert Graysmith, and Jeff MacNelly |
The Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year — 1974 is one that was not already in my collection, so I had to bring it home. The cartoons are from 1973: the year the U.S. withdrew from the Vietnam War; the Watergate scandal burst wide open; Spiro Agnew resigned the vice presidency; Syria and Egypt attacked Israel; the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries imposed an oil embargo on Western Europe, Canada, and the United States, resulting in a severe energy crisis; and U.S. troops massacred Native American protesters at Wounded Knee, South Dakota.
It was also the year the Supreme Court issued its decision in Roe v. Wade, but there is no mention of it in this particular book.
I was really struck, however, by the book's forward, written by Washington Star-News editor Newbold Noyes. In light of the state of newspaper editorial cartooning these days, I'd like to quote it in full; so aside from a few cartoons from the book and my credit lines, the rest of today's GHT is Mr. Noyes:
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| "The Boss Says Make It Funny" by Bill Crawford (for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. Sept. 4, 1973) on back cover |
So far as an editor is concerned, the cartoon on his editorial page is that white-hot point of light beneath the burning glass. Here the newspaper's editorial statement is reduced to its simplest and strongest terms. More readers are likely to register the cartoonist's message, on any given day, than any other commentary. For better or worse, this pictorial comment comes closer to embodying the spirit of the newspaper than any other element in its pages.
So far as the editor is concerned, this is not always for the better. We have to be candid about this: for an editor, the power focused in the cartoonist's penpoint is something of a problem. When editors meet, the things that really are on their minds do not appear on the formal agenda — they surface in talk around the bar.
When the board of the American Society of Newspaper Editors met the other day on the shores of Arizona's Lake Powell, its members did not devote their first cocktail session to the beauties of the second largest man-made body of water, or even to Watergate. They talked instead about the Los Angeles Times' decision to move its editorial cartoon to the the "op-ed" page, that kaleidoscope of other opinion appearing opposite the newspaper's own editorials.
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| "Alas, Poor Agnew..." by Paul Conrad in Los Angeles Times, October 17, 1973 |
Was the switch being made on general principles, or because of some clash of opinion on a major issue developing between editor and cartoonist? Was it a good idea for the rest of us? How about moving the cartoon off the editorial page only on those days when it evidenced a major departure from the views of the editor? How would their cartoonist [Paul] Conrad react?
Evidently, the Times' just-announced move touched a sensitive and responsive nerve in editorial circles.
The problem, of course, was not a new one; it was just that here was somebody doing something about a situation that, subliminally, had perplexed us all. I hearkened back, as the talk rolled on, to the time when our morning competitor in Washington warmly supported Eisenhower in its editorial columns, while its editorial cartoonist [Herblock] persisted in presenting the General as the very personification of Simple Simon. The town took wry delight in the Post's embarrassment, but the newspaper somehow survived. It seems to me the cartoonist went on a vacation, or something.
I am going into all this not to suggest that editorial cartoons no longer belong on editorial pages (which seems to me a dubious proposition), but only to make one point: there is potency in this branch of journalistic commentary. A good argument could be advanced, I think, that the editorial cartoonists in this country have more immediate impact on public opinion than editors, or columnists, or TV anchormen, or any other group.
What makes a good cartoon? Everyone has his prejudices. I, for instance, happen to be partial to those that make a serious point with a humorous twist. In times such as these, however, when very little that happens is at all funny, it is fortunate indeed that a good cartoon can be sad, or bitter, or furious.
Some say that, because cartoons rely on over-statement or exaggeration — distortion, if you will — they must be basically mean. I don't agree; a number of my favorite cartoonists, including Gib Crockett of the Washington Star-News, are consistently good-natured in their approach. That quality should be no more unwelcome on an editorial page than it is in real life.
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| "Yankee Gone Home" by Gib Crockett in Washington Star-News, January, 1973 |
The essence of good cartooning, needless to say, is simplicity. This is true of almost any sort of artistic expression, graphic or otherwise, but in cartooning it is the name of the entire game. You cannot be subtle in a cartoon. You cannot be balanced. You cannot worry too much even about being fair.
The cartoonist produces his effect by over-simplifying — by stripping away all the qualifications, the "yes, buts" and "on the other hands," and reducing his message to one pure unequivocal statement.
That, obviously, makes editors uneasy. One such pure, unequivocal statement says far more to more readers than a thousand carefully considered, nicely balanced words. So in addition to being more influential with public opinion in general, the cartoonist may even have more effect than the editor on the public's perception of his newspaper's stance.
This is why the editorial nose is always out of joint in relation to cartoonists — more than usual these days, because of the unusually complex and critical nature of the issues we are trying to deal with. My own guess is that, despite their discomfiture, most editors will let cartoonists continue to dominate the editorial pages, just as they have all along.
The reason, in one pure and unequivocal statement, is that the editorial page would be so damn dull without its cartoon!
—NEWBOLD NOYES, November 5, 1973
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| "And That's the Truth" by Mike Peters in Dayton Daily News, August 16, 1973 |
If you happen to be in Washington D.C. looking for something worthwhile to do, "A Savage Art" The Life & Cartoons of Pat Oliphant" premieres today at the DC/DOX'25 film festival. Bill Banowsky's documentary examines Oliphant's career through interviews with the cartoonist himself, his family, and colleagues. We are told that the documentary also features several of his cartoons.
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| Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, ca., Feb. 12, 1966 |
I can't be there (and if the AAEC convention organizers get permission to screen it at our convention in Baltimore in September, I'm afraid it appears unlikely that I'll be able to be there, either), so instead, today's Graphical History Tour highlights some of Oliphant's amazing work.
A collection of my favorite Oliphant cartoons would require a sequel post or seven, so I have limited my choices to cartoons that do not include caricatures of actual persons. I would like to focus on the artistry that inspired so many cartoonists of my generation to mimic his style.
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| by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, March 3, 1970 |
Compare his 1966 depiction of Vietnam, atop this post, with this one four years later. The sarcasm is the same, but the tone is entirely different.
Not only is the setting much darker, the clean-shaven kids in the first cartoon have been replaced by grizzled, war-weary adults, even though the soldiers would be about the same age in either cartoon. (The best and brightest guys in the white shirts and skinny ties are gone entirely in the 1970 cartoon.)
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| by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, April 18, 1972 |
Here Oliphant demonstrates an adeptness in portraying the ravages of age on his cartoon character as a parallel with the ravages of war on her country. The forty years between France reclaiming Indochina from its (brief) Japanese occupation after World War II to North Vietnam's conquest of the South three years after Oliphant drew this cartoon wear heavily on her, successive liberators notwithstanding.
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| By Pat Oliphant in Washington Star, Nov. 6, 1980 |
Here’s a theme Oliphant revisited more than once, but this is his most impressive depiction of the American Electoral Machine as something massive, complex, and somewhat antiquated. Its engines, gears, fly wheels, pistons, and furnace occupy almost every square millimeter of the frame, save for the exhausted Uncle Sam dwarfed by it in the lower right corner. You can almost feel the heat and smell the coal, soot, and metal in the air.
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| By Pat Oliphant for Universal Press Syndicate, March 22, 1982 |
Ronald Reagan, complaining about TV news reporting of the recession early in his presidency, griped, "Is it news that some fellow out in South Succotash who has just been laid off should be interviewed nationwide?" Pat Oliphant took that dismissive, elitist remark and created this excellent cartoon.
Neatly divided by the railroad, we have dirty, downtrodden, and darkly satanic South Succotash on the wrong side of the tracks. Layoffs and welfare frauds (a longtime Republican byword) combine to outnumber the population. You wouldn't want to live there.
The White House sits perched high on the hills of North Succotash, home to a pleasant golf course, and lovely trees. Its 500 residents pull down millions yet somehow pay no taxes.
And it all fits in one 3-by-5 panel. No animated panorama. Not even color.
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| By Pat Oliphant for Universal Press Syndicate, Feb. 24, 1983 |
Upwind of South Succotash, Oliphant’s Burfordville, named for one of Ronald Reagan’s Environmental Protection Agency administrators (incidentally also the mother of a current Supreme Court Justice), cannot possibly exist in the real world. But Oliphant has rendered it in such rich detail that you would swear that it must be real.
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| By Pat Oliphant for Universal Press Syndicate, June 6, 1983 |
A horse cannot roll around on the ground convulsed with laughter, but if it could, this is exactly what it would look like.
Credit the portion of Oliphant's career living out West perhaps. He is a master at drawing — and sculpting — horses, and you can tell how much more loving care he puts into drawing horses than, say, cats. For years, I struggled to depict horses that appeared to be capable of motion; I credit Pat Oliphant as a reference point for every horse I have drawn successfully.
Now, I would have liked to include some more recent cartoons in this discussion, but I had a problem finding examples of superior draftsmanship that didn't include caricatures. So compare this cartoon from 2001...
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| by Pat Oliphant for Universal Press Syndicate, Feb. 6, 2001 |
...with a similarly themed cartoon from 1980:
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| by Pat Oliphant in Washington Star, Oct. 30, 1980 |
Both cartoons convey the wind and chill, dampness and dreariness outside their respective pawn shops. The earlier one, however, is meticulously rendered, whereas the later one appears rushed and cursory. The elevated perspective of "Lee Iacocca Sent Us" is visually arresting in a way that the Presidential Seal cartoon isn't.
Of course, there's no point in drawing the same cartoon twice, right?
Oliphant's eyesight has betrayed him these days, and there could be some of that showing up by 2001. His having rejected the use of duoshade since 1980 also makes a difference; yet I would point out that the South Succotash, Burfordville, and Western character cartoons are all drawn without it.
With that, I leave you to draw your own conclusions.
Today's Graphical History Tour continues rummaging through the dusty files of cartoons from my salad, appetizer, and cheese course days.
Last week's GHT left off with a cartoon marking the tenth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, so let's start off with this cartoon marking the twentieth.
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| in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., April 20, 1995 |
My cartoon was an homage to the famous one by David Levine of LBJ showing off his appendicitis scar. I was commenting that we were still arguing over what the lessons of Vietnam were. Did we need to stop getting involved in domestic disputes overseas? Or was the problem that we failed to commit to overwhelming force?
It was a debate the U.S. was having in the absence of an International Communist Threat. The fall of the Soviet Union was supposed to herald the End of History, whatever that meant; yet our supposed Peace Dividend had already been partly spent in the the former Yugoslavia and in Haiti.
One of my highly respected colleagues cast some shade last week on editorial cartoons that pay homage to classic editorial cartoons. I'm as guilty of that as anyone (I'll note that he and I have both ripped off Bill Mauldin's Weeping Lincoln cartoon). I guess if there is a rule about such things, it is to avoid copying someone else's idea that is already an overexposed meme on the internets.
I say that as someone who once cartooned Bill Clinton as a bunch of dancing screensaver babies.
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| in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., April 13, 1995 |
Sticking with April of 1995 for a moment but turning to a local issue: Milwaukee Aldermen Dan Schramm and Tom Nardelli objected to the Common Council settling a lawsuit by the family of Konerak Sinthasomphone to the tune of $850,000. Sinthasomphone was the 14-year-old Laotian-American boy returned to Jeffrey Dahmer's clutches by police officers Joseph Gabrish and John Balcerzak on May 27, 1991.
Schramm blamed Dahmer's victim for having put himself in danger, and Nardelli cast aspersions on his parents. We'll never know why Konerak didn't keep his distance from the man still on parole for drugging and sexually assaulting Konerak’s older brother; we do know why Gabrish and Balcerzak chose to believe the white serial killer rather than the Asian boy with a hole drilled through his skull or the Black women who called the police for help.
Can't we talk about something more pleasant?
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| in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, April 8, 2005 |
Jumping ahead to April of 2005, here's another local issue cartoon. Sort of.
Before getting into the topic of the cartoon, I just want to point out that I spent a lot of time and effort drawing in black around all that verbiage on the chalkboard. The verbiage isn't white-out, or white ink, or gesso, it's all absence of black ink. Oh, sure, I could have simply filled the space with black in Photoshop and superimposed the repeated sentence in Comic Sans. But we here at Bergetoons honor our commitment to bring you only the highest quality, hand-crafted cartoonistry.
I drew this cartoon before our present government made white supremacy official policy and DEI a dirty word. The editorial page of the Business Journal (at least twenty years ago), like Lt. Governor Barbara Lawton, was quite in favor of promoting diversity on corporate boards, and this character appeared in several of my cartoons accompanying those editorials.
Here's an earlier cartoon featuring the the fictional board of Gibson, Gibsen, Ibsen and Gibbs:
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| in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, June 13, 2003 |
No Photoshop cut-and-paste in that cartoon, either.
Moving on to April, 2015:
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| for Q Syndicate, April, 2015 |
About all that stuff I said about handcrafted artisanal cartoonistry and being above filling drawings in Photoshop, um, just forget that.
Once I decided that I needed to start sending out cartoons in living color, there was no way I was going to draw two versions of every cartoon: one in color and one in grayscale. Nope, nuh-uh! All the colorizing for one and halftones in the other is done in Photoshop to one black-and-white scan of one drawing.
This cartoon followed an early morning incident in March in which an unidentified man dressed in a construction suit tried to enter the White House grounds through the gate at Pennsylvania Avenue, but was stopped by Uniformed Division officers and taken into custody. Also that April, a man who had jumped the north fence onto the White House lawn in July pleaded guilty to trespassing on restricted grounds.
More seriously, the previous September, an Iraq War veteran named Omar Gonzalez had made it all the way into the White House through the North Portico doors, where he overpowered a Secret Service officer. He ran through most of the main floor before getting tackled by a counter-assault agent. He was later sentenced to seventeen months in prison.
That’s it for another Graphical History Tour. Please return your seats and tray tables to the upright position, and remain seated until history comes to a complete stop.
When I slap together these Graphical History Tours featuring my own cartoons, I usually dredge up one cartoon from each decade marker for the month. But when I started looking through the cartoons from April of 1985, I couldn't decide which one I wanted to write about.
So here are a whole bunch of them.
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| in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., Apr. 25, 1985 |
With the current maladministration punishing any media that don't kowtow to Trumpspeak, here's a reminder of an earlier president's efforts to get reporters to echo the Official Line.
Unlike the Gulf of Mexico, which has bore that name for centuries, the Reagan administration's space-based "Strategic Defense Initiative" was brand new. But it was popularly called "Star Wars" after the film series. Reagan and spokesflack Larry Speakes were up against late-night comedians and editorial cartoonists. "Star Wars" was shorter than "Strategic Defense Initiative" and pithier than "SDI."
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| in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha Wis., Apr. 4, 1985 |
This cartoon starred local Congressman Les Aspin (D-WI) in a triple role. The inset copies a cartoon I had drawn for the Ranger the previous November, after Aspin had debated Republican challenger Pete Janssen on the Parkside campus, cruising on his way to an eighth term. First elected in 1970 as a critic of the Vietnam War who had served as a U.S. Army officer in Vietnam and a Pentagon systems analyst under Robert MacNamara.
With some serious seniority under his belt in 1985, the Defense Department gadfly was named Chair of the House Armed Services Committee, and his more conservative positions soon came to the fore. I drew this cartoon after he voted in favor of Reagan's Star Wars program and the controversial MX missile system.
He would also support Reagan administration aid to the Contras fighting against the socialist government of Nicaragua, and later, George H.W. Bush's build-up to the Gulf War I. It got him deposed as Armed Services Committee Chair, but only briefly; it also got him named Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense.
In the meantime, his House position in those days got us Blue Angel fly-overs on Fourths of July hereabouts.
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| in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha Wis., Apr. 11, 1985 |
Wharton School of Business D-student Donald Trump has been wreaking havoc recklessly imposing and revoking draconian tariffs, eviscerating your 401k and college savings fund. It's all part of his cunning plan to undo decades of global free trade.
Forty years ago, the postwar American dominance of world markets was suddenly challenged by Japan. In the 1960's, Americans considered Japanese products cheap and of inferior quality; but after the energy crisis of the 1970's made gas-guzzlers unfashionable, Japanese automakers produced fuel-efficient cars while U.S. automakers were slow to retool.
The U.S. complaint was that Japan was not letting American goods into their country while underselling our domestic manufacturers. (And then buying our domestic manufacturers.) At the end of March, both houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly in favor of resolutions calling for retaliation against Japan unless it reduced its trade imbalance with the U.S. Over the course of the year, 300 protectionist bills were introduced in Congress by members of both political parties.
So the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations hammered out free trade agreements wherever they could; and thus Coke was able to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. And domestic manufacturers moved all the jobs to Mexico, China, and wherever the median wage was a bushel of beans per month.
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I drew an alternating pair of comic strips for the Ranger that year. "Reductio and Absurdam" starred a man and a woman — I never established which was Reductio and which was Absurdam — who appeared in a variety of situations. They might be a couple, or co-workers, or teller and customer, as the gag warranted.
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| "Reductio and Absurdam" in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha Wis., April 11, 1985 |
The only consistent conceit was that, except for any text, I drew the cartoon in charcoal. The problem with charcoal as opposed to india ink is that I couldn't go back and erase pencil marks showing around the charcoal.
I called the other cartoon "Post Nasal Strip." That I drew with india ink, the medium I've relied on for most of my cartoons for not quite 60 years.
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| "Post Nasal Strip" in UW-Parkside Ranger, Kenosha Wis., Apr. 11, 1985 |
"Post Nasal Strip" tended to be more topical than "Reductio and Absurdam," here highlighting a quote by Sen. Jake Garn (R-UT) upon his return from a jaunt into outer space on the space shuttle Discovery. NASA had publicly mused about sending a artist, journalist, or teacher as the first civilian into space, but gave the seat to the Chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies instead.
Garn had flown as a pilot with the U.S. Navy and the Utah National Guard before winning election to Congress in 1974. Designated "payload specialist" for the Discovery flight, he was the guinea pig for experiments on Space Adaptation Syndrome. So basically, he was there to throw up.
And so he did. And the rest is History.
"Jake Garn was sick, was pretty sick. I don't know whether we should tell stories like that. But anyway, Jake Garn, he has made a mark in the Astronaut Corps because he represents the maximum level of space sickness that anyone can ever attain, and so the mark of being totally sick and totally incompetent is one Garn. Most guys will get maybe to a tenth Garn, if that high. And within the Astronaut Corps, he forever will be remembered by that."
Two side notes about my cartoon: I snuck in the Ranger Features Editor, Jim Niebuhr, as the fellow delivering the punch line in the final panel. And yes, having performed on a thrust stage, I know what a vomitorium really is.
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| in UW-Parkside Ranger, Somers Wis., May 2, 1985 |
Last week's Graphical History Tour was all about the fall of South Vietnam, so I'll close with this cartoon drawn for its tenth anniversary.
The cartoon was supposed to accompany an article about the anniversary. The article didn't run, but the Ranger ran my cartoon anyway, just below the cartoon I had drawn for the editorial page.
You'll notice that there is one president missing from my cartoon. There was a war in Vietnam (this time with China) during Jimmy Carter during his presidency, but the U.S. stayed out of if. Nor did Carter commit American troops to a shooting war anywhere else, so there was no particular reason for me to include Carter in this cartoon.
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| "American Monument in Southeast Asia" by Frank Miller in Des Moines Register, March 20, 1975 |
Two weeks ago, our Graphical History Tour visited southeast Asia for the 50th anniversary of the fall of Phnom Penh to the communist Khmer Rouge. Today, we return for Part Thieu.
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| "We're Gettin' Out of Here" by Dave Engelhardt in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 1, 1975 |
North Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion of the South in January, 1975, its People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and the Viet Cong (properly, the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam) racking up a string of victories. As it became crystal clear that the U.S. Calvary was not going to ride in to save the day, South Vietnamese President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu pulled back the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) for a last-ditch, desperate bid to protect his capital, then known as Saigon.
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| "We Would Be Much Braver Than This" by Pat Oliphant in Washington [DC] Star, ca. Apr. 3, 1975 |
ARVN’s hurried retreat left military hardware abandoned in its wake, and ran through the panicked evacuation of civilians. Anyone with any connection to civilian government or the U.S. military fled in fear for their lives, with whatever they could carry.
The Chicago Tribune reported isolated instances of Americans in the path of the retreat being robbed by ARVN soldiers. The report quoted an anonymous Westerner that, "The South Vietnamese soldier feels he has been stabbed in the back by the Americans. He feels that he has had to suffer because of the war, but Americans come and go in Vietnam, brandishing their dollars, and he feels they owe him something, anything."
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| by Jeff MacNelly in Richmond [VA] News-Leader, ca. Mar. 30, 1975 |
That report quoted an American teacher in Saigon: "The Vietnamese people are convinced that America has betrayed them. They believe we led them into the battle, then ran away and left them to fight. They have very little respect for us as a people."
On the other hand, a Vietnamese teacher at a Catholic school told the same reporter, "Americans have a tremendous guilt complex about what they have done in our country, the mistakes they have made, and now they feel everybody here hates them for it. Actually, the Vietnamese people don't hate the Americans, they just don't understand them. But who does?"
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| "Selling It to Congress Won't Be Easy" by Wayne Stayskal in Chicago Tribune, April 13, 1975 |
Acknowledging that the United States still had an obligation to the people who had relied on American promises, the Ford Administration opened the doors to as many Cambodian and South Vietnamese refugees as wanted to come to the U.S.
In a joint effort, the U.S. military and Immigration and Naturalization Services (predecessor to today's ICE) scrambled to accommodate an estimated 120,000 refugees.
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| "Can the Congress Be So Calloused" by Hugh Haynie in Louisville Courier-Journal, April 16, 1975 |
The airlift started with Cambodian and Vietnamese children — mostly given up by terrified parents — arriving a Camp Pendleton, California, to be adopted by American parents. Then came whole families, sponsored by religious congregations and civic groups until they could make a living for themselves in a country where nobody spoke their language.
Sponsoring agencies had to commit to finding housing and jobs for the refugees, most of whom arrived with little more than the clothes on their backs, whatever their circumstances might have been back home.
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| "There Goes the Old Neighborhood" by Dick Locher in Chicago Tribune, May 11, 1975 |
The cost of caring for the refugees while they were in temporary camps awaiting resettlement was predicted to cost $500 million (in 1975 dollars, or nearly $3 billion today). Inevitably, Americans being Americans, resistance and resentment soon arose to the wave of strangers who would supposedly — this may sound familiar — eat the neighborhood dogs and the cats.
U.S. News & World Report described refugees as "a motley mixture, from professors to bar girls." Washington Post Columnist Nicholas von Hoffman accused some of being "the pimps, madams, and hijackers of American food and material" and "the torturers from Gen. Thieu's political police."
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| "Thank God It's All Thieu's Fault" by Tom Curtis in Milwaukee Sentinel, April 3, 1975 |
Nguyễn Văn Thiệu had been President of South Vietnam since 1967. What opposition there was to his rule was unable to unite around any rival leader during elections in 1971.
Refugees fleeing south as the communists advanced "are voting with their feet," wrote National Observer columnist James M. Perry. "Trouble is, there is no one for them to elect. The army is in panic, the Thieu regime is broken, and Thieu himself is finally exposed as the pusillanimous fraud he has always been."
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| by David E. Seavey in National Observer, Washington DC, April 12, 1975 |
Thiệu resigned the presidency on April 22 in a rambling speech in which he revealed that to get him to sign the 1973 Paris Peace Accord, then-President Richard Nixon had promised that the U.S. military would return if the peace failed. Tearfully blaming the U.S. for his plight, he told his nation, "I never thought that a man like Mr. Secretary of State Kissinger would deliver our people to such a disastrous fate. ... If the Americans don't want to support us any more, let them go, get out! Let them forget their humanitarian promises!"
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| "King Rat" by Paul Szep in Boston Globe, April 22, 1975 |
Thiệu turned the government over to his ailing 72-year-old Vice President, Trần Văn Hương, who then resigned, succeeded by ARVN General Dương Văn Minh, 59. A leader of the 1963 coup that overthrew Ngô Đình Diệm, "Big Minh" had nevertheless earned a reputation for indecision.
Three days after ascending to the presidency, with PAVN advancing into Saigon and the U.S. hastily evacuating its embassy, Minh ordered ARVN to lay down its arms and surrendered to North Vietnam. Having offered no resistance to the victorious North, he was allowed to retire in peace, but eventually left for France.
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| "Will the Last One Out..." by Wayne Stayskal in Chicago Tribune, April 27, 1975 |
Thiệu retired to the United States, living out his days here in obscurity. He died at age 78 in Boston, Massachusetts on September 29, 2001 after suffering a stroke.
