The two Yalies found common ground despite their generational and political differences.
The two Yalies found common ground despite their generational and political differences.
B y 1976, Garry Trudeau, just six years out of Yale, was riding high. His counter-cultural daily cartoon Doonesbury, then running in 450 newspapers across the land, was followed religiously not only by his fellow Baby Boomers but by political insiders. As President Gerald Ford put it, “There are only three major vehicles to keep us informed as to what is going on in Washington: the electronic media, the print media and ‘Doonesbury’ — not necessarily in that order.” That February, at the age of just 27, the first strip cartoonist to win a Pulitzer Prize was featured on the cover of Time. And that May, Trudeau became the youngest person ever to receive an honorary degree from his alma mater.
William F. Buckley Jr. traveled to New Haven for that occasion because that was also the day his son Christopher was handed his Yale sheepskin. But the prominent member of Yale’s Class of 1950 was confused when the graduating seniors gave Trudeau a standing ovation. The co-founder of National Review also could not make any sense of what Yale’s president was referring to when he praised Trudeau for his “satiric insights into the foibles and pretensions of both the notorious and the obscure” and “for helping keep us sane even when the times seem crazed.” As Christopher Buckley tells me, when his father admitted to him that he had no idea who Trudeau was, “I looked at him in astonishment as if he were unaware of World War II or the sinking of the Titanic.”
But the elder Buckley would soon both come to know and like Trudeau and to appreciate his vast oeuvre that often poked fun at the nation’s leading conservative politicians. And the two Yalies would form a lasting bond.
Buckley and Trudeau did not meet face-to-face until about a year later, when the journalist invited the cartoonist to dinner. That was shortly after Jim Andrews, the president of Universal Press Syndicate, which distributed to newspapers both Buckley’s columns and Trudeau’s ’toons, asked Buckley to write a foreword to an upcoming collection of Trudeau’s strips. An endorsement from a prominent conservative, Andrews figured, could help the cartoonist who had rocketed to fame with his celebrated Watergate strips broaden his audience still further.
Andrews’s hunch proved correct. Doonesbury’s Greatest Hits: A Mid-Seventies Revue, which featured an “Overture” by Buckley, sold so well that it was reprinted numerous times and was re-released in a new edition in 1986. In his remarks, Buckley confessed that he initially was embarrassed to be caught immersing himself in Trudeau’s cartoons on planes and trains. “People of all ages,” he noted, “have certainly thought me reverted to infantilism as they see the comic strips spread about me. But those who looked me in the eye would have detected that I share Yale’s pride and delight.” And he concluded his close textual analysis of several strips by stressing that “those in search of the meaning of humane letters need go no further than to Doonesbury.”
In the 1970s, both Buckley and Trudeau developed a penchant for establishing cordial relationships with those with whom they disagreed politically. Trudeau’s vast archive at Yale features dozens of friendly letters that were exchanged between Trudeau and Nixon as well as Ford aides who were spoofed in his strips. Consider what John Ehrlichman wrote to Trudeau in May of 1973 when Nixon’s former domestic policy adviser learned that his sudden resignation a couple of weeks earlier had required the cartoonist to ax a series of upcoming strips: “Sorry. Next time! — let me what you’re planning and I’ll try to cooperate.”
James Rosen, who now serves as the chief White House correspondent for Newsmax, stresses that the two cultural icons shared a common sensibility that transcended their politics. As an adolescent growing up in the 1980s, Rosen devoured Trudeau’s old collections such as the one to which Buckley contributed. “I actually longed to be Trudeau,” he says, “because he somehow enjoyed establishment acceptance, but maintained a hippie sensibility.” At the same time, Rosen also became a fervent admirer of Buckley, who ended up funding his first book — a study of John Mitchell, Nixon’s attorney general. “Both Yalies,” he adds, “were brilliant, handsome, and gifted, and both possessed a satirical wit that bordered on the subversive, trained as often on charlatans who broadly shared their politics as on targets who did not.”
While Trudeau and Buckley never became close friends, they continued to intersect over the years. In 1995, for his 25th Yale reunion, Trudeau and a few classmates arranged to sponsor a debate between Buckley and the Reverend William Sloan Coffin, which would be a reprise of their famous 1967 debate at the Yale Political Union. Both Buckley and Trudeau had close ties to Coffin, who served as the basis for the Doonesbury character, Reverend Sloan. A member of the Yale Class of 1949, Coffin had been in Buckley’s social circle when they were both undergraduates. When Trudeau arrived at Yale in 1966, Coffin was the college’s chaplain who had established a national following for his virulent opposition toward the Vietnam War. In his debate with Buckley the following year on campus, the fierce political opponents fired a series of salvos at one another. But the 1995 encounter was a whole different ballgame. “It was considered a bit of a disappointment,” Trudeau says, “because both debaters conducted themselves with warmth and mutual respect. We were expecting fireworks.”
After his retirement from his long-running PBS show Firing Line in 1999, Buckley began hosting intimate dinner parties at his Park Avenue apartment for National Review editors and select guests. Despite his declining health, Buckley very much enjoyed the wide-ranging intellectual conversations. In December 2001, Trudeau accepted Buckley’s invitation. Of those dinners, Buckley’s biographer Sam Tanenhaus tells me, “He invited all sorts of liberals and lefties,” but some automatically declined. Take the case of one former New York Times editor who, when interviewed by Tanenhaus, said that he feared “he was being set up to be kicked around by Bill Buckley.”
As Trudeau admits to me, on the evening of that dinner, he was “a little unnerved, concerned that I might be walking into some kind of ambush. But Buckley couldn’t have been a more gracious host. I was peppered with benign questions over dinner, but I don’t recall contentious discussions of politics, mostly curiosity about my process.”
When I inform Trudeau that the Yale archive includes a letter in which Buckley wrote that he enjoyed his company that evening and described him as “a wonderful guest,” the cartoonist responds: “How nice! I hope I wrote him first.” No prior letter from Trudeau has surfaced, but the record leaves little doubt that the admiration was mutual.