By 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.”
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