Backing Into Forward

by Jules Feiffer

  Who says you can’t win them all?

  Village Voice, February 19, 1958

  COLLEGE DAYS

  I was drawing anti-Vietnam cartoons as early as 1963. I am quite sure I was the first cartoonist, certainly in mainstream newspapers, to attack U.S. policy in Vietnam. By the early sixties my cartoon was being syndicated in close to one hundred papers, almost every one of which I disagreed with editorially, and my cartoons reflected that. It took editors awhile, sometimes over a year, to discover that they had a viper in their nest. All that feature editors knew, and all they cared about, was that I was the new boy on the block whose cartoon appealed to college kids—the next generation of newspaper readers—whom they wanted to attract. In any case, my strip contained so much dialogue, panel by panel, that busy editors didn’t know what was in it much of the time.

  I had been nervous about allowing the strip to be syndicated. I loved the idea of being seen outside the Village and its environs, but I was afraid of censorship. Newspapers had a tradition of “fixing” elements in cartoons that might upset their readers. They doctored drawings and they rewrote copy. I had no intention of allowing that to happen.

  Bob Hall, president of the Hall Syndicate, the most innovative (and liberal) syndicate in the business, had been wooing me for over a year. I’d go up to his Midtown office, we’d sit around. He’d lounge behind his desk, a noisy, profane, tough-talking, smart, and immensely likable salesman. Hall was a great storyteller. He knew all the cartoonists and all the old-time great reporters. Sitting with him in his office was like being down the street in Tim Costello’s bar on Third Avenue. At one of our long-winded meetings, Hall became so exasperated with me and my ever-so-cautious approach to syndication that he tossed a sheet of blank stationery at me and barked, “If you’re so goddamn worried about your precious goddamn integrity, write your own goddamn contract!”

  So I did. Right there in his office as Hall looked on, I scrawled a deal memo that set out my terms for syndication: the usual 50-50 split, I retained ownership of copyright, and no subscribing newspaper could change a word of text. They could drop a particular strip if they objected to what I was saying, but they couldn’t alter it.

  Hall spent ten seconds looking over my memo, got up from his desk, and said, “It’s about time, goddammit! Let’s get a drink and celebrate, goddammit!”

  In my syndicated cartoon, I enjoyed outraging hawk sensibilities with my opposition to the war—although I couldn’t imagine why a prowar reader would bother reading me. By the time of Vietnam, I’d been in syndication since 1959. My politics should not have come as a surprise.

  After an initial queasiness—a lifelong reaction that befell me every time I defied my country or my mother—I felt a measurable pride in staking out a position that no other cartoonist except for Ollie Harrington in the Communist Daily World had arrived at (yet). My courage and my chutzpah were solidly in place within the safe confines of the Village Voice, whose readers might write angry letters to the editor but couldn’t get their hands on me.

  But when I began accepting offers to speak at colleges, the image of myself as a fearlessly honest and lonely antiwarrior took a hit. I knew what I was going to say on campuses, and I knew that it would come as a nasty surprise to upstate and midwestern audiences who had come to hear the Playboy cartoonist kid around about sex.

  I wasn’t anxious to go out in public and talk against the war in 1965 and 1966, when most Americans still supported our efforts. It wasn’t that I minded being yelled at (I rather enjoyed the idea), but I did mind some professor at some university standing up and, point by point, taking my arguments apart, making a fool of me in an area where, despite my homework, I didn’t feel that qualified.

  I had studied my antiwar gurus, Hans Morgenthau, I. F. Stone, Paul Goodman, and Tom Hayden, as well as Bob Scheer in Ramparts. In addition, I read the more balanced and therefore not nearly as useful coverage in the New York Times.

  But stepping onto college campuses never failed to remind me—no, it haunted me—that I had not gone to college. I didn’t have a degree or an education. I was lecturing students and faculty who had proof of accomplishments. Credentials. All I had was my ability to make people laugh by making points few others were making. But what did I really know?

  How much did I really know about the war and how much was I making up, as I did as a kid when Mimi and I got into political arguments? Each time I took a train or flew out to give a talk, I’d move into a mode of destination panic. I wasn’t invited to talk about Vietnam or civil rights or anything controversial. I was invited as a humorist. Irreverent was all right, acerbic was acceptable, but controversial? When I stopped being funny and started speaking my mind, audiences might rise as one and storm the stage. All my mother’s caution resurfaced: “Be nice, Sonny Boy. Don’t be a know-it-all. Don’t get people mad at you. You can’t change anything.”

  I was quite familiar with these panics. So, along with me on my trips, I brought my brain trust: sheafs of articles by Izzy Stone, and Morgenthau, and Goodman, and David Dellinger. Paul Goodman, in particular, focused on the morality of the war, the sheer brazenness behind our imperial policy. His high moral tone inspired a rage in me, pumped me up with the courage I needed before going on stage to shoot my mouth off and be exposed as an uninformed dolt.

  I had stumbled on a formula for my college speeches: open soft with a joke or two the way you’re supposed to, then devote ten minutes or so to the whys and wherefores of my work, and then, after I’d entertained them and begun to interest them, launch into a mordant but amusing rundown of the current American scene from a left perspective that they were not likely to encounter on college campuses in the early sixties.

  Reactions were unpredictable. Sometimes I felt I had them in the palm of my hand, other times I lost them and sensed their discomfort and bewilderment. “Who is this madman and why doesn’t he go away?” Sometimes it was both at the same time. Regardless, I would end my speech with an assault on the war, determined to impose my views in the wan hope that eventually I would see some light at the end of the tunnel.

  The reactions I got seemed to have little to do with the unwelcome ideas I had to convey. My success or failure in the Vietnam part of the speech depended entirely on the opening few sentences spoken fifteen minutes earlier. A big, big laugh right at the start ensured that audiences were going to love me, no matter how seditious my later comments. If there was scattered laughter or only a titter, I was a goner.

  Here’s how I opened: “I have two characters who appear in my cartoons, Bernard and Huey. Bernard is innocuous, ineffectual, and in all things a loser. Huey is a make-out man, sexy, cynical, behaves badly, and women cannot resist him. The questions I get continually from my readers are, ‘Are you Bernard?’ and ‘Who among your friends is Huey?’”

  Waves of laughter, followed by applause. And after that the sober, unfunny part of my talk worked like a dream. No one stood up to dispute my facts—or on the few occasions when someone did, my response was better informed than I was and was usually greeted with approval, laughter, and applause. But only if Bernard and Huey worked. If the audience reaction to my opening gag was soft, my speech was dead in the water.

  Protests against the war, even those as innocuous as mine, confused and pissed off the Johnson administration. We who were protesting and demonstrating were not playing the game as rooted in tradition. Not since World War I, when radicals and socialists opposed our entry into the war, with Eugene Debs and others going to prison for their dissent, had there been serious opposition to any of our wars once they were declared (or, as in the current fashion, undeclared).

  Robert McNamara at Defense, Dean Rusk at State, and McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, resented and deplored outside interference in the execution of their foreign policy. We had democratically elected a government to run things, so who did we peace marchers think we were, trying to tell the experts what to do? They, the Pentagon, State, and the CIA, were in
charge and we were fortunate to have them. They had access to information we didn’t have. They had captured enemy documents. They had the domino theory, which stated that once Vietnam went Communist, Laos and Cambodia and the rest of Southeast Asia would fall, and then on to the Philippines, Hawaii, and the Red tide would soon enough wash up on the shores of Malibu and Santa Monica.

  In my campus speeches I offered a view (wittily, I hoped, but only mildly satirical) on how policy is made in Washington:

  It is a given that spells of paranoia periodically affect our domestic and foreign affairs. The prophets of paranoia mix and mingle with the old-boy network they went to school with—politicians, government bureaucrats, and statesmen who, as the pressure mounts, are moved to soften their “wait and see” attitude and commence a measured march to the ramparts, thus stamping the growing paranoia with “moderate” accreditation. These insiders, members of the club with their old-school institutional and foundation ties, know what’s going on. They are qualified. We, who are in dissent, are not. They are experts. We are not. Consequently, our dissenting views are not to be trusted or taken seriously. To challenge the views of the club, views that with op-ed and TV talking-head exposure ascend to conventional wisdom within days, is to display a willful and dangerous ignorance in confronting the crisis at hand.

  Please fill in the above with the name of the current crisis.

  And when the conventional wisdom behind this month’s or this year’s crisis turns out to be seriously flawed or out-and-out wrong, none of its advocates, pundits, or publicists lose stature. None of them is cast out of the club, dismissed, or demoted from his government post or foundation. None is disgraced. None is asked to resign—although a few choose voluntarily to step aside to “devote more time to their families.”

  And few change their minds. Rather they change assignments—from high-level jobs where “mistakes were made” to new arenas where, within moments, they are just as high-level, knowledgeable, self-confident, and assertive as if mistakes had not been made. Their views are still sought and their authority is still respected. They show up on CNN, Meet the Press, and Charlie Rose. Their mistakes (and past history) have been rendered inoperative.

  It was the members of the club who drew my attention as a cartoonist. They brought screamingly to the surface everything I’d hated about authority since early childhood. The McNamara explanation—“We have access to information that you don’t have”—reminded me of my mother’s answer when I asked her to give me a reason for an action or decision she couldn’t be bothered to explain or defend. The reason she gave that ended all discussion was “Because.”

  My government was, in a sense, telling me “Because.” And it made me every bit as outraged as I was at eight and nine. But I was not powerless now. I was a grown-up, determined to speak out and demonstrate and write and draw cartoons and make speeches. And now the isolation was beginning to go the other way. The term credibility gap, which did not exist before the Vietnam years, came into use. We outsiders had managed to put the club on the defensive. “Because” no longer ended debate. It inflamed it.

  Village Voice, August 4, 1966

  DAVE

  My father died watching a Yankee game. It was in the ninth inning, the Yankees behind, the bases loaded, a Yankee at bat, a hot July day in 1963 five months before the president was shot. My parents were living in a two-bedroom apartment in a high rise on Kissena Boulevard in Queens, where they had moved seven years earlier as part of the Jewish migration out of the Bronx into Queens and Long Island.

  Dave had been in bad health for about a decade, in and out of the Veteran’s Hospital in Queens with two heart attacks and prostate surgery. A lifetime of smoking had done him in. He breathed hard and sometimes noisily, but he walked fast, slightly bent but still with a soldier’s posture.

  He had two good world wars behind him. In the first, he had seen action in France, and while he himself had never spoken of the war, my mother told us that he had been a member of the company of men sent out to find the famous “lost battalion” in France’s Argonne forest. This was a battalion of men that had disappeared without a trace during a firefight with the Germans. No radio contact, no hint of their fate. My father’s company found them and rescued them, and more I was never to know other than that it was a feat of heroism.

  World War I was the high point of his life. The rest of his life was the low point. He never, ever figured out civilian life, and while his brothers and sister did well (two of them became rich), my father couldn’t keep three men’s shops open. He was lousy as a shopkeeper, had no business in business.

  For a while, he collected rents for a landlord named Theodore Badman. This was during the Depression, and when particular tenants couldn’t come up with the monthly rent, Dave, a soft touch, paid it for them.

  On Saturday mornings, my father liked to take me down to his office and let me sit at his desk, a giant old rolltop. He enjoyed bringing me to his job. It must have made him proud to show his son another world he inhabited, where my mother couldn’t diminish him.

  My father and I had only one safe subject to talk about: the New York Yankees. We were both fans. We talked about the Yankees from the Depression thirties into the Camelot sixties, our only conversation that was free of tension.

  He was loving and sweet when he could service us, and the rest of the time he hardly said a word. Late every afternoon during my Bronx childhood and young manhood, he would prepare seeded slices of rye bread smeared with butter, topped with thinly sliced radishes, and serve them to Alice, Mimi, and me as we did our homework. He looked on, pleased with us and pleased with himself as we devoured the snack.

  His life with us was nonverbal, his talk no-nonsense, getting him from point A to point B. When he’d had his say, that was it. My attempts to get a discussion going were seldom picked up on. I would make my point and he would respond, “You’re full of hot air.” That was it. He’d go back to his book or newspaper. This man who taught me, with infinite patience and frustration, how to recognize words off flash cards treated conversation between us as something close to an invasion of privacy.

  Silence was his first language, not Polish. His life was spent translating his native silence into words that his wife and children and fellow workers and friends might understand. But when he found the opportunity to slip back into silence, he was most himself.

  My mother had been criticizing my father since I was four or five, beginning with the throwaway line “Your father is a good man, but—” And the buts ran on for novel length.

  He never spoke a word against her. His acceptance of her backstabbing, without speaking out in his own defense, without the mildest criticism of her, drove me mad with irritation. I was his advocate and couldn’t stand that he refused to help his own cause.

  It became my mission to prod Dave into criticism of Rhoda. One night when they still lived in the Bronx, I took him out to a bar and began pouring Scotches down him. I rottenly repeated to him some of the things she had told me about him, not at all concerned with how this might hurt him. I was interested only in advancing my scheme to get him to insult my mother.

  He didn’t fall for it. “She didn’t mean that,” he said and said again. He said, “Your mother is a wonderful woman,” sticking to his story no matter how much Scotch I wasted on him.

  I loved him for his sweetness, his kindness, and his gentlemanly acceptance—without a trace of self-pity—of being a victim. And a victim he was. My mother often treated him with contempt, his American Legion buddies with amiable condescension.

  My father belonged to an American Legion post in Midtown Manhattan, a town house on East Thirty-ninth Street off Park Avenue. His army buddies aged into his American Legion buddies: Company E, 305th Infantry, Seventy-seventh Division, the only friendships my father maintained late in life. All were men who had done well, who were helpful to him when necessary, and who mocked him good-naturedly and habitually. It was one of his buddies, a man named Way
ne Oakley, who got him a New Jersey waterfront job in the navy’s Quartermaster Corps during World War II. My father was a storekeeper (once again), but in navy terms it meant that he was a civilian who kept track of requisitions, doled them out, kept inventory, and, I liked to think, maintained a stream of cheery conversation with his navy cohorts, the like of which in volubility and profanity would have been hard to believe at home.

  There were few Jews among his Legion buddies. His closest friends were Mark Gropper and Manny Rosenstein. Most of his fellow legionnaires were Gentile, Republican, and unserious anti-Semites. One evening when I was in the army and on weekend pass, my father escorted me into the clubhouse dining room, which took up the parlor floor of the legionnaires’ town house. He passed by table after table, introducing his soldier-boy son, on leave from basic at Fort Dix. At one table a drinking buddy genially clasped my father’s hand with his two hands and yelled, “Hey, Dave, you know, there’s a strong bond between the Jews and the Arabs. I guess you know who’s holding the bond.” He released my father’s hand and both men laughed heartily. I simmered, thinking: “These assholes like Dave Feiffer, they really do. He’s one white Jew.”

  “Sonny, sit down, try to not get too upset, Daddy is dead,” my mother said when she called on that July afternoon.

  I got a cab out to Queens. My father was stretched out on his back on the living room couch, covered from the head down with a white bed-sheet. The next-door neighbors had helped lift him from the floor where he had collapsed, and they had laid him out.