Comics: Extinction of the Longhorn

Just as sure as presidential candidates crop up every four years, so is Cartoonist Walt Kelly sure to needle them in his comic strip, Pogo. He is off to a fast start this year. During the New Hampshire primary campaign, he sketched Romney, Rockefeller and Nixon as windup dolls running off haphazardly in all directions—and in the case of Romney, backward. Last week it was Lyndon Johnson’s turn in the guise of a booted, bulbous-nosed Texas longhorn that horns in on a picture-taking session. “You gittin’ my good side, oF buddy?” he inquires of the photographer. “Which side’s that?” retorts an onlooker.

Most newspapers seemed to think the caricature was harmless enough to be printable, but the Washington Evening Star did not. It dropped the strip for three days. As Managing Editor I. William Hill put it: “If someone wants to go after the President that viciously, it ought to be on the editorial page. It’s a little oldfashioned, I know, but we still think that the office of the President of the U.S. deserves some dignity.”

The disappearance of the strip brought more than the usual calls of protest from loyal readers, who, says Hill, make up a “medium-sized, highly articulate, aggressive following.”