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Bill Mauldin blows his sergeant's whistle as a call to battle. At his weakest when assaulting local targets, such as St. Louis' antiquated building code, he is strongest when blazing away with lethal skill at the vulnerable figures that prowl the political jungles of Washington and the other capitals of the world. Mauldin understands the art of politics as few cartoonists do (he has run for public office) and plays on the public's fascination with the intricacies of the subject —a fascination that has kept Advise and Consent on the bestseller lists for 100 weeks. Thus he could reduce the political complexities of the row between the Speaker of the House and the chairman of the powerful Rules Committee to an easily digestible cartoon. "No hard feelin's, Mr. Sam," says Chairman Howard Smith into the telephone after losing the power struggle to Speaker Sam Rayburn. Then Smith continues solicitously, as he sticks pins into a voodoo doll of Rayburn: "By the way, how are you feelin'?"
Cracks in the Idol. This spirit of attack charges Mauldin's work. At home, he can ridicule the race issue by drawing two Dixie rednecks armed with baseball bats and speculatively eying a Negro just out of the picture. "Let that one go," says one. "He says he don't wanna be mah equal." He treats the space race between Russia and the U.S. with barbell scorn: a monkey up a tree demands of its space-suited companion back from a quick zip through the firmament, "Where the hell have you been?" Ranging across the world for targets, he aims at many, misses few. Mauldin's Khrushchev stands in the U.N., a squat, solitary and ridiculous figure with his own shoe stuffed into his mouth. As for Russia's huge and backward Orientalally, Communist China, few cartoonists could sum it up better than Mauldin's trenchant cartoon that shows the Chinese as human ties beneath an oncoming train.
Occasionally, Mauldin's wallops land a little below the belt — as in his figure of Charles de Gaulle sitting by the bed of a skeleton labeled "Colonialism" and observing cheerfully: "While there's life there's hope." A liberal by instinct, Mauldin refused to be hog-tied by the hampering allegiances that can destroy a cartoonist's punch. "I have lots of acquaintances and few friends," he says. Democrat Mauldin was all for John Kennedy during the campaign, but lost little time after the election in searching for cracks in the idol. He poked fun at the new host of Harvard men in Washington, showed Kennedy sitting in a rocking chair knitting while U.S. prestige declined. On the two crucial issues of the New Frontier so far —Laos and Cuba — Mauldin has hit as hard as anyone: Khrushchev amiably consumes a fowl (Laos) as Kennedy looks on, a blind Kennedy is flung heels over head by a Seeing-Eye dog (the CIA) hot on the trail of a skunk clearly meant to be Cuba. "Once Kennedy was President," says Mauldin, "I didn't even give him the usual 100 days of grace. I stung him hard. And I'll sting him again." Such deep engagement in battle, says Cartoonist Paul Flora of Hamburg's weekly Die Zeit, "is Mauldin's strength. He may outlast us all."