Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 124

120
Popular Culture Review
In these sequences of Pogo, Kelly portrayed McCarthy as a somewhat
pompous Don Quixote, a noble but hopeless figure. Robert Kennedy, on the
other hand, was presented the way that many in the McCarthy group saw him—
as an opportunist, a “hitch-hiker” on the anti-war campaign. However, later,
after Kennedy’s death, when this series was reprinted in book form, Kelly added
a footnote to his introduction:
The cartooned figure of Senator Robert can be found here.
Normally the cartoonist drops the caricature of one who has
departed. But, in truth, it is hard to comprehend that this friend
is gone. Besides, he believed in the fun we all shared. To that
extent also, he lives on.15
The most important, and controversial, caricatured figure in Pogo
during the Vietnam era, as one would expect, was Lyndon Johnson. In 1968,
Johnson decided not to seek another term as president following the nightmare
of the Tet offensive and his poor showing in the March New Hampshire primary
against Eugene McCarthy. Still, Johnson is the key figure, the lightning rod, of
the period. He was also one of the most controversial and disliked political
figures in public life.16 It was with all this in mind that Kelly decided to include
Johnson in the strip. Johnson had made appearances in Pogo as early as 1965. In
that year he was played by a swamp character (Albert the Alligator) wearing a
Stetson and always saying things like “OF Hoss.”17 In 1967, Johnson appeared
in somewhat more negative tones, part of a surreal sequence in a Pogo book set
in a pre-historic “Pandemonia.” Johnson’s face was drawn on the body of a
centaur, with a cowboy hat pulled down over his eyes. He spent most of his time
shaking hands and asking “to put it there ol’ buddy.” In this series the Great
Society was satirized, since the centaur was called the “Loan Arranger” who
rescued folks for a living. He also protected the inhabitants from a Red Dragon
that had a Mao look-alike as a rider.18
Finally, in 1968, Johnson had his third incarnation in the Pogo strip.
This time he was transformed into a longhorn steer “with vision problems.” The
series started with the steer having somehow gotten his head caught in wooden
Mount Rushmore cut out. In a weakly veiled reference to Vietnam, Kelly had
Johnson admitting at one point that “once I stick my head in, don’t seem like I
gets out easy.” It was asked at that point, “how he get his head in in the first
place.”19
It was soon determined that the steer needed new glasses and that
assumption triggered a string of puns and political inside jokes. Because of his
poor vision, Johnson claimed to be thinking about starting a new career (another
reference to reality) and that he might become part of a comic strip. He asked
Pogo, “where is we at right chere now?” The answer, of course, was that they