January 23, 2003

BY NEIL STEINBERG STAFF REPORTER

Bill Mauldin, 81, one of the great editorial cartoonists of the 20th century, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, whose characters Willie and Joe defined the average American foot soldier in World War II, died Wednesday of complications from Alzheimer's at a California nursing home.

Mr. Mauldin drew for the Chicago Sun-Times for nearly 30 years. As successful as he was at cartooning, he also pursued a wide range of other interests. He ran for Congress. He appeared in several Hollywood movies. He was also a pilot, logging thousands of hours of flight time and capping his career by flying a new 747 jumbo jet in 1970.

William Henry Mauldin was born in Mountain Park, N.M., on Oct. 29, 1921, the son of Edith and Sidney Mauldin. He grew up on a ranch near Phoenix, among other places. His father, an itinerant miner, "had an itchy foot," Mr. Mauldin said.

At 17, he went to Chicago for a year at the Academy of Fine Arts. Mr. Mauldin learned about the city's rising bridges by trying to watch a ship pass under the Michigan Avenue bridge while he was standing on it, unaware of what the ringing bells meant.

"One of the nice things about Chicago is its tolerance for rubes," he wrote years later.

Returning to Phoenix, he joined the Arizona National Guard in September 1940. Five days later, the Guard was called up.

Small and ornery, weighing 122 pounds, his legs bowed from childhood rickets, Pvt. Mauldin was assigned to the motor pool, but haphazard driving skills nudged him toward his division's newspaper.

Mr. Mauldin began doing spot drawings for the 45th Division News, but by 1943, he was drawing for the Mediterranean edition of the Army newspaper Stars and Stripes. He covered the fighting in Sicily, Salerno and Anzio. Willie and Joe were first drawn during the miserable winter of 1943-44, when American troops in Italy fought under tough conditions.

The pair offered a refreshing blast of candor in a time dominated by cheery propaganda. An exhausted and dirty Joe guarding three equally exhausted and dirty Germans was captioned with a quote from a rah-rah news dispatch: "Fresh, spirited American troops, flushed with victory, are bringing in thousands of hungry, ragged, battle-weary prisoners."

That won Mr. Mauldin his first Pulitzer Prize, in 1944. His cartoons, syndicated back home, were hugely popular--his first collection, Up Front, went on to sell 3 million copies.

Near Cassino, in Italy, Sgt. Mauldin was wounded, while working on a cartoon, by a fragment from an enemy mortar shell. He walked to an aid station, and a medic removed the shrapnel and handed him a Purple Heart.

He turned the incident into a memorable cartoon: Joe slouches infront of a medic, sitting at a table piled with Purple Hearts. "Just gimme th' aspirin. I already got a Purple Heart," he says.

Such irreverence could not go unpunished. Early in 1945, Gen. George S. Patton demanded that Stars and Stripes drop Mr. Mauldin.

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, aware of the morale value of Willie and Joe, intervened, arranging a meeting between the cartoonist and the famously gruff Patton.

"I was scared to death," Mr. Mauldin recalled, at Ike's death in 1969. "For 45 minutes, Patton lectured me on military history and his theories of discipline. It was a very eloquent chewing-out."

In 1947, he followed Up Front with another successful book, Back Home. In all, he published 14 books.

Like many vets, Mr. Mauldin had trouble adapting to civilian life after the war. His wartime marriage, to Norma Jean Humphries in 1942, ended in divorce in 1946. He worried that he had benefitted from the terrible world cataclysm.

"I never quite could shake off the guilt feeling that I had made something good out of the war," he said. "It wasn't a nice feeling."

His comics lost their edge and became merely strident. Newspapers in his syndicate fled, at one point dropping his cartoon at the rate of one a day.

"I became a bore," he later said.

He married again in 1947, to Natalie Sarah Evans.

When his contract with the syndicate ran out in 1948, he didn't try to renew it.

The next decade, he spent wandering. He covered the Korean conflict for Collier's, leading to the book Bill Mauldin in Korea (1952). He wrote five unpublished novels and acted in two war movies, "Teresa" and "Red Badge of Courage" (1951). In 1956, Mr. Mauldin ran for Congress, unsuccessfully, in New York.

In 1958, traveling through St. Louis, bad weather grounded his plane. He paid a call on the Post-Dispatch's artist, Dan Fitzpatrick, who was about to take a leave of absence and asked Mr. Mauldin if he had any idea who should replace him. Mr. Mauldin volunteered for the job.

That year, he won his second Pulitzer--a cartoon on the refusal of the Soviets to allow author Boris Pasternak to leave the country to accept his Nobel Prize.

The cartoon shows two emaciated prisoners, in rags and chains, splitting a log in the driving Siberian snow. "I won the Nobel Prize for literature," says one. "What was your crime?"

In 1962, he was hired by the Sun-Times, to great fanfare. He was chauffeured to his first day on the job in an Army jeep.

Mr. Mauldin did not rest on his laurels. Instead, he traveled the world for the newspaper.

When James Meredith enrolled to integrate the University of Mississippi, backed by federal troops, Mr. Mauldin was at the riot. In 1963, when President John F. Kennedy delivered his famous "I am a Berliner" speech at the Berlin Wall, Mr. Mauldin was there.

In 1965, he visited Vietnam. Mr. Mauldin was the only correspondent present when the Viet Cong hit the U.S. air base at Pleiku, where his son was stationed, and Mr. Mauldin's sketches and reporting of the assault ran all over the country.

In 1967, he went to Israel just in time for the Six Day War. He was unabashedly pro-Israel, drawing the country as a tiny but brave soldier menaced by giant hooknosed Arab figures.

Mr. Mauldin's most famous cartoon of the decade--and among the most famous editorial cartoons of all time--was penned the day Kennedy was assassinated.

The captionless cartoon shows the Abraham Lincoln figure from the Lincoln Memorial, bowed forward in his seat, face buried in his hands in grief.

The Sun-Times ran the cartoon over the entire back page, and many vendors sold the newspaper back page up, to display Mr. Mauldin's work.

More than 250,000 requests for reprints of the drawing came in. Jacqueline Kennedy asked for the original and placed it in the Kennedy Library at Harvard.

Mr. Mauldin won the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Distinguished Service to Journalism for the drawing.

His wife was killed in a car crash in August 1971 while driving to meet Mr. Mauldin at the airport. The next year, Mr. Mauldin married for a third time, to 26-year-old Christine Lund, an editorial assistant at the Chicago Daily News. They later divorced.

In retirement, the honors kept pouring in, too numerous to mention, except perhaps the U.S. Postal Service stamp showing Willie and Joe, part of a series commemorating the 50th anniversary of the war.

In his last years, Mr. Mauldin battled alcoholism and Alzheimer's. Survivors include seven sons--two from his first marriage, Bruce and Timothy--and four from his second, Andrew, David, John and Nathaniel, plus a teenage son from his third.

Click here for Willie and Joe Cartoons