Doonesbury has covered numerous political and social issues, some of which were pioneering and others that drew criticism:
1970s • A November 1972 Sunday strip depicting Zonker telling a little boy in a sandbox a fairy tale ending in the protagonist being awarded "his weight in fine, uncut Turkish
hashish" raised an uproar. • During the
Watergate scandal, a strip showed Mark on the radio with a "Watergate profile" of
John Mitchell, declaring him "Guilty! Guilty, guilty, guilty!!" A number of newspapers removed the strip and one,
The Washington Post, ran an editorial criticizing the cartoon. Following
Richard Nixon's death in 1994, the strip was rerun with all the instances of the word "guilty" crossed out and replaced with "flawed". • In June 1973, the military newspaper
Stars and Stripes dropped
Doonesbury for being too political. The strip was quickly reinstated after hundreds of protests by military readers. • September 1973:
The Lincoln Journal became the first newspaper to move
Doonesbury to its editorial page. • In February 1976, a storyline included the character
Andy Lippincott saying that he was gay. Dozens of papers opted not to publish the storyline, with
Miami Herald editor Larry Jinks saying, "We just decided we weren't ready for homosexuality in a comic strip." • In November 1976, when the storyline included the blossoming romance of Rick Redfern and Joanie Caucus, four days of strips were devoted to a transition from one apartment to another, ending with a view of the two together in bed, marking the first time any nationally run comic strip portrayed
premarital sex in this fashion. The strip was removed from the comics pages of a number of newspapers, although some newspapers opted to simply repeat the opening frame of that day's strip. • In June 1978, a strip included a coupon listing various politicians and dollar amounts allegedly taken from Korean
lobbyists, to be clipped and glued to a postcard to be sent to the
Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, resulting in an overflow of mail to the Speaker's office.
1980s • In 1985, a series of Doonesbury strips helped to repeal a 60-year-old discriminatory law in
Palm Beach, in
Florida. • In June 1985, a strip featuring
Aniello Dellacroce and
Frank Sinatra together, which referred to Dellacroce as an "alleged human" who has been charged with murder led to several papers dropping the strip and a statement from Sinatra. • In December 1988, the
Winston-Salem Journal dropped a Sunday strip featuring the
R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (in which a prospective executive cannot deny the link between smoking and cancer without bursting out laughing) because "it would be personally offensive to its employees." It was the first time the strip had been pulled in deference to a corporation. • In June 1989, several days' comics (which had already been drawn and written) had to be replaced with repeats, because the humor of the strips was considered in bad taste in light of the violent crackdown on protesters in
Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Trudeau himself asked for the recall, despite an interview published with Universal Press Syndicate Editorial Director
Lee Salem in the May 28, 1989,
San Jose Mercury News, in which Salem stated his hopes the strips could still be used.
1990s • In November 1991, a series of strips appeared to give credibility to a real-life prison inmate who falsely stated that former Vice President
Dan Quayle had connections with drug dealers. The strip sequence was dropped by some two dozen newspapers, in part because the allegations had been investigated and dispelled previously. Six years later, the reporter who broke the Quayle story, some weeks after the
Doonesbury cartoons, later published a book saying he no longer believed the story had been true. • In November 1993, a storyline dealing with California wildfires was dropped from several California newspapers, including the
Los Angeles Times,
The Orange County Register, and
The San Diego Union-Tribune. • In June 1994, the Roman Catholic Church took issue with a series of strips dealing with the book
Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe by
John Boswell. A few newspapers dropped single strips from the series, and the Bloomington, Illinois,
Pantagraph refused to run the entire series. • In March 1995,
John McCain denounced Trudeau on the floor of the Senate: "Suffice it to say that I hold Trudeau in utter contempt." This was in response to a strip about
Bob Dole's strategy of exploiting his war record during his
presidential campaign. The quotation was used on the cover of Trudeau's book
Doonesbury Nation. McCain and Trudeau later made peace: McCain wrote the foreword to
The Long Road Home, Trudeau's collection of comic strips dealing with character B.D.'s leg amputation during the second Iraq war. • In February 1998, a strip dealing with
Bill Clinton's
sex scandal was removed from the comics pages of a number of newspapers because it included the phrases "oral sex" and "semen-streaked dress".
2000s • In November 2000, a strip was not run in some newspapers when Duke said of presidential candidate
George W. Bush: "He's got a history of alcohol abuse and
cocaine." • In September 2001, a strip perpetuated the
Internet hoax that claimed George W. Bush had the lowest IQ of any president in the last 50 years, half that of
Bill Clinton. When caught repeating the hoax, Trudeau apologized "with a trademark barb – he said he deeply apologized for unsettling anyone who thought the president quite intelligent." • In 2003, a cartoon that publicized the recent medical research suggesting a connection between masturbation and a reduced risk of prostate cancer, with one character alluding to the practice as "self-dating", was not run in many papers; pre-publication sources indicated that as many as half of the 700 papers to which it was syndicated were planning not to run the strip. • In February 2004, Trudeau used his strip to make the apparently genuine offer of $10,000 (to the
USO in the winner's name) for anyone who could personally confirm that George W. Bush was actually present during any part of his service in the
National Guard. Reuters and CNN reported by the end of that week that despite 1,300 responses, no credible evidence had been offered. An FAQ posted on the
Doonesbury site in September of that year noted that the submissions, while "surreally entertaining", had failed to provide a single definitive corroborator, adding that Trudeau had donated the $10,000 to the USO anyway. • April 2004: On April 21, after nearly 34 years, readers finally saw B.D.'s head without some sort of helmet. In the same strip, it was revealed that he had lost a leg in the
Iraq War. Two days later, on April 23, after awakening and discovering his situation, B.D. exclaims "SON OF A
BITCH!!!" The single strip was removed from many papers—including
The Boston Globe—although in others, such as
Newsday, the offending word was replaced by a line.
The Dallas Morning News ran the cartoon uncensored, with a footnote that the editor believed profanity was appropriate, given the subject matter. An image of B.D. with an amputated leg also appeared on the cover of
Rolling Stone that summer (issue 954). • In June 2005, Trudeau published
The Long Road Home, a book devoted to B.D.'s recovery from his loss of a leg in Iraq. Although Trudeau opposed the Iraq War, the foreword was written by Senator
John McCain, a supporter of the war. McCain was impressed by Trudeau's desire to highlight the struggle of seriously wounded veterans, and his desire to assist them. Proceeds from the book, and its sequel
The War Within benefited
Fisher House. • July 2005: Several newspapers declined to run two strips in which
George W. Bush refers to his adviser
Karl Rove as "
Turd Blossom", a nickname Bush has been reported to use for Rove. • In September 2005 when
The Guardian relaunched in a smaller format,
Doonesbury was dropped for reasons of space. After a flood of protests, the strip was reinstated with an omnibus covering the issues missed and a full apology. • The strips scheduled to run from October 31 to November 5, 2005, and a Sunday strip scheduled for November 13 about the nomination of
Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court were withdrawn after her nomination was withdrawn. The strips have been posted on the official website, and were replaced by re-runs by the syndicate. • Trudeau sought input from readers as to where Alex Doonesbury should attend college in a May 15, 2006, straw poll at Doonesbury.com. Voters chose among
MIT,
Rensselaer, and
Cornell. Students from Rensselaer and then MIT hacked the system, which was designed to limit each computer to one vote. In the end, voters logged 175,000 votes, with MIT grabbing 48% of the total. The Doonesbury Town Hall FAQ stated that given that the rules of the poll had not ruled out such methods, "the will, chutzpah, and bodacious craft of the voting public will be respected", declaring that Alex will be attending MIT. • Before the 2008 presidential election, Trudeau sent out strips to run in the days after the election in which
Barack Obama was portrayed as the winner. Newspapers were also provided with old strips as an alternative. In response, McCain spokesman
Tucker Bounds said, "We hope the strip proves to be as predictive as it is consistently lame." ==Criticism==