A comprehensive and delightful new biography of visionary Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau hits shelves next week. Fittingly titled Trudeau & Doonesbury: The Cartoonist Who Turned The News Into Art by writer Joshua Kendall, the book covers 50 years of the iconic strip. Like the characters and cartoon itself, it’s a chronicle of our times — from Vietnam and Richard Nixon to Iraq and George W. Bush, and of course the age of Donald Trump. The exclusive excerpt below chronicles the somewhat fraught creation of the gonzo character Uncle Duke, based on Hunter S. Thompson, and Trudeau’s long association with Rolling Stone.
In the late 1970s, TV anchor Jane Pauley, dubbed by TV Guide “the fastest rising personality in the history of television,” and Garry Trudeau were an “it couple” whose evening outings were closely monitored by the tabloids. As Trudeau hinted in an early 1978 strip, he was not thrilled about the prospect of having to attend lots of public events together.
They bonded over their mutual discomfort with celebrity, which Pauley has often referred to as a “mental health disorder.” For his part, Trudeau has called fame both “corrupting” and “time-consuming.” Pauley was also taken by Trudeau’s feminism, as she realized that he could likely be counted on to do his share of the parenting. Surprisingly, there are few traces of Pauley to be found anywhere in Doonesbury. One notable exception is a quick allusion to her high school in a 2000 strip that touches on the early life of Uncle Duke:
DOONESBURY © G. B. Trudeau. Reprinted with permission of Andrews McMeel Syndication. All rights reserved.
But Duke’s mention of Warren Central is little more than a throwaway line.
By the late 1970s, Duke had emerged as one of Doonesbury’s central characters. In his initial incarnation in late 1974, Uncle Duke — Zonker was nominally his nephew, but the pair were actually just family friends — was living in Colorado and writing for Rolling Stone, just like his real-life analogue, the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. As Trudeau wrote decades later, “Duke wasn’t inspired by Thompson, he was Thompson — right down to the name, taken from ‘Raoul Duke,’ Thompson’s pseudonym.” Trudeau was initially drawn to Thompson because he was a huge fan. He and Annie Hurlbut had both been bowled over by Thompson’s chef d’oeuvre, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the 1972 novel that chronicles the drug-fueled reporting trip of its protagonist, Raoul Duke. Trudeau’s Duke was also defined by his love of both drugs and guns.
In July 1974, Zonker visited Duke at the office of Rolling Stone, where he ran into his editor, whom Trudeau dubbed “Yawn Wenner”:
DOONESBURY © G. B. Trudeau. Reprinted with permission of Andrews McMeel Syndication. All rights reserved.
A couple of weeks later, a bemused Jann Wenner wrote to Trudeau saying that the entire staff in San Francisco was following these Doonesbury strips carefully. So, too, was the rest of the nation, as, according to Wenner, Thompson “was being pointed at and called ‘Uncle Duke,’ ‘Uncle Duke’” on his recent visit to Washington to cover the Supreme Court case involving President Nixon and the Watergate tapes. Wenner also thanked Trudeau for another by-product of his Duke cartoons: “We had several freelancers show up here with guns and booze, shooting up the office!” Trudeau and Wenner struck up a friendship, and Trudeau soon began to write (and draw) occasionally for Rolling Stone.
During Christmas week in 1974, Duke was sidelined by a bad acid trip:
DOONESBURY © G. B. Trudeau. Reprinted with permission of Andrews McMeel Syndication. All rights reserved.
At the time, the comics pages typically waxed gooey and sentimental during the holiday season. “That December, Jim Andrews got into a tussle with Garry because he was worried that these Christmas strips had gone too far,” says Tom Thornton, then beginning his 33-year career at UPS. “But I was 24 and I loved it. And Garry told Jim that he needed to listen to young people like me. He ended up winning over Jim.”
The following week, Duke — the avatar of the counterculture — expressed his contempt for his fellow Colorado denizen, the singer-songwriter turned TV star John Denver:
DOONESBURY © G. B. Trudeau. Reprinted with permission of Andrews McMeel Syndication. All rights reserved.
Duke’s antipathy for John Denver — which was then widely shared by music critics at hipster magazines such as Rolling Stone — also became a leitmotif in Doonesbury. But this embodiment of 1970s pop culture never seemed to mind the barrage of insults. Soon after meeting Trudeau backstage at a Madison Square Garden concert a couple of years later, the preternaturally obtuse Denver sent Trudeau a squishy note, saying that he and the cartoonist were “both serving people by making it safer for them to experience and to acknowledge that their lives are working.”
Within a year, Duke’s connection to the flesh-and-blood Thompson was almost nonexistent. As Trudeau noted decades later, “Duke soon shed the Rolling Stone connection and shipped out to the world’s trouble spots, contriving a never-ending series of debauched schemes.” In February 1975, Trudeau’s life borrowed a page from Trudeau’s art. Just as the fictional Duke left the magazine to become governor of American Samoa, Trudeau himself signed a contract with Wenner to do a 10,000-word piece that would involve his own trek to the island to interview the actual governor, Earl B. Ruth. Accompanying Trudeau was a motley crew of seven, which featured, among others, Nicholas von Hoffman as well as the actress Elizabeth Ashley, then one of von Hoffman’s frequent drinking companions, her husband, and her five-year-old son. “That spring, Nick was visiting me in Santa Monica,” Ashley tells me. “I was newly married to Jim McCarthy. After Nick said that he was headed to Samoa, we announced, ‘We’re going to come, too.’ It was the last bastion of American colonialism, and one of the bleakest places on earth; the beaches consisted of little but mud. But the whole trip was hysterical, and Garry was charming.”
In August 1975, Rolling Stone published Trudeau’s cover story, “Doonesbury’s Last Tago in Pago Pago,” which featured his original artwork and was cowritten by von Hoffman. “My father hated to travel internationally — and he did it only a few times in his entire life — so it was a sign of his fondness for Garry that he agreed to go,” says Alexander von Hoffman. In his byline, Trudeau described himself as “a reclusive Yalie gone wrong who still makes his home in New Haven (perhaps still hoping to go right again).” The Rolling Stone material was then incorporated into a book on their madcap adventures, Tales from the Margaret Mead Taproom (1976). “The bar at the Americana hotel where we all stayed was named after Margaret Mead, who had published a famous study of the island,” adds Ashley.
Trudeau got the idea to turn Duke into the governor of Samoa from a passage in Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 in which the gonzo journalist joked about a major disappointment in his life. As Thompson quipped, Larry O’Brien, whom he had gotten to know during his stint as chairman of the Democratic Party, “pulled a fast one on me. He never had any intention of making me governor of American Samoa, and when I finally realized this, it made me very bitter and eventually changed my whole life.” So in January 1975, as soon as Duke abandoned his journalism gig at Rolling Stone, Trudeau’s character latched on to the idea of finding employment on the other side of the globe:
DOONESBURY © G. B. Trudeau. Reprinted with permission of Andrews McMeel Syndication. All rights reserved.
Over the next few weeks of Doonesbury strips, Duke would be inaugurated and start his governorship. As Trudeau would later put it in the Rolling Stone piece, he was left with no choice but to follow in the footsteps of his fictional character. He had “drawn and written extensively about American Samoa, so now it was time to do some research on the subject. Today’s responsible journalism demands that you have your facts right, if not before you go to print, at least afterward.”
Trudeau, von Hoffman, and their six traveling companions had a blast sampling the food and culture of the five islands that constitute American Samoa. But they never did get to interview Governor Ruth, who happened to be back in Washington at the time. They did meet his wife for drinks on the veranda of Government House, which, as Trudeau noted, “looked exactly like Uncle Duke’s.” He found that disconcerting because “he had drawn it without ever seeing a picture of Samoa.” His only research involved studying the sets of old Ronald Colman and Tyrone Power movies that took place on the other side of the globe.
After his disastrous run as the governor of Samoa, Duke did a stint as ambassador to China. In February 1978, the unemployed Duke failed in his attempt to land one of his dream jobs — president of Yale or head of ABC News. But he then managed to parlay his deep knowledge of high-performance steroids into another plum position — the general manager of the Washington Redskins. A couple of months later, Duke discussed with Bobby Mitchell, the first Black Redskins star, who was then executive assistant to the team’s president, the possibility of obtaining a gifted lineman he had first spotted in Samoa:
DOONESBURY © G. B. Trudeau. Reprinted with permission of Andrews McMeel Syndication. All rights reserved.
Though Mitchell played just a cameo in the strip, such was the cachet of Doonesbury in the late 1970s that the future NFL Hall of Famer considered this mention “the thrill of a lifetime.” “No passes caught in 11 years of pro ball will measure up to being in the same comic strip as ‘Duke,’” his wife, Gwen, wrote to Trudeau.
But Thompson always hated Trudeau’s attempt to caricature him for his own narrative ends. Though the pair never met, Thompson repeatedly threatened the cartoonist. And he once sent Trudeau an envelope containing nothing but used toilet paper. Thompson also claimed that the popularity of his namesake caused irreparable harm to his career. In the fall of 1978, when he was mining the college lecture circuit “just for cocaine money,” Thompson told a Maine paper that he wanted to exact vengeance on Trudeau: “I doubt if there’s anyone here who wants to be a comic strip character. It has made it almost impossible for me to work as a political journalist.” But even close friends of Thompson thought the fiery journalist was exaggerating. When asked by Thompson to sue Trudeau, his own lawyer John Clancy quipped, “You should be grateful. The guy makes you out to be friendly and nice, basically. You’re not.”
Thompson was convinced that Trudeau had long been spying on him, but the cartoonist countered that “he obtained the intimate details of Hunter Thompson’s private life by reading his books and articles.” According to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of Health and Human Services in the second Trump administration, who hung out a lot with Thompson in Woody Creek Canyon over the years, the Colorado journalist was particularly incensed that Trudeau managed to reproduce the precise layout of his home in the strip. “I remember him being in a murderous rage against Garry for this one morning at breakfast,” Kennedy said.
Trudeau’s visibility was at its peak in the late 1970s, when he had the power to jump-start journalism careers. Take the case of Judy Woodruff, who served as NBC’s White House correspondent shortly after Brokaw moved to Today. In August 1977, Trudeau briefly alluded to her in a Doonesbury strip that addressed the “decision” by President Jimmy Carter to suspend various activities of the executive branch during Congress’s August district work session:
DOONESBURY © G. B. Trudeau. Reprinted with permission of Andrews McMeel Syndication. All rights reserved.
Several days later, Woodruff wrote to Trudeau, “It wasn’t until after you used my name in the strip last week that several people who’ve been ignoring me, walked up and started conversations.” Concluded Woodruff, who stepped down as the longtime anchor of PBS NewsHour at the end of 2022, “You made my week, my month and maybe my year!”
Excerpted from the upcoming book TRUDEAU & DOONESBURY: A BIOGRAPHY (Abrams Press) by Joshua Kendall, on-sale May 26 © 2026 Joshua Kendall.
