Uncle Duke character in "Doonesbury"?
HT: No. I never saw him; I never talked to him. It was a hot, nearly blazing day
in Washington, and I was coming down the steps of the Supreme Court looking
for somebody, Carl Wagner or somebody like that. I'd been inside the press
section, and then all of a sudden I saw a crowd of people and I heard them
saying, "Uncle Duke," I heard the words Duke, Uncle; it didn't seem to make any
sense. I looked around, and I recognized people who were total strangers
pointing at me and laughing. I had no idea what the f--k they were talking about. I
had gotten out of the habit of reading funnies when I started reading the Times. I
had no idea what this outburst meant.. It was a weird experience, and as it
happened I was sort of by myself up there on the sitars, and I thought: "What in
the f--k madness is going on? Why am I being mocked by a gang of strangers
and friends on the steps of the Supreme Court? Then I must have asked
someone, and they told me that Uncle Duke had appeared in the Post that
morning.
why he didn't cover the 1976 campaign:
I was going to write a book on the '76 campaign, but even at the time I was
doing research, I started to get nervous about it. I knew if did another book on the
campaign, I'd somehow be trapped.
I was the most obvious journalist - coming off my book on the 1972 campaign -
to inherit Teddy White's role as a big-selling chronicler of presidential campaigns.
I would have been locked into national politics as a way of life, not to mention as
a primary source of income..And there's no way you can play that kind of
Washington Wizard role from a base in Woody Creek, I'd have had to move to
Washington, or at least to New York...and, Jesus, life is too short for that kind of
volunteer agony. I've put a lot of work into living out here where I do and still
making a living, and I don't want to give it up unless I absolutely have to. I moved
to Washington for a year in 1972, and it was a nightmare.
Yeah, there was a definite temptation to write another campaign book -
especially for a vast amount of money in advance - but even white I was looking
at all that money, I knew it would be a terminal mistake. It wasn't until I actually
began covering the campaign that I had to confront the reality of what I was
getting into. I hadn't been in New Hampshire two days when I knew for certain
that I just couldn't make it. I was seeing my footprints everywhere I went. All the
things that were of interest last time - even the s all things, the esoteric little
details of a presidential campaign - seemed like jibberish the second time
around. Plus, I lost what looks more and more like a tremendous advantage of
anonymity. That was annoying, because in '72 I could stand against a wall
somewhere - and I'd select some pretty weird walls to stand against - and
nobody knew who I was. But in '76, Jesus, at press conferences, I had to sign
more autographs than the candidates.
Through some strange process, I came from the '72 campaign an unknown
reporter, a vagrant journalist, to a sort of media figure in the '76 campaign. It
started getting so uncomfortable and made it so hard to work that even the
alleged or apparent access that I had to this weird peanut farmer from Georgia
became a disadvantage.
working with the Secret Service:
No, I made my peace with the secret service early in '72 when I went to a party