“Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand.” So declares Mark Twain's Satan near the end of The Mysterious Stranger: “Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution – these can lift at a colossal humbug, – push it a little, century by century: but only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast.”Footnote ¹ By such violent reckoning, what then should be left of Richard Nixon? After all, according to Arthur P. Dudden, Nixon had been the target of the most “malicious humor” directed at the White House since Roosevelt's New Deal:

My object here is to challenge Mark Twain's assertion through the example of Richard Nixon, whose reputation – in spite of the nearly universal acknowledgement of his guilt – appears to have survived the shock-and-awe tactics of the American comedians ranged against him from the 1940s to the 1980s. I shall explore one work extensively – Kurt Vonnegut's Watergate novel, Jailbird (1979) – as an interrogation of how satirical comedy failed in its treatment of Nixon, setting that novel in the context of the comedic firepower that had been directed at Nixon since the dawn of his political career and which, in the end, could not prevent his rehabilitation.

Vonnegut was uniquely prescient in predicting Nixon's ultimate triumph over the arsenal of laughter, surveying the ground at the Republican National Convention in Miami in 1972. There he had looked morosely upon Abbie Hoffman, “the clowning revolutionary,” who was by then himself “a weary clown.” In contrast, Vonnegut described Nixon as an ebullient “Winner” about to reclaim the presidential chair in a landslide – a Winner who had emerged from the straits of the Great Depression with undying contempt for the American poor, the “Losers.” Against such a merciless Darwinist figurehead, Vonnegut saw Hoffman as a defeated comrade:

As if to confirm Vonnegut's suspicions, the composer John Adams has discussed the inspiration for his opera Nixon in China (1987), which attempts to invest Nixon with a stature and complexity worthy of Verdi. By 1983, Adams explains, “Nixon had become the stuff of bad, predictable comedy routines.”Footnote ⁴ Although Adams is categorical in admitting his own “personal animosity” for Nixon,Footnote ⁵ there is no doubt that Nixon in China is one of many creative efforts contributing to a phenomenon that the satirists of the 1970s – at least, those without Vonnegut's crystal ball – would have deemed unthinkable: Nixon's rehabilitation.

As Thomas Johnson argues in his 1995 study The Rehabilitation of Richard Nixon, “Today, Nixon is hailed as a genius, and Watergate is rarely mentioned.” Perhaps the reason is merely generational, as Johnson implies in basing his conclusion on a survey conducted in his home state of Washington: “those who learned of Watergate through media use after the fact were less likely to judge him guilty of Watergate crimes and more likely to forgive him for the Watergate scandal than those who directly remembered this event.”Footnote ⁶ Similarly, Stephen Paul Miller observes, “Nixon was merely, most of my students believe, the first modern president to be caught for such a bad thing, and he was therefore more an object of humor for being a sad sack than a target of contempt for his tyranny.”Footnote ⁷ But a sizeable cadre of writers who can actually remember Watergate have also been hard at work shaping Nixon's “rehabilitation.” Joan Hoff's Nixon Reconsidered (1994) argues that Nixon surpassed “the accomplishments of the New Deal and the Great Society in the areas of civil rights [and] social welfare spending”Footnote ⁸ – an argument recently reiterated by Iwan Morgan, who predicts that history will view Nixon as “both much better and much worse” than other US Presidents.Footnote ⁹ Even Marvin Kalb – no lover of Nixon, himself a target of vicious White House harassment as a journalist in the 1970s – grudgingly takes his hat off to Nixon's Machiavellian ability to secure post-Watergate recognition as an elder foreign-policy statesman by steering the Bush and Clinton administrations into sensitive engagement with the crumbling Soviet Union.Footnote ¹⁰ Nixon's biographer, Stephen Ambrose, presents him as an arch liar, a coacher of liars, and an obstructer of justice, but he is also a pitiable figure who “retreated into a fantasy world in which he evidently came to believe his own vehement denials of involvement [in Watergate] and became even more reckless in the lies he told the public.”Footnote ¹¹ In this, Ambrose comes close to implying what John J. Fitzpatrick declares outright: “Tragedy is the hallmark of Nixon's life.”Footnote ¹²

The construction of Nixon as a tragic figure is undoubtedly a major component in whatever “rehabilitation” he managed to secure in the two decades before his death, as well as posthumously. It is perhaps not surprising that the disgraced British MP-turned-biographer Jonathan Aitken would seek to explain Nixon's downfall in terms of his “Shakespearean complexity.”Footnote ¹³ Less predictable is Oliver Stone's treatment in Nixon (1995), which, in order to inject an aura of tragedy into his conspiracy-driven scenario, mendaciously presents Nixon as a whisky-swilling pill-popper isolated in the Lincoln Sitting Room, consumed by terrifying, sinister forces from both within and without – something Stone ultimately calls “the Beast.”Footnote ¹⁴ In keeping with the Aristotelian categories of tragedy, Theodore H. White writes of Nixon's “fall” in terms of a tragic flaw that doomed the “imperial presidency”: an inability to “understand the past – or why Americans so long ago had originally put so much potential power into the office he held.”Footnote ¹⁵

Were the Aristotelian poetics scrupulously maintained, tragedy and comedy could never share the same subject in the first place. But the record of political humour directed against Nixon suggests that if he did indeed manage ultimately to secure his rehabilitation as a tragic figure, it was not for want of trying on the part of a generation of American satirists. Even prior to Watergate, an awesome barrage of comedic weaponry had been trained on Nixon through all his vicissitudes of political fortune, beginning with the caricatures of Herbert Block – “Herblock” – for the Washington Post. In 1948 Herblock's first attack on the Californian congressman had him dressed as a Puritan torching the Statue of Liberty as a witch. In 1954 his Vice President Nixon was a rat crawling out of a sewer.Footnote ¹⁶ It is true that McCarthyism – a term coined by Herblock himself – threatened a moratorium on progressive American satire, as Malcolm Muggeridge explained in 1958: “When people are fearful they want everyone to be the same, to accept the same values … [T]here is no place for the jester. He strikes a discordant note, and therefore must be put down.”Footnote ¹⁷ Thus a certain critical deference inspired by McCarthyism still held sway on the eve of the 1960 presidential campaign, yet a rare comedian like Mort Sahl could refer to the Republican candidate's past in reminding audiences that “for a while, every time the Russians threw an American in jail, the Un-American Activities Committee would retaliate by throwing an American in jail, too.”Footnote ¹⁸ Lenny Bruce was merciless in his construction of Vice President Nixon as Eisenhower's patsy, set up by the President for a disastrous state visit to Venezuela, where he was threatened by an angry mob in 1958. Nixon was to write of this ordeal in Six Crises (1962): “The classic crisis is one involving physical danger. What is essential in such situations is not so much ‘bravery’ in the face of danger as the ability to think ‘selflessly’ – to blank out any thought of personal fear by concentrating completely on how to meet the danger.”Footnote ¹⁹ In Bruce's scenario, however, Nixon – on the verge of tears – complains to Eisenhower, “They spit at me! They hate me! They threw rocks at me,” to which the President replies, “They liked you; it's your old lady, Pat. She overdresses.”Footnote ²⁰

Defeat at JFK's hands sent Nixon briefly into the wilderness, but his re-emergence for the 1964 California gubernatorial campaign brought forth Mark Harris's reportage, which, amidst the raw grief over Kennedy's murder, morphed into the political satire Mark the Glove Boy, in which the author himself fantasizes about despatching Nixon with the accuracy of Lee Harvey Oswald.Footnote ²¹ With Nixon's presidency finally secured and the Watergate break-in still a year away, Philip Roth published what is probably the major satire of Nixon's first term, Our Gang (1971). It was Nixon's candidacy in 1960 that had partially inspired Roth's outburst the following year in his essay “Writing American Fiction”:

Thus, ten years later, with his amazement having hardened into contempt, Roth depicted a scheming President, Trick E. (Tricky) Dixon, in a host of bizarre scenarios: declaring himself a homosexual in order to evade charges of adultery, invading Denmark for its harbouring of an anti-Dixon critic, drowning naked like an aborted foetus in a huge plastic bag and challenging Satan for the presidency of Hell. Presented largely as a series of dialogues, monologues and mock news broadcasts, Our Gang is an extended burlesque that capitalizes on Nixon's verbal mannerisms for its immediate comic effect, but it also relies on a stretching of logic to ridiculous conclusions in order to emphasize Nixon's duplicity and hunger for power. Thus, in one scenario between Tricky and his crisis managers, the president declares,

In spite of its energetic lunacy, which draws obviously on a host of comedic precedents from the Marx Brothers to the monologues of the Borscht Belt cabaret artists, Our Gang is an ephemeral treatment, a spent force for reasons that Sanford Pinsker identifies:

As Our Gang went to press, Nixon's long-standing nemesis, Herblock, was into his twenty-third year of attempted character assassination, as he and his counterpart at the New York Review of Books, David Levine, continued to limn the President as a sinister, shifty gangster eternally in need of a shave (thereby keeping alive the recollection of Nixon's televisual disaster in his debates with Kennedy in 1960). On record, the impersonations of David Frye had a budding generation of impressionists wobbling their cheeks in schoolyards across America, attempting Frye's low intonations of “Let me make one thing perfectly clear!”Footnote ²⁵ Thus, if not an entire comedic army, certainly an elite crack brigade had already discharged an impressive quantity of gunfire at Nixon prior to July 1972.

Then – or so Dudden claims – “with the Watergate affair, all restraints collapsed … The attempted cover-up afforded humorists a world series opportunity.”Footnote ²⁶ For Stephen Whitfield, Watergate “meant that satire was not something that would close Saturday night but would run through the Final Days and thereafter.”Footnote ²⁷ Dudden catalogues the overspill from the comic page and stage into the popular domain:

More than one comedian uttered variations on the theme played by the satirical pianist and songwriter Mark Russell: “I hope that Watergate never ends. If it does, I'll have to go back to writing my own material.”Footnote ²⁹ The cartoonist Garry Trudeau, two years into his Doonesbury comic strip, charted the daily revelations of the unravelling scandal with a series of devastating observations, notably the regular “Watergate Profiles” broadcast by his zany radio disc jockey, Mark Slackmeyer. Gerald Ford was to admit the importance of Trudeau's targeting when he observed, “There are only three major vehicles to keep us informed as to what is going on in Washington: the electronic media, the print media, and Doonesbury – not necessarily in that order.”Footnote ³⁰ Thus it was a considerable milestone in American political history when Slackmeyer gleefully broadcast the “obituary” of Nixon's Attorney General, John Mitchell, even before the verdict was returned: “THAT'S GUILTY! GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY!!”Footnote ³¹ While even the Washington Post blanched and removed this particular Doonesbury profile from its pages, it was reprinted elsewhere through syndication and in the 1973 collection, The Fireside Watergate, written by Trudeau and Post columnist Nicholas von Hoffman. For two years Trudeau's pen circled increasingly closer to Nixon himself, culminating with the 12 August 1974 cartoon that won him the Pulitzer Prize. Across the four frames of this cartoon, workmen on the White House lawn progressively build up the stone wall that ultimately obscures the view of the presidential mansion and the (sanitized) words of the incriminating tape recording of 22 March 1973: “I don't give a shit what happens, I want you all to stonewall it. Let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover up or anything else.”Footnote ³²

With Nixon's resignation in 1974, Mark Russell's prediction came true: “I wept. I had to go back to writing my own material.”Footnote ³³ David Frye, too, saw his comedic star wane with Nixon's disappearance, just as the impressionist Vaughn Meader had done a decade earlier with the death of JFK.Footnote ³⁴ One might assume that, even if their cash cow was now gone, American comedians could at least claim their share of the credit in ensuring his permanent exile as well as his resignation. But this is not necessarily the case. Mort Sahl had given up on comedy by 1968, echoing Philip Roth in claiming that his poor comedic imagination was no match for a reality that could elevate Richard Nixon to the presidency.Footnote ³⁵ Dick Gregory, perhaps the last of the great stand-ups of the 1960s after Sahl and Lenny Bruce, had disastrously chosen to abandon the comic stage to challenge Nixon for the presidency in 1968 on the “Freedom and Peace” ticket.Footnote ³⁶ In an ironic reversal, Nixon was at the same time challenging these comedians on their turf with his cameo appearance on the top satirical show Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, stiffly poking fun at himself by uttering the show's weekly catchphrase, “Sock it to me.” (Hubert Humphrey later claimed that his own refusal to appear on the show had lost him the election.)Footnote ³⁷ Perhaps the greatest defeat of all came to Herblock, who was dismayed to find himself hounded by Nixon's henchmen, Bob Haldeman and John Erlichman – not to rough him up or to destroy his drawings, but rather to purchase the originals to display proudly on their office walls. Herblock considered this a personal and professional failure.Footnote ³⁸ Garry Trudeau faced similar dubious success with his Doonesbury cartoons, which also found homes on the walls of Washington power-brokers like framed badges of honour.Footnote ³⁹

Nixon's late rehabilitation gives rise to a number of speculations about the efficacy of satire. One reason for his long-term triumph over his comedic adversaries may have been a collective failure of satirical nerve, as exemplified in the withdrawals of Mort Sahl and Dick Gregory, but this does not explain Nixon's ultimate immunity to Herblock, who was relentless in his visual criticism before and after Watergate. Another reason may be a failure in satirical judgement when engaging with Nixon, with the massive discharge of all barrels still leaving an unscathed target. The gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail, ’72 (1973) comes to mind – of which Thompson bragged in his Rolling Stone obituary for Nixon, “the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Again, the problem may have lain in the tendency on the part of satirists to go too far in the direction of burlesque and caricature, conveniently targeting Nixon's physical or verbal mannerisms at the expense of a deeper engagement with his complex character – a criticism implied in Pinsker's “Jamesean” reading of Our Gang. But the most significant example to confound such a charge would be Robert Coover's The Public Burning,Footnote ⁴¹ whose Nixon deserves particular scrutiny for the complexity with which he is rendered.

The Public Burning is Coover's cri de coeur over the injustice of the Rosenberg case and the debasement of American political honour that it implied. As the narrator, Richard Nixon offers the first-person discomfiture and frequent moments of introspection that inject significant tension into the fantastical burlesque scenario in which the Rosenberg executions are presented – literally – as public spectacle for a nation that has lost its compassionate centre. As Nixon notes, this lack of compassion extends to American satirists themselves:

The Nixon who considers his fate at the hands of such unforgiving satire is equipped to convey what appears to be genuine pain as well as philosophical stoicism. However, these qualities dovetail into delusions of omnipotence and martyrdom: “I didn't mind. It was one of the consequences of power.”Footnote ⁴³ Coover's Nixon is ultimately a self-pitying buffoon who considers his own tragedy to be greater than that of all others (including, astoundingly, the executed Rosenbergs). In the end, when he is brutally sodomized by the demigod Uncle Sam, it is possible to lend credence to his claim: “This … this is not happening to me alone … but to the nation as well!”Footnote ⁴⁴ However, Coover ensures that Nixon's equation cannot be read along the democratic lines of Allen Ginsburg's “It occurs to me that I am America.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Rather, it is an expression of self-delusion and self-aggrandizement on the part of a consistently ridiculed vice president scheming to become White's “imperial president.” This ultimately undercuts any sympathy for Nixon's mawkish sense of victimization. The “tragedy” of Coover's 1953-vintage Nixon becomes as untenable as that of the post-Watergate Nixon mocked by the Manic Street Preachers in their 2004 satire “The Love of Richard Nixon,” which has the fallen president brooding over the world's failure to appreciate him as “Richard III in the White House.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Rehabilitationists such as Johnson, Hoff and Morgan have argued that Nixon's reputation has survived the slings and arrows shot from a whole company of merciless satirists. In the end, however, the problem of satiric impotence may not be due to a delayed recognition of Nixon's tragic status, but rather to the empty boast behind Mark Twain's “assault of Laughter,” against which anything can stand, including – apparently – the reputation of Richard Nixon. This sobering thought is implied in Vonnegut's musings on comedy as the “lubrication” of “cruel social machinery,” for which charge satire had long stood in the dock:

This comedic despair of 1972 marks a far cry from the Vonnegut who is well known for applauding the power of slapstick radio comedy in the 1930s – “a great time for comedians … [and] a very bad time in the history of the country, far more unbearable than the First or Second World Wars.”Footnote ⁴⁸

The chilling descent of American comedy from its recuperative height in the Great Depression to its nadir amidst the Nixon presidency is thus a major preoccupation of Vonnegut's anti-Nixon satire, Jailbird, which, among other things, is an investigation into the negligible impact of satiric expression in the face of the political and moral disintegration of the Nixon era. In this regard it shares, and sets out to justify, the dismay of defeated satirists such as Roth, Sahl, Gregory and Herblock; for Jailbird asserts that in Nixon's America progressive satire is a poor match for its target.

The novel's protagonist, Walter Starbuck, introduces himself as a slapstick comedian figure – in his own words, “a fool” – with the admission of his own “preposterous contributions to the American political scandals known collectively as ‘Watergate’.”Footnote ⁴⁹ It is surely no accident that Vonnegut gives his protagonist the surname of the ineffectual idealist of Melville's Moby-Dick, and Starbuck shares the same air of self-defeat that characterizes not only Melville's character but also many of Vonnegut's other protagonists, notably the bitter and neglected writer, Kilgore Trout. In terms of a comedic critique, however, Starbuck finds his greatest kinship with the doomed clowns of Vonnegut's grim bicentennial satire, Slapstick (1976). In that novel the protagonists, Wilbur and Eliza Swain, hide their formidable critical genius behind a façade of comic idiocy because, as Wilbur explains, “all the information we received about the planet we were on indicated that idiots were lovely things to be.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In Slapstick a prime target of the Swains’ analysis is the US Constitution – “as good a scheme for misery as any”Footnote ⁵¹ – while in Jailbird the attempt is to project a satirical vision onto the disastrous catalogue of American political and economic history that has finally arrived into the custody of Richard Nixon. Thus Watergate is positioned in a political frame shared by Sacco and Vanzetti, the lost cause of the American labour movement, the Depression and the McCarthy witch-hunts, among other historical afflictions.

However, the novel's controlling, critical voice, that of Starbuck, the “weary clown,” is caught up in an outmoded discourse, the slapstick tradition of the affirmative radio comedy and musical theatre of the 1930s, which faced the Depression with stoic optimism. In Nixon's America, Vonnegut suggests, such optimism is as woefully misplaced as the slapstick ethos projected by it. Vonnegut had dedicated Slapstick to the memory of Laurel and Hardy – “two angels of my time” – with the explanation that “their fundamental joke … was that they did their best with every test,” always bargained “in good faith with their destinies, and were screamingly adorable and funny on that account.”Footnote ⁵² But could such an ethos maintain a critical impact in the 1970s? On the one hand, as Vonnegut makes clear in his well-known analogy between the artist and the canary in the coal mine, all artistic expression is by definition impotent: “You know, coal miners used to take birds down into the mines to detect gas before men got sick. The artists certainly did that in the case of Vietnam. They chirped and keeled over. But it made no difference whatsoever. Nobody important cared.”Footnote ⁵³ However, when the artistry is comedic, the failure is redoubled, as Vonnegut implies through the slapstick imagery with which he confesses to his own critical impotence vis-à-vis the Vietnam War:

Thus, by entrusting his satiric attack to a strategically impotent comedic figure, Vonnegut ensures that the protagonist of Jailbird is sacrificed to the spirit of his times – initially the vindictive spirit of the 1950s that saw through the executions of the Rosenbergs and gave rise not only to McCarthyism but also to its most successful beneficiary, Richard Nixon. The first reversal of Starbuck's fortune begins when he inadvertently ruins his friend Leland Clewes with his mistaken testimony before the HUAC: “All I had ever accused him of was membership in the Communist Party before the war, which I would have thought was about as damning for a member of the Depression generation as having stood in a breadline” (68). Unaware then of the ferocity of McCarthy's intent – or of that of his protégé, the young, ambitious Nixon – Starbuck is stunned to see his friend go to prison, and is soon elbowed out of government and ostracized as a Judas. Rescued from poverty seventeen years later by the Nixon administration in a gesture of contemptuous charity, he is given an obscure position in a White House basement office. As “the President's Special Advisor on Youth Affairs,” Starbuck is habitually ignored by the gangsters in the Oval Office – except for once, when, chain-smoking his way through a meeting, he finds his “proper place in history as the butt of the one good joke by Nixon”:

Starbuck is thus trumped by Nixon's humour, just as the historical Nixon had gained the upper hand through his appearance on Laugh-In. Nixon's “special burglars” are so dismissive of Starbuck that they are willing to risk secreting in his office “the corpus delecti of [his] Watergate crime,” a steamer trunk containing a million dollars in unmarked bills – “an illegal campaign contribution” (52). The trunk is discovered by the Watergate Special Prosecutor's office; but rather than send anyone to prison again through his testimony, Starbuck remains silent and goes to prison himself. Again, it is as a chain-smoking clown, playing with fire, that Starbuck acknowledges his own buffoonery in this grotesque chapter of American history:

In accordance with time-honoured comic inversion, the novel's slapstick imagery is at its most naked when Starbuck's fortunes are at their lowest. He is released after a two-year prison sentence, a widowed, penniless old man. But on his first day on the outside his wanderings through the streets of New York bring him to a series of incredible, coincidental encounters that further consolidate the novel's slapstick framework while inviting a damning critique of it. Starbuck bumps into Leland Clewes, the man he ruined, on a street corner and renews a painfully broken friendship. “As luck would have it, there were religious fanatics behind him, barefoot and chanting and dancing in saffron robes. Thus did he appear to be a leading man in a musical comedy” (129). At exactly the same time, a filthy, derelict woman latches onto Starbuck, becoming one of his “supporting cast” in her “enormous purple-and-black basketball shoes. They were so out of scale with the rest of her that she looked like a kangaroo” (129). In an intolerable coincidence, she is a former sweetheart of Starbuck's, Mary Kathleen O'Looney. As if both the encounter and the name were not enough to test the willingness to suspend disbelief, the comic premise is stretched almost to the breaking point through another layer of improbability: unbeknownst to Starbuck, Mary Kathleen is in reality Mrs. Jack Graham, major stockholder and head of the all-powerful RAMJAC Corporation. Starbuck casually drops into his retrospective narrative: “And in the toe of one of her capacious basketball shoes, among other things, were hypocritical love letters from me. Small world!” (130). Blandly, he concludes, “Nowhere in the word was this sort of theatre being done anymore” (140).

At great risk, Vonnegut places substantial weight on one further discredited device of slapstick comedy: the cliché of convenient amnesia. As a young radical, Mary Kathleen had loved Starbuck for his own idealism as he dabbled in labour politics and the socialist revolution, but a sustained case of amnesia had prevented her from knowing about his subsequent change of political allegiance. She thus remembers him as the only political comrade she could trust. Hoping to return the RAMJAC fortune to the American people in the cause of the revolution, Mary Kathleen adopts Starbuck as her confidante. When he is later imprisoned again for a night – due to the cumbersome screwball device of a drawerful of stolen clarinet parts in his hotel room – it is through Mary Kathleen's influence that he is sprung by none other than Roy Cohn, McCarthy's “appallingly effective” committee counsel (xx). As his good fortunes continue to mount at the behest of Mary Kathleen, Starbuck can only keep a grip on reality with a comic rationalization worthy of Cary Grant at his most befuddled: “This is just the dream of a jailbird. It's not supposed to make sense” (192). When Mary Kathleen's attorney asks him why he had “never heard the name Starbuck associated with Watergate before,” Starbuck explains that the scandal was like “a wonderful musical comedy where the critics mentioned everybody but me” (209) – which is, ironically, very much as Nixon himself describes it in the “Smoking Gun” tape of 23 June 1972: “a comedy of errors, bizarre.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Thus a major point of Jailbird's testing of the comedic limits is precisely to ask the same question implied by Philip Roth in “Writing American Fiction”: Just how implausible is such a plotline in comparison with the phantasmagorical history of the American twentieth century – a history that has culminated in the ascendancy of Richard Nixon? It is here that the significant presence of Sacco and Vanzetti is to be felt in the novel. Just as Coover had turned to the theatrical passion play of the Rosenberg executions in order to link the current President with a monstrous injustice of the past, so Vonnegut turns to the “Passion” of Sacco and Vanzetti to condemn the historical amnesia that could facilitate the rise of persecutors, inquisitors and criminal executioners to the office of the presidency:

In his twenty-page-long invocation of Sacco and Vanzetti, Vonnegut shares the same progressive incredulity and anger as Katherine Anne Porter, whose contemporaneous The Never-Ending Wrong (1977) re-creates the Sacco and Vanzetti case as “one of the important turning points in the history of this country,” a “symptom of a change so deep and so sinister” as to be nearly beyond comprehension.Footnote ⁵⁶ But while Porter casts the case as an enduring national tragedy, Vonnegut casts it as a sick joke; hence the sardonic laugh that Starbuck can barely suppress in his recollection of the trumped-up robbery charge that initially brought Vanzetti to the dock:

Starbuck's recitation of the “Passion” of Sacco and Vanzetti concludes with a punch line also drawn from the pages of American history – the black humour of the sentencing judge, Webster Thayer, whose words were painted on a banner overhanging the coffins of the executed pair: “DID YOU SEE WHAT I DID TO THOSE ANARCHIST BASTARDS THE OTHER DAY?” (181). Thus does Starbuck aim to inspire with wonder and shame any contemporary readers who, if they know the names of Sacco and Vanzetti at all, would consider their case merely as dead history, irrelevant to the Nixon era. In this Vonnegut shares the intent of Porter, who argues “that when events are forgotten, buried in the cellar of the page – they are no longer even history.”Footnote ⁵⁷ But Porter ensures that her passion play is an unalloyed tragedy, while in Vonnegut the passion play competes with the pantomime – the inevitable outcome from a writer who, as Vonnegut confesses elsewhere, will “head for a punch line every time.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Thus the main connection that Jailbird asserts is that while convenient amnesia may be the harmless stuff of slapstick comedy, it is, more darkly, what allows a generation tempered by the Depression, two world wars and the Cold War to elevate to the presidency a politician of such self-serving ferocity as Richard Nixon – “whose prevailing ideology,” in Miller's words, “consisted of punishing his enemies and repaying his friends.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Implicitly, Vonnegut also reaffirms his belief that comic pleasure is itself culpable, as it relies on an equally dubious amnesia – a wilful blinding to the sinister designs of the powerful for the sake of the laughter that lubricates the “cruel social machinery” of American history. The implication in Jailbird is that if one wants to laugh, one really cannot afford to know. Thus Starbuck goes so far as to establish an explicit link between Richard Nixon and comedic depravity: Nixon, too, is a would-be comedian (not surprising for the politician who established the precedent of candidates’ making fools of themselves on national television in order to attract the youth vote). When Starbuck's old lover Sarah Wyatt marvels that they “could still laugh, despite all we had been through,” Starbuck notes, “That was something Julie Nixon had said about her father after he got bounced out of the White House: ‘He still has his sense of humor’” (201). Nixon's sense of humour, however, carries sinister overtones; his smile resembles “a rosebud that has just been smashed by a hammer” (32).

Ultimately, however, it is Starbuck's own joking that implicates him and marks him out as an impotent, defeated crusader for an ideal society. At one point, amidst his colleagues at a RAMJAC gathering, he offers a pompous lecture on the “total lack of seriousness” that “is finally going to kill this planet” (238). The response from the gathered company is simply a further dose of slapstick, initiated significantly by the erstwhile historian in the company's midst:

Faced with such obstinate optimism and determined historical amnesia, Starbuck dispenses with his political activism and falls on his own sword: “So I gave up on saying anything serious. I told another joke, and I sat down” (239). As R. B. Gill notes of this moment, “Starbuck's idealism is lost in the inanity of polite applause” prompted by his joke.Footnote ⁶⁰

Such a damning scenario challenges Lawrence Broer's conclusion that Starbuck is, at the end, “reborn, not a ‘jailbird’, but a ‘canary bird in the coalmine’, an agent of illumination and spiritual healing.”Footnote ⁶¹ For if such an agent is doomed to impotence – to “chirp and keel over,” armed only with the progressive power of a pie in the face – what is the value of his agency? How can one illuminate when one is ignored or, at best, laughed at? In such circumstances, Starbuck might welcome the “polite applause” for his jokes with as much enthusiasm as Herblock welcomed the praise of Haldeman and Erlichman. As William Keough suggests, what these two criminals had identified in Herblock's caricatures were “jokes without teeth.”Footnote ⁶²

Ultimately, such jokes dominate the legacy of anti-Nixon satire, as they must – given that they are, in the end, just jokes. Vonnegut himself had written that laughter “solves nothing, just as tears solve nothing. Laughter or crying is what a human being does when there's nothing else he can do.”Footnote ⁶³ Laughter, to be sure, contributed to the political temperature that finally drove Nixon from office. But from the longer perspective, having faced this “assault of Laughter,” it is the rehabilitated Nixon who is the last man standing.