THE cartoonist Michael Ramirez thought that the secret service agent was joking when he called him about a sketch depicting President Bush being shot by a character called Politics. “How do I know you are secret service?” he asked. “I’ve got a dark suit, dark sunglasses and credentials,” the voice replied. Thirty minutes later the agent arrived at the Los Angeles Times office.
The man was polite, but to the point. He demanded to know why Mr Ramirez had advocated the President’s assassination. Mr Ramirez’s editor called in the lawyers and showed the agent the door.
To Mr Ramirez, whose cartoon was supposed to sympathise with Mr Bush as his opponents criticised the Iraq war, the secret service’s reaction was a severe case of post-September 11 paranoia. “I knew it (the cartoon) could be controversial, but controversy is one of the weapons — oops, I better not use that word any more — one of the tools that we use,” he said.
Mr Ramirez has now had the last laugh with a new cartoon. It depicts his own assassination by a secret service run amok. His original cartoon was inspired by one of the most brutal images of the Vietnam War. Taken at the beginning of the Tet offensive in 1968, a photograph of the South Vietnamese Police Chief, Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, executing a Viet Cong officer on the street featured on the front page of The Washington Post and won the photographer, Eddie Adams, a Pulitzer Prize.