Paul Krassner, 1932-2019

July 22, 2019
Posted by Jay Livingston

To appreciate the brilliance of Paul Krassner’s “Fuck Communism” poster, you have to remember that in 1963

a. Anti-communism was still the number one principle for US conservatives — more than tax cuts, more than “freedom,” more than guns, more than anything.

b. The word fuck was far more taboo than it is today, and especially so among conservatives. In 1963, you still couldn’t say damn or hell on TV and radio. It was darn and heck or just don’t bother.

I don’t know how many copies of the poster The Realist, Krassner’s satirical monthly, sold. The more famous Realist graphic was Wally Wood’s “Dirty Disney” drawing. According to the Times obit, “Later, digitally colored by a former Disney artist, it became a hot-selling poster that supplied Mr. Krassner with modest royalties into old age.”

More widespread fame, though also more fleeting, went to Krassner’s parody of a best-seller about JFK.

The Realist’s most famous article was one Mr. Krassner wrote portraying Lyndon B. Johnson as sexually penetrating a bullet wound in John F. Kennedy’s neck while accompanying the assassinated president’s body back to Washington on Air Force One. The headline of the article was “The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book,” and it claimed — falsely — to be material that had been removed from William Manchester’s book “The Death of a President.” “People across the country believed — if only for a moment — that an act of presidential necrophilia had taken place,” Mr. Krassner told an interviewer in 1995. “The imagery was so shocking, it broke through the notion that the war in Vietnam was being conducted by sane men.”

I don’t know whether Krassner is right about the effects of his article. But it was impressive that for one brief shining moment, so many people, sophisticated media people, believed that it was true or at least plausible. They believed it in part because it fit with their image of LBJ. But mostly what made it credible was Krassner’s skill as a parodist. It sounded like William Manchester. Yes, Johnson was Krassner’s target, but Krassner also did a great job of imitating Manchester’s pop-history prose.

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