News

John told me the news in misty-eyed and modest amazement, which is the most you’ll ever hear from John. He’s not amazed with his own work, but amazed and gratified to hear of the effect of his work on others — sometimes practical, often aesthetic or spiritual, and sometimes simply daybrightening and uplifting, which is plenty if that was the extent of his accomplishment.

Even though the work he inspired was known all over the world, until this week, he didn’t know he had inspired it.

He might have watched the congressional discussion on C-SPAN, he might have watched President George W. Bush sign the bill with Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison looking on, and he wouldn’t have known he was part of this.

The ghost of his cartoon, however, floated over that bill-signing ceremony. John’s cartoons are simply his heart put to paper, so in a real if mystical way, John was in the room that day when the president of the United States granted aid to the women and children of Afghanistan.

The women and children who, even as the ink dried on the bill, were dodging shrapnel and terrorists as the United States rode in to help.

John inked the cartoon in his bunker in the newspaper building eight days after the terrorists set upon New York and Washington. On Sept. 20, 2001, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette printed the cartoon on its editorial page.

John Deering, who grew up in Cammack Village, drew five fearful turbaned Taliban in a cave. One was reading an ultimatum from the United States: “Give us Osama bin Laden, or we’ll send your women to college.”

Days later, Maj. Jimmie O. Keenan, who grew up in Murfreesboro in southwest Arkansas, saw John’s cartoon in The Washington Post.

Maj. Keenan also noticed that the cartoon was from her home-state paper. She took the cartoon to the office of Sen. Hutchison, a Texas Republican, where the major was working in the Army’s congressional fellowship program.

The major showed the cartoon to David Davis, a member of the senator’s staff.

“Americans were outraged and disgusted by Taliban rule and their treatment of women,” Mr. Davis says now. “John’s cartoon captured that ... anger and offered a tonguein-cheek way to strike back at the repressive Taliban rulers. John’s clever line really did capture the essence of our culture and our best response to bin Laden.”

Mr. Davis showed the cavemen to Sen. Hutchison, who reacted quickly, says Jimmie Keenan, now a colonel and chief of staff of the Warrior Care and Transition Office.

“She said, ‘You know what? We need to do something about this. Let’s draft some legislation on this issue,’” Keenan recalled. It was Mr. Davis who contacted John this week, and told him about the bill.

So an Arkansan in Sen. Hutchison’s office, inspired by the artist in Little Rock, set to work with Sen. Barbara Mikulski’s staff. Before the end of the year, President Bush had John Hancocked the Afghan Women and Children Relief Act of 2001.

Conceived in an Arkansas heart, set to paper in a cartoon-littered and acrylicsplotted bunker in downtown Little Rock by a man who never would tell you about it.