Black and White and Read All Over

The day Steve Benson was born, the royal family of the Mormon Church had a new prince. The first grandchild, and a son, no less, born into a religious dynasty ruled by men. His grandfather, Ezra Taft Benson, already was the most famous Mormon in the nation, being the interior secretary for President Dwight D. Eisenhower. And when grandpa would fly home to Salt Lake City, little Steven – wearing an “I Like Ike” button – would dash to the plane and be swept up in the arms of the old man who adored him. The picture ran in newspapers nationally.

Everyone knew exactly what to expect of Steve Benson, and they weren’t disappointed. He went to Brigham Young University. Naturally. He did the two-year mission to spread the faith that is expected of good Mormon boys (and for which he’d saved all his life in a three-slot piggy bank: one slot for regular church tithing, one for his spending money, the other for his future mission). And when he showed a talent for drawing and political commentary, nobody flinched as he became an extremely conservative political cartoonist who mirrored the lessons of his family and his church. By then, his grandfather had become the living prophet of his church – a voice capable of interpreting direct messages from God.

From his talented pen-and-ink he railed against gays, against women’s rights, against immigrants, against abortion, against liberalism, against Democrats… and he rallied in favor of anything that leaned right, from unrestricted gun ownership to the entire Republican platform.

And then something incredible happened. He started moderating his views, a little here, a little there. And then when he openly derided Evan Mecham – the first Mormon to be elected governor of Arizona and a personal friend of his grandfather – people started wondering what was happening to good ol’ Steven, whose family had always stood, and still stands, for all that the Mormon Church teaches.

Eventually, all hell broke loose. Decades ago, he not only left the Mormon Church, he denounced it; he not only kept adopting left-leaning ideas, he championed them.

These days, you’re not alone if you’re scratching your head and asking: How in the world could such a good Mormon boy end up a bona fide liberal?

In the realm of political thought, there’s not much precedence for this kind of transformation. Most folks start out liberal and become more conservative as they age. But Steve Benson’s trip down the wrong way of that One-Way Street has been something strange to behold.

“I’ve taken a 180-degree turn in a lot of my thinking,” he says now. “I used to be vicious to gays – an aversion to sexual orientation was part of my upbringing. But here I am stepping out into a new reality. I’m this heterosexual former Mormon, out there carrying the banner for my gay friends.”

Yes, folks, if you looked up the phrase “political whiplash” in the dictionary, Steve Benson’s picture could be there.

And no one understands that better than Steve Benson himself.

“I was born into a family considered to be the royal blood of Mormonism,” he says over lunch in Downtown Phoenix. “We were supposedly truly blessed to be born Mormon. But it was all black and white. Walking into the Benson mind was not technicolor.”

It’s startling, even shocking, to hear how much color he’s put into his mind and his life and his cartoons since he rejected the church of his birth and the ways of his family. Sometimes, it even startles him. Espec-ially considering where it all began. “The politics of my family,” he says, “makes Gen-ghis Khan look like Mother Teresa.”

To understand the incredible political journey of Steve Benson, you have to understand the power of love. And you have to know about Mary Ann.

“She’s the first and only girl I’ve ever kissed,” he says, not at all embarrassed by how sweet that still sounds after 26 years of marriage. They met as students at Brigham Young University, where he was already a hot shot – he was drawing cartoons for the school newspaper, and she was studying business education. Steve and Mary Ann fell in love instantly.

“She’s very independent-minded and liked to play basketball with the guys,” he remembers. “She’s vivacious and outgoing. Plus, she’s real pretty.”

Looking back now, his very attraction to her showed the first crack in a theology that wasn’t to be questioned. “I was raised in a society where the women’s role is to be a breeding machine – a system that told them who they were and what they should do,” he says. “Mary Ann broke the mold. She showed a refreshing expression of individualism in a repressive system, although I didn’t realize that at the time.”

But Steve was the only one taken with this independent beauty.

“My mother was very opposed to us being married,” he says, and when pressed, lists mom’s two objections: Mary Ann’s bones were too big, and she was using her body to attract men. (He laughs at the first and smiles at the second.) But that wasn’t even the worst of it, as far as his father’s objections went. Mary Ann, although a good Mormon girl (and Steve admits he wouldn’t have even considered any other type), wasn’t suitable for the Benson clan because her father was the Democratic County Chairman in Idaho. “My grandfather once said he couldn’t figure out how you could be a good Mormon and a Democrat,” Steve explains.

It had been a tradition, he remembers, that “no one was allowed to marry into the Benson family without a vote of approval from the family.” The family’s vote was negative.

“You were expected to obey the family and the church – that’s the first law of Mormonism,” he says. “My impulse was to follow my heart and marry Mary Ann, but instead we put it on hold.”

His mother tried to interest him in other girls – girls with smaller bones and no Democrats in the closet – but he wasn’t interested. When she couldn’t distract him she played her “ace in the hole” – she called his grandfather to have a chat with the boy.

“One cold morning, he called me and said, ‘I’m not calling as your grandfather but as the president of the Quorum of 12. You need to go home and mend your family. Obey your mother and you’ll be blessed.’ It’s like Peter the Apostle just called me up!”

He and Mary Ann then met on a snowy slope outside campus. “We bawled our eyes out – we just held each other, but I had to go home,” he remembers. Mary Ann helped him pack, and he went off to Texas, where his father was Dallas County Chairman of the George Wallace for President Commit-tee. (And if Wallace had had his way, Steve’s grandfather would have been his vice-presidential candidate, but Steve says “even the Mormon Church” could see the negatives of formally attaching their star to a controversial politician from Alabama running under the banner of the white-power American Independent Party.)

His mother was ecstatic and believed he’d come to his senses. But instead, he was finding that the “imprinting” of obedience had curled edges. “I started to recoil against institutional authority telling me what to do,” he says. “I was miserable. I didn’t date. I missed Mary Ann.”

He went back to Salt Lake City for a conference and decided to take his case dir-ectly to his grandfather, the Prophet.

“I told him we’d broken it off twice to keep everyone happy, but I was in love.” This time, his grandfather listened as a grandfather. His beloved “Steven,” as he always called him, was a Temple-worthy Mormon – a young man who’d served a mission, was morally clean and honored his temple covenants. Grandfather decreed that a man who had those credentials could decide his own bride. In 1977, “under the hand and authority of my grandfather,” the 22-year-olds were married in the Temple.

Their love would turn out, for both of them, to be the first “early lesson of self-empowerment,” Steve says. They’d have four children, now ages 16 to 25, and Mary Ann would work in retail. “She’s got a really good business sense,” her husband brags. “To me, money is like a waterfall – nice to be around. We’d have filed Chapter 11 if not for her.”

And then he literally gets dreamy-eyed and says this: “I can’t imagine living without her. She makes every day a joy for me.”

Mary Ann chose not to be interviewed for this story, but a key to her own road of self-empowerment can be found in her

e-mail address: “RUafreewoman.”

“I discovered there’s nothing as powerful as a deep-seated, individual commitment,” Steve says.

Steve Benson gets tons of mail at The Arizona Republic. Most of it is hateful.

“Oh yeah, you suck,” concludes one.

“Why do you find it necessary to lie about the president?”

“It is time for you to retire.”

“You’re a traitor.”

“You’re a terrorist.”

The worst ones promise death. He’s even been turned into the Office of Home-land Security as a national threat.

One of his favorite letters came years ago from none other than Arizona’s venerable late-Senator Barry Goldwater: “There are – and have been – good Bensons. You ain’t.”

When Benson “harpooned” former Phoenix Mayor Paul Johnson, he got this note from hizzoner: “Your editorial cartoon was rude, crude, outrageous, inaccurate and poorly drawn. Could I have it for my office?”

Of course, now and then, there’s a rave, like the woman who wrote: “I’ve loved your work for a while, especially the fact that Bush is growing increasingly Satanic in your renderings.”

He admits to liking Mark Twain’s line: “Get your facts first, then you can distort them as much as you please.”

He recalls how his mother tried to shape his cartoons, admonishing: “You can catch a lot more flies with honey than you can with vinegar.” And he remembers his response: “Yeah, Mom, but who wants a lot of flies?”

His own self-portrait portrays him as a devil with horns and pitchfork emerging from a bottle of ink.

Steve Benson has long summed up his craft like this: “I don’t aim to please, I just aim.”

He knows exactly how he came about his ideas on war. The road sign read “Hiroshima.” From 1973 to 1975, Steve Benson served his Mormon mission in the Japanese city that was first bombed by the United States in its quest to end World War II. He’d later visit the second nuclear bomb site, Nagasaki, where at ground zero, he discovered, sat “the largest Catholic Church in Asia.”

He was a zone leader for his group of missionaries who taught English as a “gimmick” to convert the Japanese to the “one true” church.

“Every day we’d hand out [pamphlets] in the ‘Peace Park’ that stands at the epicenter of the bomb,” he remembers. “Every day I’d cross the bridge at the site of so much death.” He couldn’t stay out of the museum dedicated to what he sees as the most inhumane act ever committed – using weapons of mass destruction on civilians. There he studied the stories of those who melted, those whose clothes were burned into their bodies, those whose skin fell off as they died.

“People desperately wanted to believe that killing children and old men and women was necessary to end World War II,” he says. “I didn’t buy that for a minute. That began my personal odyssey away from war. I’m not a pacifist, but except for self-defense, I cannot justify the use of lethal force.”

He came back from his mission and drew a birthday card for his father, showing an American fighter bombing the Benson home, with the message: “You ought to be against the Vietnam War.” His father took him aside to insist that Vietnam was a “fight against communism.” Steve didn’t buy that for a minute, either.

And he’s still amazed that the American people bought into the war in Iraq. He can see no reason we attacked that nation and believes the president lied about the so-called “weapons of mass destruction.” Nor is he swayed by those who are willing to substitute other reasons to justify the war, like the mass graves of Saddam Hussein’s victims. “I thought, if you want to see a mass grave, go to Hiroshima.”

Steve Benson came to Arizona in 1980, when he was hired by Pat Murphy, then the editorial page editor of The Arizona Republic. It was a year after earning a bachelor of arts in political science from Brigham Young University and seven years after getting an art instruction certificate from a school in Minneapolis. He was hired to succeed the Republic’s most holy icon – its only Pulitzer Prize winner, the heart and soul of its editorial pages for decades – Reg Manning.

Murphy quickly discovered what a sheltered life his new hire had led. “He was drawing a cartoon involving Billy Carter, brother of Jimmy Carter, which included a can of Billy Beer. Steve was so loyal to his non-alcohol Mormon faith that he had to send one of our staff across the street to buy a can of beer he could use as a model.”

Murphy admits he disagreed with many of Benson’s cartoons, “but stoutly defended them,” including the time it got him fired. Publisher Duke Tully was “embarrassed” by a Benson cartoon that lampooned the late Phoenix Mayor Margaret Hance. Murphy left the building and Tully called the editorial staff together to name a new editor. But community relations director Bill Shover, playing the role of peacemaker that would be his stock and trade for most of his career, got the two men together and figured out a way for them both to save face.

Murphy came back to work, and ironically, when Tully was exposed as a fraud – passing himself off as an Air Force pilot with a chest full of medals when he’d never served in the military – it was Pat Murphy who became publisher of the Republic.

Murphy notes that early on, he expected Benson’s hard-line, right-leaning Mormon-ism would mellow. “I believe the Republic environment Steve worked in broadened his view of life, the world, people’s various viewpoints,” he says. “Of all the people I’ve hired in my years as a newspaper executive, Steve is among the top-five standouts – in ethics, intelligence, verve, talent, likeability and achievement. Anyone who spends even minutes with him goes away with the impression that he’s one helluva guy.”

When another former editor, Keven Willey (now with the Dallas Morning News), calls Benson “a talent beyond compare,” she’s not exaggerating.

For nearly a decade, he was the “most nominated loser” for the nation’s highest journalism award, the Pulitzer Prize. In 1993, he took the prize home (and was nominated for the fifth time, although losing again, in 1994). Steve Benson has also been honored by the National Headliner Award committee, the Overseas Press Club of America, Best of the West, and has won a Rocky Mountain Emmy.

He’s written five books, and his cartoons are distributed in more than 100 newspapers by United Features Syndicate. (They’ve also appeared in all the major news magazines, as well as news television shows.)

But ask him for the award he adores the most and it’s “The Parched Cow Skull Award” from the Arizona Office of Tourism for “the least positive contribution” to the snowbird industry that Benson harpoons with great regularity.

In 2002, he reached the peak of liberal recognition when he received the “Practitioner of the First Amendment Award” from the American Civil Liberties Union for having “taken on John Ashcroft, Jerry Falwell, President Bush and anyone else who has sought to denigrate or to deprive us of liberties that are guaranteed under the Bill of Rights.”

“Working with Steve was great fun and, occasionally, enormously frustrating,” Willey says. “I learned that Steve’s idea of making a 6 p.m. deadline was applying the final brush strokes around 6 p.m. Hawaiian time.”

She stresses that her job “wasn’t to censor” him but to make sure his message – one she often disagreed with – was clear and making the point he was trying to convey. In 1998, she moved his cartoon from the editorial page to the “op-ed” page that faces it “so there would be no reader expectation – or publisher push – for his cartoons to reflect the Editorial Board’s opinions.” Because by then, the cartoonist and his newspaper were usually a continent apart.

But Willey can remember only one cartoon being spiked. She had approved a controversial cartoon where Benson was defending former lawmaker Art Hamilton, who is African-American. The cartoon showed Hamilton being lynched, but the publisher decided the caricature of both Hamilton and his attackers looked racist, and overrode her to kill it. Benson says he agrees with the decision because “there was a better approach to tackling the issue.”

But there were many cartoons that raised howls and screams – sometimes from the left, lately from the right.

When the Texas A&M bonfire collapsed and killed students partying before a big football game, Benson drew a cartoon that showed the bonfire as a boneheaded idea in the first place. The Republic got 20,000 e-mails in protest and ended up apologizing for the cartoon. Benson says he still agrees with the message, but thinks he did a bad job conveying it. “The cartoon was within 24 hours of the fire – they were still pulling bodies out,” he remembers. “But my message wasn’t tight enough and it was too open to miscommunication. It was grossly misunderstood [as poking fun at dead children].”

His recent anti-war cartoons have drawn thousands of irate letters, as well, from people who see him as unpatriotic and a traitor who would be best to move to another country.

“We’re in an era and time when there’s a desperate desire for unity,” he says. “Unity is a salve for people – if there’s a big enough crowd screaming the same mantra, it must be right. But they’re not right about the war in Iraq.”

Anyone paying attention would conclude Benson can’t draw President Bush without making him look like a buffoon.

“I respect his philosophical metamorphous,” Willey says. “Like all cartoonists, however, he tends to see things in black and white. Such absolutism, after all, is key to cartooning. He used to be absolute and predictable as a conservative. Now, he sometimes seems absolute and predictable as a liberal.”

These days, his work appears in the Republic’s “Viewpoint” section, which is ed-ited by Phil Boas, himself a Mormon, but one whose political thought hasn’t strayed far from the right.

“We have a love-hate relationship,” Boas says. “We don’t agree on anything. Steve will walk up with a gleam in his eye – it’s a great thrill for him knowing he’s going after the president I respect or my part of the world. I think he’s totally off his rocker on Afghanistan and Iraq, but I respect his courage. His stand was not popular, but one time he told me that to do his job, he had to have the hide of a rhino.”

And Boas is quick to add: “I think he’s brilliant; he has a really great mind.”

Boas has known Benson since both were students at BYU. (“Barbie and Ken University,” as it’s often called for its clean-cut student body.) “When I was a freshman, Steve was a star at BYU and was already doing cartoons for the student newspaper. You could tell then that he was special.”

He watched with particular amazement as Benson changed his viewpoint on almost everything and attacked the church.

“The Mormon experience is not monolithic,” Boas stresses. “My experience growing up was far different than his. In Steve’s Mormon family, his grandfather, Ezra Taft Benson, came down for Ev Mecham’s inauguration. In my Mormon family, I got a call from my mom saying, ‘You can’t believe the idiot we just elected.'”

But Boas says he didn’t feel the yolk of restrictions that Benson knew. “I grew up in a family a lot more relaxed about religion and the rules. I look back on it with real gratitude – it kept me off drugs and alcohol and gave me a real sense of self. I didn’t have that very strict upbringing. As Steve describes growing up, I think I would have gone crazy and rebelled, too.”

As different as the two men are, Boas does share something with Benson: “I understand how painful it had to be for him to change his view of his religion.”

Like most religions, Mormons tend to think they’re the only ones going to heaven (and many think Mormons are tied with Roman Catholics in that misguided hedonism).

For a long time, Steve Benson thought they were right.

“I grew up in a very, very close family, where all our goals and values were through the template of Mormonism,” he says. “It was very regimented, very isolated and very judgmental. It pulled you out of the mainstream of human experience, and you didn’t get to taste diversity.”

The centerpiece of this family was a grandfather he cherished. “He wasn’t only my grandfather, but my shepherd. He was also a man I could relate to on a very personal level. He was quite human, with a good sense of humor – a sassy guy. If he hadn’t been suffocated and molded, he could have been very broad-minded and a widely influential man. But Mormonism hobbled him.”

The first hobbling they tried of young Steve Benson came during his days at BYU. He wanted to research the Mormon position on organic evolution – the church said it was communistic and contrary to the word of God – and Steve will insist to this day that he expected his research to bear that out. Nobody was more surprised when he discovered that, instead of “exposing the folly of evolution, as my grandfather wanted,” he was finding the church’s teachings were “contradictory, confused, unscientific and ignorant.”

It became a family crisis. “My father got in the act, then my uncle. It was an undergraduate paper! What were they so afraid of? They insisted my grandfather review it. He finally told me, ‘I don’t want you to publish anything that would undermine the faith of the Brethren.’ I thought, what if they’re wrong – what about the truth?”

That showed a crack in the faith he was so certain was right. And so did the fight over marrying Mary Ann. And so did the feeling of suffocation. But it would be his grandfather’s final days that would drive him from the church.

In truth, Ezra Taft Benson was still called the “living prophet” of the Mormon Church long after he’d become too infirmed to know what was going on, his grandson says. “They were lying about his health, and he was being manipulated. The Mormon Church is supposed to be led by a living prophet. They couldn’t admit he wasn’t a hands-on general anymore.”

One Sunday, a decade ago, Steve Benson’s 11-year-old son asked him a question he couldn’t answer and still hold faithful to the church: “Why do they call great-grandfather a prophet when he can’t do anything?”

Benson remembers thinking, “That’s it,” as he called a friend at the Associated Press to go on the record about the health of his grandfather. His father’s response was stunning. “He told me the media is the enemy of the church, and if I ever spoke to the press again about the health of my grandfather, he wouldn’t allow me to see him anymore. I thought, if a church puts loyalty to an institution above family, I wanted nothing to do with it.”

He and Mary Ann decided to leave the church that was not only their religious base, but their social base. They let their children decide for themselves – children who were watching their entire social structure collapse. Eventually, all the children followed their parents out of the church.

“I’ve come to conclude The Book of Mormon is not a book of revelation, but was plagiarized from other sources and is pure mythology,” Benson says. “Mormon Founder Joseph Smith was a quack and a charlatan.”

He knows these words hurt his family. “They think my soul is lost,” but he doesn’t feel lost, and he doesn’t feel scared. These days, he calls himself an “atheistic [meaning ‘without religion’] in the strictest sense of the word.” Or he likes to paraphrase Clarence Darrow: “I don’t believe in God because I don’t believe in Mother Goose.”

And he calls himself a liberal. “I think at heart, I’m a natural-born liberal, but it took decades to cast off the crustaceous shell to get to the real me.”

A movie comes to mind when he looks back at his early life.

The Truman Show is about a guy whose entire life was a television script, broadcast to the world, and he was the only one who didn’t know it. Jim Carey plays the title role, content in his perfect life with its rules and regulations and security.

There’s an incredible scene when Carey rows a boat out to sea and ends up bumping into the fake horizon. It’s then that he realizes all this was phony and he has been nothing but a pawn.

Steve Benson says he knows exactly how that feels. “The Truman Show is such a metaphor for my life.”

photography by Troy Aossey