The Cartoonist as Champion

He shakes hands like Muhammad Ali, I thought last Sunday morning, greeting Nelson Mandela across the church plaza from my office.

Now with whom do you share a thought like that? It isn't a matter of policy toward the South African government. Yet it is a detail that reveals character, and character is the best index of what a leader will do.

Well, I would have told Guernsey LePelley. I would have walked into our former cartoonist's office next to mine and said right off, ''He shakes hands like Muhammad Ali.''

Guernsey would have provided the rest: how we had met Ali nearby on Massachusetts Avenue, and the then reigning heavyweight champion, the most famous man in the world, took our hand in the absolutely gentlest of grips. Mandela too had been a boxer. The link would have been made: a contrast between power and gentleness, authority and humility we had noted during discussion of leadership that expanded over many years. He would have recalled seeing a well-dressed young woman's knees buckle as she caught sight of Ali - and how gently he helped her to her feet. Ali's voice was so quiet. Was this the taunting, dancing, stinging heavyweight champion of the world?

''We need a world without distinction among peoples,'' Mandela had said a few minutes before, to a gathering of Monitor editors on the plaza. ''We are all children of God.'' He would shortly fly to Washington to meet with President Bush. Gentleness and strength. Mandela's eyes darted with delight as he looked at flags around the plaza, Symphony Hall nearby - so long in prison, he seemed unable to see enough.

A political cartoonist is a newspaper's prizefighter. His space is his ring. He is out there alone with his adversaries - poverty, injustice, stupidity, and his most unforgiving opponent, humorlessness. As Guernsey often said, the cartoon is a medium of attack. Many newspapers will not have cartoonists; they can be too much trouble. For a newspaper like ours, which as a matter of principle does not cover professional boxing, the cartoonist's challenge can be extraordinary.

Many readers do not like to see authority figures poked fun of. But elected and institutional leaders must be held to account for the policies they represent.

Some see the cartoonist as an anarchist. He is definitely not organization man.

The cartoon is feared. The image, like a quick jab, is communicated faster than conscious thought. The cartoon often develops from an unconscious connection of familiar images. At work, the cartoonist chuckles to himself, totally absorbed. One in a thousand people perhaps can draw. One in thousand may be funny. To combine both these gifts in one individual is rare indeed.

''Kin is a humorist,'' Guernsey's wife, Maxine, would insist (the family called him Kin), in trying to explain her husband's versatility. He was a playwright as well as an artist. From his country home in Connecticut, he wrote comedies that still play in schools and communities across America. Guernsey's first drawing - of Governor-elect James M. Curley, which the audacious youth got the governor to sign - appeared on the Monitor's front page on Jan. 3, 1935. Besides political cartoons, for many years he drew a comic strip, ''Tubby,'' a chronicle of family humor. He retired in May 1981 but continued a column on the ''amusing nonsense going on in the world, posing as serious thought.'' He passed on last week in Florida.

When the Thresher sank in April 1963, LePelley drew a submarine resting on the ocean bottom, a hand reaching toward it. ''Even there ...'' read the caption, a fragment from the Psalmist: ''If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.''

Those whose affection and character we have known most vividly never leave us.

The world has a laughter deficit.

Power and humor rarely combine; neither do might and lightness of touch.

We need our cartoonists with the soft, darting, teasing hands and a grasp of steel.