Herblock, 91; Cartoonist Captured His Time

Herblock, the Washington Post cartoonist whose witty and frequently ferocious drawings provided some of the most memorable images in the history of American political discourse and earned him the highest honors of his profession and the nation, died Sunday night at Sibley Memorial Hospital. He was 91. He had pneumonia.

His career began before the stock market crash of 1929 heralded the Great Depression and lasted into the 21st century. Herbert L. Block, in illustrations of stunning power and simplicity, illuminated and helped to define the great issues of the age: the rise of Hitler and the spread of fascism and dictatorship in Europe and Asia in the 1930s; World War II; the Cold War; the sea changes that marked American life in the postwar era; the collapse of the Soviet Union; and the prosperity and scandals of the Clinton years in the 1990s.

He chronicled every president from Herbert Hoover to George W. Bush. He coined the term “McCarthyism” for the smear tactics of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, the Red-baiting Wisconsin Republican who was eventually censured by the Senate. His drawings of a fat and patient humanoid A-bomb encapsulated the menace of nuclear weapons.

He took the side of the have-nots of the world against the haves. He favored civil rights and candor in government. He distrusted all efforts to curb constitutional rights. He believed in the values underlying democracy: freedom, justice, equality.

Some of his earlier cartoons seem topical even today. He favored campaign finance reform, environmental protection and gun control decades before they became part of the nation’s political agenda. A former cigarette smoker, he was a critic of the tobacco industry even before he quit.

His cartoons provided trenchant and highly accessible commentary on the day’s events. The Herblock cartoon was the first thing many readers looked for in their newspapers, whether they agreed with him or thought he was outrageous.

Herblock won three Pulitzer Prizes for editorial cartooning in his own right and shared a fourth Pulitzer with The Post for its coverage of Watergate, the scandal that forced Richard Nixon to resign the presidency under threat of impeachment. He received five prizes for cartooning from Sigma Delta Chi, the professional journalism society, as well as numerous other honors and half a dozen honorary degrees.

In 1994, President Clinton awarded him the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.

The Washington Post was Herblock’s base for more than half a century, and through syndication, he reached newspaper readers all over the United States and in several foreign countries. He wrote a dozen books, including “Herblock: A Cartoonist’s Life,” which was published in 1993.

In 1950, he had a one-man show at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and President Truman was among those who attended. A half-century later, in 2000, the Library of Congress mounted a retrospective exhibition of his work.

Herblock is represented in the Rosenwald Collection of the National Gallery of Art. And he was honored in the mid-1960s with a commission to design a postage stamp commemorating the 175th anniversary of the Bill of Rights.

Some of Herblock’s most famous cartoons involved Nixon, whom he pictured crawling out of a sewer on one occasion and to whom he offered a clean shave on another.

But he considered all presidents, Democrat or Republican, to be fair game. He showed Lyndon Johnson carrying a bullwhip while striding past cowering White House aides under the caption, “Happy Days on the Old Plantation,” and he drew Gerald Ford going both ways on the question of tax increases or cuts. A vacillating Jimmy Carter was shown complaining that he could not get a clear picture of himself on television.

In a cartoon on the Iran-contra arms-for-hostages scandal, President Reagan looked resolute on television while actually kneeling at the feet of the Ayatollah Khomeini and offering him a handful of money. During the 1988 presidential campaign, a two-faced George Bush was depicted under the caption, “Which Lips Are We Supposed to Read?” In 1997, Clinton was shown saying, “True, I Had Coffee With Those Big Contributors, but I Didn’t Swallow.”

President Eisenhower, whom Herblock faulted for allegedly insufficient support of the civil rights movement and lack of zeal in curbing the excesses of McCarthy, canceled his subscription to the Washington Post. Nixon did likewise. In 1967, Johnson dropped plans to give Herblock the Medal of Freedom. In 1970, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew dismissed him as “a master of sick invective.”

Although his work appeared on the editorial page of The Post, Herblock made no effort to conform to the newspaper’s editorial policies. His cartoons expressed the view of no one but himself.

In 1952, when The Post backed Eisenhower for president and Herblock backed Democrat Adlai E. Stevenson, the cartoons were dropped by the paper for a few days but then were restored in the interest of expressing diverse views.

In an essay in the catalog of his Library of Congress show, Herblock wrote that a “political cartoon is not a news story and not an oil portrait. It’s essentially a means of poking fun, for puncturing pomposity.” He added that cartoons and stories serve the same purpose of helping readers understand situations.

Herblock said he got his ideas by reading the newspaper until he found some item that caused him to say, “They can’t do that, for crissake!”

The task of transforming this sense of outrage into a cartoon involved several preliminary sketches and informal consultation with one or more reporters who had expert knowledge of the issue at hand. If he was doing a cartoon about the defense budget, for example, he would talk to the Pentagon correspondent.

“Such help--not ‘ideas for cartoons,’ but background information and relevant facts--is of enormous value,” he said.

Having decided what he wanted to do, he set about making a final drawing. He always pressed his deadlines and rarely left the paper at night until he had a chance to see a page proof with his cartoon on it.

Herbert Lawrence Block was born in Chicago on Oct. 13, 1909, the youngest of three boys in the family of David and Tessie Block. His father was a chemist who had a number of successful businesses. His mother was a prizewinning cook and the winner of a national contest for her slogan, “Milk from contented cows,” for the Carnation Milk Co.

The boy showed such a talent for drawing that when he was 11, his father enrolled him in Saturday classes at the Chicago Art Institute.

He began to send items to Richard Henry Little, who was in charge of the extremely popular contributors’ column at the Tribune. Readers who submitted material to the column often signed themselves with their initials or with a pen name. At the suggestion of his father, the youngster combined his first and last names and thus became Herblock.

In the spring of 1929, he left Lake Forest College to take a job with the Chicago Daily News. His first cartoon appeared April 24, 1929. He was not yet 20 years old.

Away from the drawing board, Herblock was cheerful and accessible and given to such homey expressions as “Golly,” “Hey, ho,” and “Hey, there.” His pleasures included golf and a vacation residence by the ocean in Delaware. He did not marry and leaves no immediate survivors.

Herblock, who published his last cartoon in the Post on Aug. 28, never retired or lost his enthusiasm for his work.

He concluded his autobiography with these words: “There’s always a clean slate, a fresh sheet of paper, a waiting space, a chance to have another shot at it tomorrow.

“Tomorrow!”