Herblock's Brush and What It Cost Three Presidents

Herbert Lawrence Block — Herblock — joined the Washington Post in 1946 and remained its principal editorial cartoonist until his death in 2001. In those fifty-five years he produced roughly fourteen thousand cartoons, won three Pulitzer Prizes, and coined at least one word that passed permanently into political language. No other American editorial cartoonist of the twentieth century held a single platform so long, or used it so precisely.

His instrument was a grease crayon and a lithographic-style brush on scratchboard, a clay-coated surface that allows the artist to scratch white lines back through a black ink ground. The technique gave Herblock's work its characteristic texture: dense shadow relieved by sharp, clawed highlights, a visual equivalent of moral urgency. Richard Nixon, Dwight Eisenhower, and Lyndon Johnson each felt it. Nixon felt it longest. Herblock drew him as a sinister, jowly figure climbing from a sewer for so many years that when Nixon won the presidency in 1968, the Post cartoonist publicly offered him a clean shave — a single cartoon declaring a temporary truce. The shave did not last.

The word "McCarthyism" entered the record through a Herblock cartoon published on 29 March 1950 in the Washington Post. The drawing showed Republican leaders struggling to push a reluctant elephant toward a teetering stack of tar buckets, the topmost labelled "McCarthyism." Senator Joseph McCarthy had been making unsubstantiated accusations of Communist infiltration for weeks; Herblock supplied the name that framed the phenomenon for history ↗. The coinage spread quickly into print and broadcast, and the term has remained in dictionaries and political discourse ever since.

His first Pulitzer came in 1942, while he was still at NEA Service before his Post years — awarded for his wartime work in a syndicated context. The second arrived in 1954, the year the McCarthy cartoons were at their peak pressure, and the third in 1979, by which time Herblock had documented Watergate from start to finish, drawing Nixon's fall with a persistence that made the Post's editorial page a consistent counterpart to its news reporting on the scandal. The Pulitzer Prize board's citation records for all three awards are held at Columbia University.

Eisenhower's administration fared no better. Herblock's atomic-age cartoons — depicting mushroom clouds, fallout shelters, and the arms race with a literalness that mainstream commentary often avoided — made the Post's editorial page uncomfortable reading for the White House throughout the 1950s. Johnson, despite being a Democrat, attracted sustained criticism over Vietnam; Herblock's cartoons on the war's cost in American and Vietnamese lives were among the most direct editorial images the Post published during that period.

Block received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994. He died in October 2001, still on the Post's staff.

The Herblock Foundation, established to honour his legacy, administers a prize for editorial cartooning in his name and supports press-freedom work. Block's original artwork, correspondence, and working papers are held at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., where the Herblock Collection comprises more than six hundred boxes of material ↗, making it the most substantial archive of a single American political cartoonist in any public institution. Researchers can access it through the Prints and Photographs Division. The collection includes original scratchboard drawings, rejected sketches, and the research files Block kept on the figures he drew — a record of how editorial cartooning was practiced, under daily deadline, at the highest level the American press produced in the twentieth century.