Herblock Special Report

Herbert Block – 1974

 

The legendary political cartoonist known as Herblock critiqued American politics from a compassionate and ethical point of view from the days of FDR to Clinton in the pages of the Washington Post.  He put out many collections of his cartoons, but Special Report is, well, special, because of its particular focus on the career of Richard Nixon, published on the occasion of his forced resignation from the presidency in 1974.  Herblock was aware of him since his first congressional run in 1946; even then Nixon’s particular baseness as a political animal was quite apparent to Herblock, who delighted in portraying the ambitious politician as stooped, jowly, five-o’clock-shadowed and always spattered in mud to symbolize his reputation for smear tactics before, during and after campaigns.  Herblock coined the term ‘McCarthyism’ and he often regretted not naming the phenomenon after its true creator, Nixon, instead.  Nixon described Herblock as a thorn in his side as early as 1950 and he was sure to include the satirist on his infamous enemies list when he became president.  One of Nixon’s recurring themes over the years was to portray himself as a “new” Nixon in order to discourage voters and reporters alike from reflecting on his sordid past, and the main theme of Herblock’s Special Report is to show that he was never new, but merely the same corrupt man who was only emboldened by his repeated ability to con the public into keeping him in office.  Some of the cartoons in the book are perceptive, some hilarious, and many are simply scathing; the laments of a man who believes in the American experiment seeing it sullied like tissue paper time and again by the crassest of opportunists.  My favorite cartoon in the book is one that doesn’t portray Nixon at all but merely shows the United States Constitution being fed into a paper shredder, published at the height of the Watergate crisis when Nixon was frantically trying to cover up his many crimes from investigators’ eyes.