Herblock’s Presidents: Puncturing Pomposity

Herblock’s Presidents: Puncturing Pomposity

National Portrait Gallery

Through Nov. 30

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Political cartoonist Herbert Block, better known as Herblock, “went after those he considered the biggest bullies in society,” said Brett Zongker in the Associated Press. “They often included U.S. presidents.” Herblock, who died in 2001 after a seven-decade career, mostly at The Washington Post, was a thorn in the side of several commanders in chief. A new selection of his cartoons at the National Portrait Gallery brings together his most biting works. President Eisenhower comes in for a drubbing for his foot-dragging on desegregation, and Lyndon Johnson “for diverting funds from the war on poverty to Vietnam.” But Richard Nixon was perhaps Herblock’s favorite target. “One memorable cartoon portrayed a huge bloodhound sniffing out scandals with Nixon on the run, throwing the dog the bones of his accomplices.”

“Jowly and often sweating, his Nixon still looks every inch the crook Herblock believed him to be,” said Michael O’Sullivan in The Washington Post. The cartoonist’s gifts for pure caricature are also on display in images of a “prune-faced” Reagan and “cluelessly vacant-eyed” Eisenhower. But what set apart Herblock’s “poison-pen presidential portraits” was his ability to crystallize the significance of sometimes fleeting Beltway gossip. “One of Herblock’s snarkiest—and funniest—drawings” takes as its subject a painted portrait LBJ commissioned, then rejected. Poking fun at the Texan’s vanity, the cartoon shows the president standing “in front of a portrait in which he’s depicted as a god, surrounded by cherubim and clouds.” He turns to the painter with concern. “That’s a little better,” he says. “But couldn’t you do it in luminous paint?”