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The Post's sharpest cut into the elephant's hide appears daily on the editorial page and in 150 other U.S. papers: the brilliant political cartoon by Herblock, 46-year-old Chicago-born Herbert Lawrence Block, No. 1 U.S. cartoonist, two-time Pulitzer Prizewinner. A left-wing Democrat, Herblock almost quit the Post in 1952 because it was supporting Eisenhower, did not do any cartoons for the paper during the week before the election.*
Publisher Graham, who registered Republican in 1952 (to help Ike defeat Robert Taft for the nomination), insists that the Post is merely following its independent conscience, recalls that "Harry Truman didn't like the Post either."* The Post has, indeed, taken its rapier (and at times its club) to anyone at the seat of Government. It approved of much in Harry Truman's Fair Deal, but it was unrelenting in its criticism of the corruption in his Administration. It praised Alf M. Landon and Wendell Willkie highly, but withheld formal support from any presidential candidate until Graham broke that precedent in 1952 by endorsing Eisenhower.
In the case of Richard Nixon, the Post has attacked when the Democrats were in power and again after the Republicans took over. The Post first criticized Nixon when he was helping to unmask Traitor Alger Hiss. Publisher Graham contends that "all men of good will," including the men of the Post, were embarrassed by the Hiss case. The paper sprang to Hiss's defense, switched later when the evidence piled up against him. In the Post's more recent anti-Nixon efforts, largely aimed at Nixon's use of the subversion issue as a political weapon, Graham has had to restrain Herblock. In his Republican gallery (Ike as a perplexed boob; Dulles, a smug bumbler; Wilson, a predatory capitalist), the cartoonist began drawing Nixon as a heavily stubbled, bestial figure resembling the famous Herblock caricature of Joe McCarthy. Graham sternly ordered Herblock to shave the Vice President. "Nixon is not McCarthy," he scolded, "no matter what else you may think of him."
Estes & Frankenstein. While the Post's thrusts against public figures it dislikes are spectacular, it has produced more significant results in the area of issues that are broader than any personality. It was the Post (long before Phil Graham's time) that first stripped the camouflage off F.D.R.'s Supreme Court packing bill and led the fight against it. Its internationalist editorials impressed Roosevelt into recommending them to press conferences as insights into his foreign policy.* Post editorials helped to assure civilian control of atomic energy, and to trigger emergency operations that spared Europe a famine in 1945-46. One gave Arkansas Senator Fulbright the idea for the exchange scholarships that bear his name. The Post's latest crusade has been to build a fire under the clean elections bill now before the Senate with 85 Senators as its joint sponsors. Based on a Graham idea, the bill would outlaw heavy individual campaign contributions, provide for financing campaigns instead through bipartisan mass money-raising.