BLOCK, HERBERT LAWRENCE

BLOCK, HERBERT LAWRENCE (Herblock; 1909–2001), U.S. editorial cartoonist. Born in Chicago, Block started to draw when he was quite young and won a scholarship to the Chicago Art Institute at 12. His critical eye and rapier pen made him one of the leading journalists of his time. In 1929 Block dropped out of Lake Forest College after two years to work for The Chicago Daily News. His cartoons were syndicated almost from the start. In 1933 he joined the Newspaper Enterprise Association, where he won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1942. The following year he joined the army, which employed his talent for cartooning in its Information and Education Division. He was mustered out as a sergeant in 1946 and joined The Washington Post, where his woodcut-like strokes and pungent, succinct captions chronicled and skewered national and world leaders for decades. Block coined the term "McCarthyism" for the prosecutorial Communist-hunting tactics of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, whom he depicted emerging from a sewer with a thug-like heavy beard. It was said that McCarthy shaved twice a day to avoid resembling the caricature. He began drawing Richard M. Nixon the same way in 1948, and Nixon, too, shaved twice a day. Block was unperturbed, saying both men had a "moral 5 o'clock shadow." Sometimes Nixon appeared as a vulture, other times as an undertaker, always as a man ready to benefit from the failure of others. When Nixon was elected president, a Herblock cartoon showed him with a clean shave, but as the administration became mired in Watergate, Nixon's eyebrows grew heavier and his wattles fleshier. Nixon, like Dwight D. Eisenhower before him, canceled the delivery of The Washington Post to his home when his children were young, because, he said, "I didn't want the girls to be upset." Block's second Pulitzer Prize was awarded in 1954 for a drawing of Stalin, who was being accompanied to his grave by the robed figure of death. "You were always a great friend of mine, Joseph," the caption said. In addition to his work as a cartoonist, for which he won another Pulitzer Prize in 1979, Block wrote 12 books in his customary punchy style. "The Soviet state builds bodies," he wrote typically in one of them. "Mounds of them." He continued contributing cartoons to the Post until three months before his death when he was 92. In addition to three Pulitzers and a fourth he shared with The Post for its coverage of Watergate, Herblock received several honorary degrees and won dozens of journalism prizes. In 1966 he was selected to design the postage stamp commemorating the 175th anniversary of the Bill of Rights. President Bill Clinton, who was often at the end of Herblock's sharp quill, in 1994 awarded him the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2000 the Library of Congress mounted a retrospective of Herblock's work. The Washington Post so valued Herblock that they referred to his contribution to the editorial page as a signed editorial opinion and not a cartoon. (Stewart Kampel (2nd ed.)