Herblock Gallery
Herblock Looks at 1972: Fifty Years Ago in Editorial Cartoons

Although President Nixon signed the Clean Air Act into law in 1970, air pollution continued to affect the quality of air people breathed in the United States. In July 1972, a heat wave led to smog blanketing the Washington, D.C., area so that people could not see the top of the Washington Monument. Herblock used the metaphor of children exercising and unable to breathe out bad air or see much of the world around them to draw attention to the issue.

Portraying a couple reading a newspaper and preparing to eat a candlelit dinner of dog food, Herblock referred to a speech Department of Agriculture Secretary Earl “Rusty” Butz made to the Southern Regional Republican Women’s Conference. As food prices skyrocketed, newspapers filled with suggestions of meat boycotts and consuming cheaper cuts.

Herblock ridiculed lobbyists as criminal thugs terrorizing people seeking mass transit and to stop construction of the Alaskan oil pipeline. In 1972, as the Senate Public Works Committee first voted to use some of the highway trust fund for public transportation, the highway lobby successfully leaned on the committee to change their vote. The oil industry received support from U.S. District Court Judge George L. Hart, who ruled that the Interior Department could issue permits to construct the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline.

Herblock occasionally drew upon literary allusions in his editorial cartoons. Here, he adjusted a quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth as well as an image of an exhausted dove of peace to signify his frustration with the secret peace talks in Paris between White House aide Henry Kissinger and Hanoi emissary Le Duc Tho. As Henry Kissinger returned to the United States without a cease-fire treaty in hand after intractable negotiations, pessimism increased about peace in Vietnam.

A strong advocate for gun control, Herblock compared the lack of peace in Vietnam with gun deaths in the United States. It is not clear whether the cartoonist reacted to any specific shooting event or the mounting tally of handgun murders in the United States. An increase in the homicide rate led to the Los Angeles Times to call for a ban on privately owned handguns the week before Christmas in 1972.

Herblock satirized the “President Nixon, now more than ever,” series of television advertisements for the 1972 presidential election campaign. He later wrote in Herblock Special Report (1974), “Nixon’s landslide re-election was trumpeted as a mandate. But even after the facts of the campaign methods used became known, few asked why—if the people wanted to give Nixon a mandate—it was necessary for him to use so much illegal money, or to employ such subversion and sabotage in manipulating the opposition party’s choice of candidates.”

Herblock depicted President Richard M. Nixon callously celebrating his own victory, while shaking the hands of wounded Republicans who had not won their own campaigns. Having spent the summer castigating Nixon for the Watergate scandal and other monetary improprieties, the cartoonist implied that Nixon had cheated. Nixon easily won re-election in 1972, carrying 49 states. However, Democrats retained their majority in Congress and gained one gubernatorial election over the Republican Party.

Democratic Party presidential nominee George McGovern selected Sargent Shriver after he compelled Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton to withdraw his candidacy as the Democratic Party vice-presidential nominee on July 31, 1972. By drawing McGovern with a knife in his back and an arrow through his arm, Herblock indicated that the Democratic Party had been feuding and that Sargent Shriver, the first director of the Peace Corps, could end dissent. The Democratic National Committee ratified Shriver as a candidate on August 8, 1972.

With a week to go before the 1972 presidential election, Herblock symbolically buried political morality on the White House lawn. The cartoonist later wrote of the campaign in Herblock Special Report (1974), “. . . the Watergate bugging was only one incident in a massive campaign of political espionage conceived in the White House as a basic re-election strategy.”

After the House and Senate cleared the way for the passage of the 1972 Federal Election Campaign Act, President Richard Nixon signed it into law on February 7, 1972. With a tiny chair atop a huge bag of money, Herblock implied the money necessary for an election campaign was insurmountable. The financial abuse during the 1972 campaign led Congress to amend the act in 1974 and form the Federal Election Commission as an oversight.

Herblock reflected on the anguish and misery of refugees after North Vietnamese troops launched an Easter Offensive on South Vietnam in March 1972. By the end of April, the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN, the regular army of North Vietnam) had pushed far enough into South Vietnam to send more than 350,000 refugees, which included South Vietnamese troops, scrambling southwards toward Huế. Although the Easter Offensive ultimately ended in a military stalemate as the South fought back, the refugees’ dislocation was not resolved.

Herblock figuratively took President Richard Nixon’s declaration against AFL-CIO President George Meany that he “would not be permitted ‘to torpedo and sink’ the battle against inflation.” Meany and several labor leaders had abandoned Nixon’s Pay Board, established to fight inflation, arguing it favored business. More to Meany’s point, wage freezes set by the Pay Board damaged the working class, who initiated strikes for higher wages to offset inflation. Nixon’s modest success in controlling inflation ended when oil prices increased in 1973, upsetting his economic controls.

With President Richard Nixon guaranteed to receive the Republican Party nomination as presidential candidate in 1972, the elephant laughs at the Democratic Party donkey trying to patch together a leader capable of beating Nixon. At the beginning of April 1972, there were twenty-three Democrats vying for their party’s nomination. After George McGovern’s decisive win in Wisconsin on April 4, the candidate pool dwindled, although Edmund Muskie and George Wallace remained strong candidates. Ultimately, Richard Nixon resoundingly defeated George McGovern.

Although Nixon signed the Tax Reform Act of 1969 with the intention of benefiting the poor and increasing taxes on the rich, Herblock shows a common citizen left nearly penniless after paying his income taxes. In seeking to stimulate the economy, the Nixon administration had reduced corporate income taxes. Reflecting on this, Herblock depicted bloated businesspersons, labeled “Subsidized Industries,” “Corporate Farms,” and “Freeloading Big Businesses,” who stand and wait to receive government handouts and favors and hold back their laughter at the little man.

Herblock graphically portrayed a victim of violent crime learning from the Nixon administration that actual crime rates were down. In election years, crime statistics enter campaign discourse, with Republicans and Democrats promising improvements in law enforcement. The Nixon administration had declared a “war on crime” in 1970 and, along with the 91st Congress, introduced major crime legislation. Nevertheless, in 1972, violent crimes had dramatically increased, even while crimes against property and the overall crime rate had fallen.

Only three days after the June 17, 1972, arrest of five men at the Democratic National Committee Headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., Herblock used the power of his ink brush and pencil to point a finger at President Richard Nixon, his re-election campaign manager John Mitchell, and Attorney General Richard Kleindienst. Herblock’s Washington Post colleagues, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, determined that one man whom police apprehended at the scene, James W. McCord, Jr., received a salary from the Republican Party.

Herblock used the White House barricade as a metaphor for the retreat and disavowal of participation in the Watergate break-in by President Nixon, his re-election campaign manager John Mitchell, and Attorney General Richard Kleindienst. As Kleindienst and Nixon quiver, Herblock portrays Mitchell as the leader barricading the door and giving orders. Herblock also selected newspaper headlines associated with Mitchell in his former role as attorney general and in his current role managing the Committee for the Re-election of the President.

Portraying the Committee for the Re-election of the President (CREEP) thrown into disarray by the Watergate scandal, Herblock personified the organization as a man entangled in tape attempting to slam the door against a man representing the United States Court. The Nixon administration demanded that hearings in a civil lawsuit on behalf of the Democratic National Committee resulting from Watergate break-in be delayed until after the November presidential election. Not long after he called the lawsuit a “political stunt,” John Mitchell resigned as Nixon’s campaign manager.

After Bernard L. Barker, one of the five men arrested in the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel, cashed a check made out to the Committee for the Re-election of the President (CREEP), the General Accountability Office launched an investigation. Herblock drew two people leaving the White House with funds, but the title of his cartoon compares the secrecy behind campaign fundraising with the secret negotiations in Paris between national security advisor Henry Kissinger and a delegation from North Vietnam.

By offering the visual metaphor of election campaign scandals escaping like steam popping a pot lid, Herblock showed the great lengths Attorney General Richard Kleindienst and President Richard Nixon went to thwart investigations into the Watergate break-in. Just days after Nixon was nominated by the Republican Party in Miami Beach, Florida, the U.S. Government Accountability Office announced that the president’s re-election committee had violated the Federal Election Campaign Act.