Cartoonists: Bipartisan Needle

Personally, Denver Post Cartoonist Patrick Oliphant, 32, leans toward Nelson Rockefeller for President, but he has a funny way of showing it. In one of his cartoons, Rocky is pictured up in some squalid attic dolefully examining a pair of track shoes: To run or not to run? That is the question. In another cartoon, he is portrayed as a fox with a lopsided grin on his face nonchalantly padding up to Dick Nixon, who is seated smugly on a nag surrounded by a pack of dogs.

All in all, Rocky fares no better at Oliphant’s hands than the rest of the presidential contenders. A buck-toothed Bobby, playing Pied Piper, is not so much leading as being rushed by a frenzied bunch of women tearing at his clothes. A diminutive Hubert Humphrey, hat and cane gingerly in hand, is pushed on to stage center by a Large But disjoined paw from the wings. A frantic Dick Nixon, decked out as a magician, thrusts his arm into a hat and plucks out a hairy hawk clutching a bomb. “And voila,” says Nixon, “we haul out a dove . . . a dove . . . I’ll have to ask you to imagine this is a dove!”

Fear of Being Blunted. This nimble needling of all politicians is characteristic of Oliphant, who does not wear his politics on his sleeve, and in fact considers politics to be a rather humorous calling. His politicians are not the hardened villains of the Washington Post’s Herblock or the Los Angeles Times’s Paul Conrad, but the hapless victims of their own personalities. Such is his inescapable fondness for the political trade that Oliphant goes out of his way to avoid meeting politicians for fear of blunting his needle. While lampooning Barry Goldwater during the 1964 campaign, Oliphant did not risk a personal confrontation until the election was over. He then found Barry to be, as he feared, a “marvelous guy.”

Soon after his arrival in the U.S. in 1964 after a career as an Australian cartoonist, Oliphant got the hang of U.S. politics and effectively ribbed the presidential candidates of that year for the Post. Today he appears in 130 other papers. Ironically, he won a 1967 Pulitzer Prize for one of his rare solemn cartoons. Ho Chi Minh, holding the lifeless body of a Vietnamese amid the smoke of war, proclaims: “They won’t get us to the conference table . . . will they?” A more recent cartoon of Oliphant’s on the war is much more in character. L.B.J. and Dean Rusk sit in diver’s suits at a table resting on the ocean floor. Ho Chi Minh, similarly accoutered, is drifting toward them. Asks the President: “How did you get him to agree to this?”

Soggy Dove. In most of his cartoons, Oliphant gets in second thoughts, as it were, by using a little penguin called Punk, who furnishes a kind of subplot. In the underwater cartoon, for instance, a waterlogged dove, bearing a soggy olive branch, tells Punk: “Oh, I just hate this job.” Another cartoon shows a striking telephone employee uneasily eying a solid wall of computerized dialing equipment. Down in the corner of the drawing, a miniature repairman informs Punk: “This strike may not work. That machine is a scab.” Oliphant admits to using this slightly puerile device to lure the comic-strip readers to his cartoon. “It’s a form of brain washing,” he says.

Professional that he is, Oliphant does not let his political views get in the way of his craft. For that reason, he is genuinely sorry that a politician of such caricaturable assets as L.B.J. is leaving the scene. “Politics aside,” he says, “losing Johnson is like losing Khrushchev.” That still leaves Hubert Humphrey, of course. Because of the raw material he supplies a cartoonist, Oliphant would like to see him elected President: “It would give me four good years of fun.” His last choice for President: Eugene McCarthy, whose patrician, well-chiseled face lacks a single exaggerated feature to exploit. “I’d rather draw him with a blank face,” says Oliphant. “I’d hate four years with him; so would every cartoonist.”