![]() ![]() ![]() Our mental images of Joseph McCarthy as a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal and Nixon as shifty, beady-eyed used car salesman owe infinitely more to Herblock’s pencil-and-ink polemics than to the photographic and filmic record. Many who met McCarthy thought he was ruggedly handsome: It took Herblock’s art to transform the anti-communist demagogue into a perpetually sweaty ape-man (and words, too: he's widely credited with coining the term McCarthyism). Is there a more perversely inappropriate fate for a satirist than posthumous sanctification? Herbert Block, the editorial cartoonist who drew under the name Herblock, spent his long life practicing the vicious art of visual mockery, exaggerating the physiognomic peculiarity of politicians in order to call attention to their moral defects. ![]()
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