The Press: The Old Caricature

Over the last few years, the liberal Democratic image of Vice President Richard M. Nixon as a jowly, blue-jawed villain with a ski-jump nose has receded in the light of his growing stature and achievements. But last week, as the campaign year began, the old image popped up again—and from a predictable source.

The source was the Washington Post's hard-hitting editorial cartoonist, Herbert Lawrence Block, 50, whose graphic commentaries on the national scene often cut as if they were drawn with a razor.

Laid up since his heart attack last September, Herblock returned to duty, and with his first cartoon—a slashing assault on Nixon—set the style for the liberal Democrats' 1960 campaign (see cut). By an irony of timing, the caricature of Nixon as a monstrous male witch (in the past, Herblock has shown him as a sewer rat, a fanged beast and a gutter habitue) ran in the New York Post the same day that Nixon was receiving widespread praise elsewhere for his part in settling the steel strike.