The Press: Trying to Be Vicious

The Uncle Sam hat and costume and the forcefully extended index finger easily evoke the World War I recruiting poster. The face, though out of context, is similarly recognizable: the gimlet eyes, bowling-pin nose and mashed-potato jowls could only be a particularly cruel caricature of Richard Nixon. And the message boldly lettered around the cartoon character provides a jolt that shakes the drawing's dissonant elements into place: YOU NEED ME.

The drawing is the work of Miami News Cartoonist Don Wright, 40. The President has been getting roughhouse treatment on many editorial pages since Watergate began, but no one has been harder on Nixon than Wright. Along with the Denver Post's Patrick Oliphant, the Washington Post's Herblock and the Los Angeles Times's Paul Conrad, Wright is now one of the nation's most widely published editorial cartoonists. Whether he is shown carrying on both ends of a phone conversation (and listening in on earphones in the middle) or provoking hysterical laughter in a Martian seeking earth's leader, Wright's Nixon is an unvarying emblem of sinister paranoia or clownish ineptitude.

No Guilt. His cartoons are syndicated in 32 papers, and Wright admits that much of his mail taxes him with cruelty to the President. "I try to explain," Wright says, "that the only weapon I have is distortion and exaggeration, and I ask them whether they agree or disagree with the point that I was trying to make." But Wright, a Democrat who lampooned Lyndon Johnson, harbors no guilt: "I don't believe it's possible to be too rough on President Nixon or on any Administration that has sought to get away with some of the things that this Administration has."

Wright was not always so politically engaged. He joined the News as a copy boy after graduating from high school in 1952. During stints as a photographer and picture editor, he dashed off cartoons for the paper's editors, who frequently posted them on newsroom bulletin boards. In 1963 he was persuaded to seek a wider audience by drawing full time. "I had no idea what an editorial cartoonist was or what he was supposed to do," says Wright, "except that he was supposed to have an opinion." Having few firm views on current affairs, he was forced to educate himself rapidly. Wright also faced tough competition from Bill Mauldin and Herblock, whose syndicated work was available to News editors. Wright proceeded to mimic their styles "because they were supposed to be the best." Looking back on his early efforts, Wright wonders "why the hell the paper ever stuck with me."

One good reason occurred three years after his debut, when Wright was awarded a Pulitzer Prize; the winning cartoon showed two survivors of a nuclear holocaust in a bomb-pocked landscape and was captioned: "You mean you were blurring?" Since then, Wright has abandoned the pencil-and-charcoal effects favored by Mauldin and Herblock. He has developed his own pen-and-ink style, in which faces and forms are distorted past realistic limits. His decisive lines and elongated figures are reminiscent of the technique of British Caricaturist Ronald Searle. Wright's characters, with their ballooning eyeballs, pinprick pupils and ramshackle poses, seem to have stepped out of a Road Runner animated cartoon.