Herblock

For years, the legendary Washington Post political cartoonist Herbert Block, aka Herblock, drew Richard Nixon with a menacing five o’clock shadow.

After Nixon was elected president in 1968, Herblock drew a freshly shorn Nixon, on the theory that every new president deserves “a clean shave.”

At The Washington Post, the great Herblock afflicted miscreants in the White House and Congress for more than 50 years.

The political polarization of a once-uncontentious comic strip points to an issue much bigger than Adams, said Ruben Bolling, the Herblock Prize-winning creator of the syndicated comic “Tom the Dancing Bug.”

“I don’t mean to blow my own horn,” he told The Washington Post in 1982, “but between Johnny Carson’s monologues, the political cartoonists such as Herblock and Oliphant, and me, if we all decide what the hot subject in the country is, that’s what it is.”