The Friendly Enemy

As editorial cartoonist for the New York Herald Tribune, Daniel B. Dowling, 47, is one of the best practitioners of the old-fashioned school of cartooning. Instead of blasting with broad, charcoal-black strokes like the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Dan Fitzpatrick or the Washington Post's "Herblock," Dowling gently spoofs with fine-line ink strokes and light caricature. A lifelong Republican. Cartoonist Dowling, who is syndicated in more than 100 papers, is guilty of one big heresy. "I really miss Harry Truman," says he. "When he was President, there was a three-ring circus in Washington." Dowling's heresy is understandable. Like all good cartoonists, whatever their political coloration, he is better off in opposition to the party in power. "The Republican Administration simply does not provide me with enough good cartoon material. There aren't enough villains."

Last week Cartoonist Dowling. whose political humor always keeps on top of the news, put his pen to work on the big political consideration of the week: President Eisenhower's need for Democratic support in Congress to push through his legislative program. But Dowling still has more fun with the opposition, e.g., his cartoon of Stevenson in a lifeboat after his recent speech on the "fears" that have spread in the U.S. since the Republicans took office (see cut).

Fast Watch. Dowling's light touch is the result of heavy work. He puts in more than ten hours a day (six days a week) to turn out six cartoons. He attends the daily morning Trib editorial conference, and though he rarely gets his subject there, the run-through helps him focus on the main news. After the 11 a.m. conference, he races to make his 4:30 p.m. deadline. Dowling always keeps his watch set an hour and a half fast. "Sometimes," says he, "I look at" my watch and it says 4 o'clock and I haven't got anything on paper. Then I remember I'm an hour and a half fast and I feel better.'' When an idea is slow to jell, he has turned out a cartoon in less than 40 minutes.

Though Dowling's cartoon world is populated with recognizable caricatures, he plasters signs all over his drawings. For example, he recently tagged a battered

Malenkov the "New Homebody," showed him sitting in a kitchen piled high with dirty dishes (labeled "consumer-goods demand"), with squalling children armed with hammers ("satellite unrest," "collectivized farming") climbing into his lap. In a Republican Administration, Liberal Republican Dowling's main target is the "division of the Republican Party between the liberals and the McCarthy right wing" (see cut).

Slow Game. Dowling's style of cartooning came from famed retired Cartoonist J. N. ("Ding") Darling. A Nebraska-born banker's son, Dowling met Ding at 16 and patterned his cartoons on Ding's from then on. He graduated from the University of California at Berkeley ('28) and worked as a police reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago. He started to study at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, but after a month was advised to go out and work on newspapers. He got a job as an artist for the Associated Press in New York, and in 1938 became a full-time cartoonist for the Omaha World-Herald, after submitting several cartoons in the "Ding manner." At the beginning of World War II, Dowling went into the Army as a private, got out as a captain in 1946, and went back to the World-Herald. Three years later, when Darling retired, the Trib, which had been printing his syndicated cartoons, hired Dowling. Dowling lives at Ardsley-on-Hudson, N.Y. with his wife, two children and "the biggest dog in the world" (a 180-lb. Newfoundland), has one consuming pastime that well fits his gentle nature if not his size (6 ft., 175 Ibs.). As often as he can, he plays his own complicated brand of croquet. Says he: "Golf and bowling require no brains at all. Croquet is a game of skill and brains--forgotten in all these years."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.