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.

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