Longtime editorial cartoonist for the Denver Post and Los Angeles Times
Paul Francis Conrad was born in June
1924 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He served in the U.S. Army during World
War II and received a B.A. in art in 1950. His first professional job
as an editorial cartoonist was with the Denver Post, where he
spent 14 years until the Los Angeles Times hired him in 1964.
Conrad stayed with the Times until his retirement 29 years
later. Outspoken and forthright about his leftist politics, Conrad
said:
“Don't ever accuse me of being objective.”
Famous for his
withering attacks on political figures – especially conservatives –
Conrad believed
that the best cartoons were those that contained no words at all,
using only pictures to depict what Conrad called the “political,
social and moral injustices” of our time.
When it came to
commenting on American culture, Conrad focused largely on the
negative. In a cartoon that appeared shortly after the 1965 Watts
riots in California, for instance, Conrad drew a group of white men
gathered around a black man who was seated on a therapist's couch,
saying to him: “You've mentioned unemployment, housing, education,
police brutality and despair ... but, what was the reason for the
riot?”
Conrad gained his greatest renown for the way he
skewered particular high-profile political figures. So searing were
his depictions of President Richard Nixon, for instance, that they
earned the cartoonist a spot on Nixon's infamous “enemies list”
in 1973 – a distinction Conrad welcomed as a sure sign of his own
effectiveness. In one particularly famous cartoon, Conrad portrayed
an agitated Nixon sitting, with pen in hand, at a large desk covered
by long, serpentine scrolls of names – titled “Enemies List.”
The caption of the cartoon read, “His Own Worst Enemy.” As James
Rainey of the L.A. Timesobserved,
Conrad's renderings of Nixon invariably showed the President with
“brow furrowed, eyes ringed with dark shadows, head slumped into
rounded shoulders – helping to cement the image of a desperate,
paranoid chief executive.”
Following Nixon's precipitous fall
from grace in the Watergate affair, Conrad's attacks on him became
still more relentless. After Nixon's death in 1994, Conrad became
incensed upon hearing anyone utter even the barest praise for the
deceased former President. “I think it's sick,” fumed Conrad. “We
know what the bastard did.” Conrad penned his own eulogy for Nixon:
a cartoon drawing of the late president's gravestone with the
inscription: “Here lies Richard Nixon” – suggesting that
Nixon's mendacity would persist for all eternity.
Conrad also
openly detested Ronald Reagan. The cartoonist's antipathy for Reagan
actually had its roots in the 1960s, when the latter began his tenure
as governor of California. At that time, Conrad depicted the
actor-turned-politician as a bumbling, intellectually deficient,
mean-spirited individual who understood nothing about the concerns of
ordinary folk, and who had stumbled into politics only as a
fortuitous result of his celebrity.
When Reagan in 1973
proposed a ballot measure to restructure the tax system of
California, Conrad depicted the governor as “Reagan Hood,”
soaking the poor in order to give to the rich. After Reagan's
election to the Oval Office in 1980, Conrad condemned the president's
military buildup as a foolhardy endeavor whose funding was made
possible only by draconian cuts to vital social-welfare programs.
When it came to international
conflicts involving the United States, Conrad generally viewed
America as the antagonist. He also held a negative view of Israel,
which he depicted as an egregious abuser of human rights and an agent
of mass murder. In the early 1980s Conrad drew a Star of David formed
by the corpses of Palestinian men, women and children. In a 2002
cartoon,
Conrad showed an Israeli airplane flying directly toward a pair of
high-rise mosques bearing an unmistakable resemblance to the Twin
Towers that had once stood in lower Manhattan.
During his 43
years as an editorial cartoonist, Conrad won the Pulitzer
Prize for editorial cartooning in 1964, 1971
and 1984. He also won two Overseas Press Club awards (1970 and 1981).
Conrad died on September 4, 2010.
