Sad to hear of the passing of the award-winning political cartoonist Paul Conrad, who leaves us at the age of 86. This article and this one will tell you about him and show you a few of his wonderful, usually-angry graphic editorials. And check out this gallery of a few of his cartoons.
Conrad had three qualities that made him perfect for the job: He could draw, he could spot irony in all its forms and he could get outraged. Politicians infuriated him and he went after every single one who mattered and some who didn't. A staunch Liberal on most but not all issues, he was remembered most for his savaging of Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon…but he was also not particularly nice to Lyndon Johnson, Ted Kennedy or Bill Clinton. And he was never nastier to anyone than he was to the Mayor of Los Angeles from 1961-1973, Sam Yorty. If you're tallying his Democratic targets versus his Republicans, you'll have trouble with Yorty, who was a Democrat who always sided with the G.O.P. But really, the final score is that Conrad spared no one who was in power while he was wielding his pen.
During much of this time, his cartoons were so scathing that they seemed to characterize the entire Los Angeles Times. It's hard to tell quite where it stands these days but when Otis Chandler was in charge of the Times, it was a very Conservative newspaper in every aspect but for Conrad…and when he went after Nixon or Reagan, their supporters ignored the Times' steadfast support of both men and decried it as a Commie-Liberal-Democratic rag. That his savaging of the left went so unnoticed by outraged Nixonites seemed to amuse Conrad. One time, he was on TV with Joe Pyne, who was kind of the Sean Hannity of his day. Pyne took issue with an anti-Nixon cartoon of Conrad's and said something like, "I notice you never have anything bad to say about any Democrat." Conrad calmly responded by picking up the book he was there to plug — a book Pyne had just held up for the cameras — and displaying page after page of anti-L.B.J. cartoons. Then he said something like, "It's been obvious for some time, Joe, that you don't know how to read but I thought even you could look at the pictures."
In April of '07, I got to meet and talk with him at a local book fest. He was sitting there, sucking on an unlit pipe and scowling a bit but once we got to chatting, he was quite affable and you could sense a great, non-egotistical pride in his body of work. I asked him about his cartoons depicting Mayor Yorty as one step away from the looney bin and Conrad said he thought in hindsight, he'd been too kind to the man. Frankly, I don't think he was ever very kind to anyone except, of course, his readership. He always did right by them.