What kind of man
flies through the air
with the greatest of ease,
spinning
and turning dangerously,
and says he does it all
to clear his head,
so he can return
to his drawing board
and meet a deadline
five times a week?
Patrick Oliphant,
Pulitzer Prize-winning
political cartoonist
of the Denver Post.
Is Pat Oliphant really a threat
to the American
political system?
Some seem to think so.
His irreverent cartoons
poke fun at the establishment
and poke fun about
the credibility of US leaders.
Political satirist,
Art Buchwald says of Oliphant,
"If I were in the White House,
I'd lock him up
and throw away the key."
He is probably
the most widely published
political cartoonist
in the country,
and maybe in the entire world.
His formula for insult
is largely unrivaled.
He's been called
"the most influential
editorial cartoonist
of the day"
by the New York Times.
Oliphant has
this unique ability
to go into soul
of the person he's working on,
and literally draw out
the essence from them.
Oliphant has been called
"the most imitated
political cartoonist
in the United States,"
and one critic has said of him,
"If Pat Oliphant couldn't draw,
he'd be an assassin."
The truth is you haven't
really made it in Washington
until Pat Oliphant
has made fun you.
Oliphant likes to say
"A cartoonist should be seen
and not heard".
He is a man of few words,
is one picture
and lots of politicians.
To me his work,
it's kind of a through line
for the insanity of America.
Did you see your work
affect public opinion?
That's a good question,
isn't it?
Why did you have to give me
that one?
With this work
you go from day-to-day,
whatever the world's
bringing at you,
and you put it down
as a linear depiction
of what... what's going on.
And you hope
you're noting history
at the same time.
Did I influence public opinion?
I'd... I'd like to think so.
I really don't collect
that sort of thing.
I don't really know.
Down the road
when people look at that work.
The drawing
is all a personal observation.
That's why I liked
this country.
It was...
it was marvelous.
People were so accepting
of some stranger who came in
and started drawing
about their country.
And they were so forbearing.
Of course,
I got my share of the letters,
"You son of a b*tch,
why don't you go back
where came from?"
You get used to that, too.
Ladies and gentlemen,
please welcome
political cartoonist
and association executive,
Pat Oliphant.
I'm from Australia,
uh, therefore I come by
this, um... accent honestly.
It is not a speech affliction.
He lived out in the country.
His father moved him
out in the country,
so there were
no playmates around.
And so,
he lived a lot in his head.
And he started drawing
when he was
maybe about three years old.
He grew up
with a love of drawing, in part,
because his father
was a draftsman
who did work
for the Australian government,
and he saw his father drawing
and wanted
to try his own hand at it.
And quickly,
it became a passion for him.
His father painted the side
of the house and so did he.
He had this old house
up in the hills,
and I did one of my first,
big pieces on his wall.
Strange thing,
he didn't get pissed.
He just left it alone,
painted it over.
His family was kind of
a famous family in Australia
at that time, because his uncle,
uh, was Sir Mark Oliphant,
who was known for his
scientific contributions
to the development
of the atom b*mb.
And part of the background
to the story of Oppenheimer.
So, people knew Sir Mark,
his reputation was known
throughout Australia.
And I think part
of what motivated my father
to become great
in his own right
was he got tired
of always being asked
if he was related to Sir Mark.
And he wanted to be his
own guy.
His first job,
at 18, was as a copy boy,
earning three pounds a week
with the Murdoch-owned
Adelaide News.
I got into it as most people do,
by osmosis and accident.
I started out in a newspaper
with the intention of being
a journalist, I believe,
but, uh, drawing won out.
He and a friend,
they were making
some pitiful amount of money.
Uh, a few dollars a week,
and they decided
"To heck with this,"
and "Let's move across town
to the other newspaper."
My mom and dad met
at the Adelaide Advertiser,
where they were both working
in the late 1950s.
They got married.
My older sister, Laura,
was born in January of 1959,
and then I came along
at the very last day of 1960.
And then I became a press artist
which means you draw maps
and things like that,
retouch photos,
- and things like that.
- Whatever was needed
- at the time. Mm-hmm.
- Whatever was needed.
And cartooning along with that,
and then I became a cartoonist
when the cartoonist
they had then
left to join the opposition.
So, that suited me fine
and that was in 1955.
Did you have to audition
for the job
- or did they know you were?
- Well, they had seen me
- drawing around the place.
- Right.
So,
that's one of those things
of being in the right place
at the right time, I guess.
It paid a pound more,
but you had to work nights.
There's always something.
He never liked it,
but only realized
quite how much he hated it
when in 1959,
he went on a world study tour.
When he got back,
small-town Adelaide
seemed to have shrunk
even further.
This being
a family newspaper,
you painted
the testicles off bulls
and things like this
and just cleaned everything up.
They would send him off
to record some fancy party,
and there would be
this important person
and that important person,
and in the middle
would be this short, stubby,
fat, little lady or something.
They would make him
cut her out,
put those
other two pieces together.
Australia's a place
in the world
where nothing happens.
So, you're reduced
to drawing cartoons
about the weather.
My newspaper,
being a very positive crusader
for all sorts of things,
always came out very strongly
for the weather.
He got tired
of these potentates
telling him what to do
and how to do it,
and they wouldn't let him
say things he wanted to say.
This penguin
washed up on the shore
and somebody brought him
into the office
and they named
the penguin "Punk."
Anyway, Patrick decided
to put Punk in his drawings.
So that I could get
my own ideas
into my own cartoons,
I invented this guy
and it became very popular
of its own accord,
his own accord.
He took on a life of his own
and has been
that way ever since.
Everybody likes penguins
as far as I know.
Punk was really
a voice of free expression
in the context
of what he would later invent
as the ultimate form
of self-expression
through the entire cartoon.
Then he said he wanted
to leave Australia,
because everybody's gone
to the beach.
Nobody really cares
about what's going on
in the political world.
America called to him
because that's where
the art was happening.
It was the center
of political foment
in the world,
it was the center of progress
in the world,
and it was the center
of his profession,
which was cartooning.
My father,
he had a very clear idea,
very early on, who he was
and what he wanted.
He doesn't get there
without my mom in his life.
This woman
that he falls in love with
turns out to be
an immigrant from Amsterdam
with the same wanderlust
for the world that he had.
And a complete willingness,
at kind of a moment's notice,
to uproot their new family
to move
to a completely new country,
and gamble
on a whole new career,
because they believed
they could make it happen.
American cartooning had,
by and large,
been looked down upon
in other parts of the world.
It had been... It had seemed
that the art had run down
and it just wasn't doing
its job anymore.
So, I... I felt that, perhaps,
I could inject
something new into it
by applying all this, sort of,
thing I was doing in Australia.
And so,
he started looking around,
and he found through a friend
that the cartoonist
at the Denver Post,
Paul Conrad,
had left
and he went to the LA Times.
The owner of the paper said,
"Well,
what's an Australian gonna know
about politics in America?"
And the other guy said,
"Well, he's gonna pay
his own way here,
so why don't we find out?"
He was still pretty raw.
One of his fellow cartoonists
wrote at the time that,
"In the trade, we all sat back
to see how long
it would take the kid
to catch on
to the American scene."
He needed about five minutes.
Humor translates fairly well,
but there was an educating
of the audience process.
I drew so differently
to anything they had before.
So, this was a new thing
for the audience.
And the audience loved it.
With his satire
and spiky caricatures,
he helped create a whole
new style of cartooning.
His influences were not
just artistic, you know,
and they weren't necessarily
just painting or cartooning.
He was clearly influenced
by the political dialogue
in Mad Magazine.
What he respected was people
who were willing
to thumb their nose at
authority
in a creative,
smart way.
Anybody who was doing that
was for him an influence.
He was also friends
with Hunter S. Thompson.
I've often thought
he was kind of
the Hunter S. Thompson
of cartooning, you know.
He's just this person
who was willing
to ask questions
nobody else was willing to ask.
At school,
when we said our last name,
everybody immediately asked,
"Are you related
to Pat Oliphant?"
Um, that didn't happen
right away,
but it happened
stunningly quickly,
because he won a Pulitzer Prize
within a couple of years
of arriving in America.
Do you ever draw
a cartoon that you wish
-you could take back?
-Oh, well.
That's going back years
to when I won Pulitzer.
I wish you could take that back.
Okay.
The Pulitzer Prize,
I feel, well,
there is a very good reason
it's not in there. It's, uh...
just simply that
I wasn't pleased with cartoon,
that was chosen
to represent my work.
Well,
let me describe the cartoon.
It was, uh...
during the Vietnam w*r
when, uh, we were trying
to bring h* Chi Minh
to the peace table
by bombing the hell
out of everything.
And, uh, it was a hawkish
sort of cartoon.
It had h* Chi Minh holding
a dead Vietnamese,
smoke and bombs everywhere.
- Mm-hmm.
- And he's saying, uh,
"They won't bring us
to the peace table, will they?"
We had this editor,
a cigar-chewing as*h*le,
who was drunk most of the time.
He, uh, had changed the caption
to read differently
than what I had.
And just deballed it.
Took the punch out of it.
Yup.
That's what that means.
Thank God.
I studied the books
that had won the Pulitzer Prize.
- There is a book in existence...
- Yeah.
...of, uh, all the winners
from way back in the '20s.
And it seemed to me that, uh,
there was a sameness
about all these cartoons.
So, I included
this one cartoon in
with 11 others which I thought
were a good cartoons.
I, uh...
then waited for the results,
and it turned out I won it.
And the one
that had been selected
to typify my work
for the entire year
was this particular cartoon.
That just affirmed for him
something which
he firmly believed,
which was that
prizes are bullshit.
Political cartooning began
in the Reformation.
When Martin Luther
broke from the Catholic Church,
the Protestant Netherlands
began turning out cartoons
making fun of the Pope.
And the Catholic Italians
made cartoons
making fun of Martin Luther.
Unfortunately,
for the Catholics,
the best artists
were on the Protestant side.
And then came engraving.
That changed
the style of drawing.
And then came etching.
In England,
in the 18th century,
Rowlandson and Gillray
were tilting
at the establishment.
It was also active in France,
during and after
the revolution.
And then came lithography.
You certainly had
Toulouse-Lautrec,
and you had Daumier.
Best known as
the first political cartoonist,
the first to reach
a mass audience.
So,
the technology of cartoon art
really got traction
in the early 19th century
with Daumier and the
development of lithography.
Daumier comes along at a time
when the political cartoon
achieves
a kind of mass availability
through the development of
something called
the lithograph.
Where you can take a print
from a stone,
create a huge number
of editions,
and fuse the circulation
of a newspaper
with the expression,
visual expression,
of a political idea.
You know, you could get thrown
in jail for doing this stuff.
King Louis-Philippe in France,
was particularly
unfavorably disposed
towards the cartoonist
and tried to clamp down.
An early 19th century form
that still gleams brightly,
especially, in the hand and eye
of a Patrick Oliphant.
The line connecting
Honor Daumier and Pat Oliphant
is straight and true,
and razor sharp.
That's the one that
got him put in the slammer.
He got six months for this one.
The poor are feeding
this bloated king.
Mm-hmm.
And he is excreting bills
and medals and awards
to his cronies.
It was always about drawing,
because that's how
these people communicated.
Words, obviously,
were important,
but it was the image
which had to be
striking visually,
and also potent politically.
Benjamin Franklin drew
a serpent cut into pieces,
under which he wrote
the caption, "Unite or Die."
For that, he's considered
America's first political
cartoonist.
In this day and age,
and going back hundreds
of years,
visuals communicate immediately.
And at the right time,
in the right place,
this guy named Thomas Nast
shows up.
And in the 1870s, he was
the highest paid entertainer,
journalist in the world.
He was everybody because
an illiterate population
could connect with
the drawings.
He was massively popular,
drawing for Harper's Weekly.
He invented Santa Claus.
He invented donkeys
and elephants
for political symbols.
He is widely credited
with putting
the corrupt Boss Tweed in jail.
He put the caricatures
of Boss Tweed and his g*ng
on the head of vultures.
People saw that,
and he was turned
out of office.
Nast relentlessly caricatured
the Tammany Hall crook,
until Tweed screamed,
"Stop them damn pictures!"
"I don't care so much
what paper's write about me."
"My constituents can't read,
but damn it,
they can see pictures!"
Boss Tweed died in prison,
and in his collection
of works in prison,
was every Thomas Nast cartoon
ever done on him.
You have
the political class here
who take themselves
ever so seriously,
and you've got the rest of us
over here who don't.
And the political cartoonists
would work that gap,
and it was an extremely potent
form of commentary,
very different
from the written editorial.
Do you see
that political cartoonists
and their satire
had any profound effect?
Oh, no, of course not.
Cartoons never
changed anything.
If they
really did change anything,
they'd throw us in the slammer.
They did Daumier for a while,
and they did Gillray
for a while,
but if we were really having
any effect at all,
they'd do away with us
in... in a nanosecond.
Funny picture,
they can cope with that.
But on the other hand,
the people who feel the way
the cartoonist feels...
Is comforted
that somebody out there
feels the way he does.
In 1967,
my younger sister,
Susanne, was born.
I was born
the year he won the Pulitzer.
So, for the life
of those four people,
not excluding me, life changed.
But I wasn't
part of that change. I was...
kind of...
experienced it from day one,
you know.
It was a different life.
At that point,
I didn't comprehend fame,
or how that influenced
the family.
I think the one thing
about my dad
was I started seeing him
doing more.
The celebrity,
the attention,
the demands all began to take
a toll on the marriage.
And my mother grew
in her certainty
that she needed to be
her own person,
that her story couldn't just be
about supporting him.
That's not what
he wanted anymore, either.
And that's what happens
as people grow up, you know.
I think they began
to experience
this really seismic shift
in their relationship.
And it wouldn't fully culminate
until they moved
to Washington, DC,
and separated and divorced.
He moved from Denver
and then to Washington.
It was a big deal
when he accepted a job
at The Washington Star.
This was a town
that revolved around politics,
which was his stock and trade.
And his ability
to poke fun at it, uh,
and to get people
to think differently
about politicians and leaders,
and what they were up to.
It was a meeting
of the man and the moment.
On the other hand,
the man had to have the skills
to be able to meet the moment
the way he did.
Pat went a level further
and introduced really good humor
in a personal way
that... had an initial bite,
and then
a wonderful aftertaste.
And it was clearly better
and cooler
than anything running
in the late '70s,
-early '80s
that I was aware of.
After
The Washington Star folded,
he went independent,
which made him really
the first cartoonist
in the 20th century
of his stature
to not have a home newspaper.
And for him,
that was kind of nirvana
at the same time
as it was a brave move,
because it meant
that he didn't have
an editorial board
looking over his shoulder,
telling him what he could
and couldn't draw.
He was on top of the world
and he had a lot of newspapers.
Now, he's so popular
that a syndicate courier
comes daily to his house
to collect the latest creation.
My father's syndication,
I think he was
very intentional about it.
He wanted to expand his reach.
And it also happened
in that his cartoons
were increasingly popular.
So, there was a market for this,
that, um, a demand
that he helped to fulfill.
Every morning he would wake up
and have to look
at the television,
or read the newspapers,
see what had happened
overnight,
and decide
what he thought was important,
and what he thought about it
and how he was gonna say that.
And he had to do that
before 12:00, noon.
So, in the good old days
there was a two-day lag
of when your work
would be available
to syndicated customers.
So, not only
did you have to think
about today's news,
you had to think about
how today's news
would play two days from now.
Do you know
where it comes from?
Where the knack to combine
an idea and the art comes from?
Or do you worry
about waking up one morning
and it'll be gone
and you won't, uh...
Oh, you get over that
in the first few years
of doing it.
I've done it 30 years now,
so you don't worry
about that too much.
And where an idea comes from,
I couldn't tell you.
It's just the way
you do it every day
and you develop a routine.
One of my things
that I think is important
if you're an artist
is that you go
to your studio every day.
Whether something happens
or not.
I think, in a sense,
some artists,
it's happening all the time.
And I think Patrick's
one of those artists.
Susan was a curator
and a gallery owner
and committed to art.
And she got to know Pat
as an artist before she got
to really know him
as a cartoonist.
And they formed
a bond around that,
which became a life
partnership.
And I love and admire Susan
for the role
that she has played
with my father.
The most fierce advocate
and guardian for him
that he could ever
have hoped for.
And they're good together.
So, it was a happy thing
to see their marriage
flourish the way that it has
over the last few decades
of both of their lives.
Takes a long time
for everybody to know
who I'm drawing.
I don't want to label them.
So, eventually,
the subject will start
to look like the caricatures.
Everything comes together
and then you're in business.
Politicians,
they all come armed
with trademarks, these people.
There was always
something about Pat
that distinguished him
from top tier cartoonists.
One of the things I discovered
when I got to know him
was his work ethic
and his insistence to improve,
to innovate.
He would videotape politicians
and study the tapes
like you do in football.
And he would look
for ticks or tells or habits,
that could convert
into a better way
of finding a ch*nk in the armor
of the bad guys.
Gerald Ford
always had a band-aid.
Jimmy Carter got noticeably
smaller over time.
Ronald Reagan,
noticeably blanker.
It's two small circles
in the eyes.
Uh, seem to do it
more than anything.
Oliphant says,
he gives each president
a honeymoon,
but sooner or later,
usually sooner,
they find their way
onto his page.
But of all
of his subjects, Richard Nixon
remains Oliphant's
apparent favorite.
And Nixon was a gift.
He was sort of an ally
to a cartoonist.
For some reason,
he likes to portray
Nixon naked.
What is it about Nixon
without his clothes on
- that fascinates you so much?
- Doesn't fascinate me.
I... I hate the thought.
Here's a Nixon cartoon of 1969.
Yeah, this is so, I, uh,
had him looking
fairly sinister there, I felt,
uh, but if you look
at these later,
uh, drawings of Nixon,
you'll, uh,
you'll see how he has changed,
become even more sinister.
How he felt about Nixon
was pretty clear in his work.
Nixon's handling of Vietnam.
Campus protests,
street unrest,
just general goings on
in the country.
I think he adored
the period of history,
and he was absolutely intent
on getting it right.
And then the Watergate scandal.
FBI officer, Liddy,
and the CIA's McCord Jr.
were convicted of conspiracy,
burglary, and wiretapping
of the Democratic
National Committee
at the Watergate Hotel
in Washington.
They were part of a group
of seven men
who broke into the offices
to get first-hand information
about Nixon's rival,
George McGovern.
It was an opportunity
to go deep into the psychology
of a president who basically
seemed to see himself
almost as infallible
in the office,
and then challenge
all of the current thinking
about how he filled that office
and what the responsibilities
of the president were,
and to poke fun
at how the presidency
was being lived out
in that man.
I wanna say this
to the television audience.
I made my mistakes,
but in all of my years
of public life,
I have never profited...
...never profited
from public service.
I've earned every cent,
and in all of my years
of public life,
I have never obstructed
justice.
And I think too
that I could say
that in my years of
public life,
that I welcome
this kind of examination,
because people have gotta know
whether or not
their president's a crook.
Well, I'm not a crook.
I've earned everything
I've got.
I have never been a quitter.
To leave office
before my term is completed
is abhorrent
to every instinct in my body.
But as president...
I must put the interests
of America first.
Therefore,
I shall resign the presidency,
effective at noon tomorrow.
Some cartoons are art,
and some cartoons aren't art.
Herblock,
his ideas were so,
so brilliant,
and they had power,
but they weren't art somehow.
They were cartoons.
Some cartoonists
are just lucky enough
to produce art.
Pat's cartoons are art.
I'm not articulate enough
to explain the difference,
but I know it exists.
When you're creating a cartoon,
it requires three
very distinct operations.
He judges himself
on three things.
First, the idea.
You have to synthesize
the issue,
- come up with your angle.
- And then the drawing.
They have to come up
with an image
- that has to register clearly.
- And then the text.
And then
you've gotta write
a caption for it that's funny.
He said
he almost never got all three.
Rarely, he thought,
but he's a very tough judge
on his own work.
To my mind,
Patrick is the only person
who was ever able to do that
at such a high level
that he was really the only one
I ever looked at.
His draftsmanship
is absolutely amazing.
I mean, since I come
from an art background,
I mean,
the thing that we learned, um,
was, you know, great foundation
in your drawing.
A Pat Oliphant drawing
is so solid.
You know, he knows
how to draw figures so well
that you can step on them
and stomp them
and they'll still stay there.
They won't crumble.
Some days it's easy.
Some days it's, uh,
it's difficult.
You know,
it just depends on the day.
I just rough out the idea.
I just draw it in loosely.
And I'll change it
as I go along, of course, um.
But this is
just to get the idea down.
As a layout,
just to get an idea
of the perspectives,
how it'll... how it'll look,
how it'll place in the frame
and what it looks like.
Then having done that
and written the caption
underneath, whatever it is,
then I'll work
with the finished drawing.
Do you have any idea
how many American cartoonists
imitate him?
Practically all of them.
The minute somebody comes up
with something strong
and effective, as Pat has done,
they all just fall
all over each other,
unashamedly.
Try to draw
exactly like him.
When people, you know,
see something work so well,
they want to imitate.
Tom Toles has
a little side sketch
in the corner, of himself
that seems to be
kind of an homage to Oliphant.
And again, it's a sign
that Oliphant really was
a master at what he was doing.
Others were successful
copying his early style,
three-time Pulitzer winner
Jeff McNally,
actually confessed to that,
that he would rip off Oliphant
every opportunity he got.
Pat knew that,
kind of bugged him.
So, Pat would change his style.
If you look at his earlier
editorial cartooning work,
it's very cartoony,
like most editorial
cartoonists.
Nothing wrong with it,
it's just a style.
It would go from what
I'm recalling as '60s, '70s,
simple, real simple lines
using zipatone,
which was
a film shading device...
to a looser,
more early-19th-century,
Daumier, Goya style.
And the way he does it,
he says,
is that
he keeps doing life drawing.
He knows so much about
what the human figure does
that he can bring it to mind
and put it right on the page.
It's all in here.
Pat works so hard at his craft
that he didn't have to think
about what he was drawing.
It just flowed through
his left-handed fingertips.
It's a little bit
like watching a concert pianist
not having to read
the sheet music.
It's already there.
His work has a freedom,
which I sorely envy.
It's very hard to do something
that has anger in it,
and yet...
the line is not angry,
the line is beautiful...
and flows.
In comic art, the whole clue
is to make it look easy.
If it looks labored,
it stops being funny.
Pat's stuff looks as though
he didn't work too hard at it.
I know he works hard at it,
but it doesn't show.
Gerry Ford came
to the White House.
He...
He was sort of difficult
to draw
because there were
no trademark things about him.
And so, I gave him this.
He was a very amusing fella
because he fell down ladders
and he fell down stairs.
Gerry Ford,
I liked as a person.
He called up one day,
long after
he'd left the Oval Office,
and he said a little bit
about "having an annual meeting
of my old staff."
"I wonder
if you'd come along and...
"...be the entertainment"
or whatever it was.
I don't know why I did this,
but I walked over... to him
and I... I used charcoal
and I drew a band-aid
on his forehead.
He looked at me and he said,
"What's going on?"
The Secret Service said,
"You do that again
and you'll never draw
in this town again."
I had a terrible time
trying to convince people
that maybe
this wasn't a good idea
to, uh,
have a president like this,
'cause everybody liked him.
I had a very difficult job
convincing people
that maybe we were
on the wrong track.
Come on. Whoa!
Watch it, Bonzo, steady.
Hey, Bonzo!
And action.
Pat certainly felt
strongly about Reagan,
and the rise
of the religious right
and what that represented
for the country.
He also did this incredible
series of cartoons
on the Cold w*r
and the nuclear arms buildup.
He wasn't afraid to take
on the Reagan administration
for their role
in bringing the world
to the brink of nuclear w*r
and nuclear Armageddon.
In spite
of the wildly speculative
and false stories
about arms for hostages
and alleged ransom payments,
we did not trade weapons
or anything else for hostages.
The record shows
that every time
an American hostage
was released,
there had been a major shipment
of arms just before that.
What would be wrong with saying
that a mistake was made
on a very high-risk gamble,
so that you can get on
with the next two years?
Because I don't think
a mistake was made.
One thing
still upsetting me, however,
is that no one kept
proper records
of meetings or decisions.
This led to my failure
to recollect
whether I approved
an armed shipment
before or after the fact.
I did approve it.
I just can't say
specifically when.
And cut!
As we're... we're getting
into caricature again.
He didn't have
a chin like that,
but it felt like he did.
I always had him wearing
glasses
because
when he first campaigned,
he, um, took off his glasses.
He thought
it made him look wimpy.
So, for all the rest of us
who wear glasses,
I always had him wear glasses.
And I also,
just to make the point,
little stronger,
I gave him a purse.
Which he didn't like.
So, who cares?
I didn't really take
to Clinton.
That there was something
see-throughable about him.
He never really convinced me
of his sincerity.
As a cartoonist,
you don't often get a chance
to depict the president in bed
with a voluptuous female.
But I wanna say one thing
to the American people.
I want you to listen to me.
I'm gonna say this again.
I did not have sexual relations
with that woman,
Miss Lewinsky.
I never told anybody to lie,
not a single time, never.
These allegations are false,
and I need to go back to work
for the American people.
Thank you.
Indeed, I did have
a relationship
with Miss Lewinsky
that was not appropriate.
In fact, it was wrong.
It constituted a critical
lapse in judgment
and a personal failure
on my part
for which I am solely
and completely responsible.
I misled people,
including even my wife.
I deeply regret that.
I'm trying to remember
what I think of Bush...
...because he's
sort of forgettable.
But he was smaller than life.
So I drew him that way.
On my orders,
coalition forces have began
striking selective targets
of military importance
to undermine S*ddam Hussein's
ability to wage w*r.
May God
bless our country...
and all who defend her.
I liked Obama.
He could put words together
that we haven't had
a president do very well.
He could form sentences
and keep the subject central
and what he was saying
for amazing amounts of time.
We will rebuild,
we will recover,
and the United States of America
will emerge
stronger than before.
I just wasn't used to that.
I'm not
an admirer of politicians.
I think I may have
made that clear.
Although the majority
of my father's cartoons
focus on the American
political scene...
...he also covered
other issues and topics
that he felt strongly about.
His cartoons on
the environment,
for example,
spanned many administrations.
He always had
a sharp eye out for government,
for corporate
and institutional overreach,
for anything that smacked
to him of collusion
and corruption and control
and censorship.
Basically anything
that looked like
it was the creeping in
of autocracy
and crowding out of democracy
and decent behavior, I think
decency was his metric.
He did a whole series
of powerful cartoons
on apartheid in South Africa.
All the way
through to freedom
and Nelson Mandela.
For decades
his cartoons on the conflict
in the Middle East
illuminated the tension
and the violence and the hope,
and the dashed hope,
in many ways the same story
still going on today.
He felt
strongly about A*DS
and the country's
response to A*DS.
He also did cartoons
from time to time
that were tributes
to fallen heroes
or just moments
to remember and to honor.
It was his passion and his duty
to try to make America
and the world
a little better place.
He was taking his gift,
his craft,
and using it to shine a light
every single day
on democracy
and the people who led us
so that maybe we would take it
a little more seriously
the next day.
My father is a true artist
and was always consumed
with his work.
This is a matter
of hours of thinking
and getting myself
into a state of mind
where I can go at it.
When he did that,
he was intense.
And he wanted quiet,
and he wanted space,
and he wanted to be left alone.
As a kid, of course, you know,
what I felt in those moments,
seems ridiculous to say it now,
but I felt afraid, like I was
walking on eggshells
because we didn't wanna
disturb him in those moments.
And my older sister, Laura,
was the strongest
in terms of being willing
to speak up
and stand up for herself.
She was also an artist
and driven by her own
creative curiosities.
She would speak up and say,
"Hey, pay attention,"
at certain times.
My younger sister, Susanne,
was a very
creative-driven person
in her own right, but I think
she never really had a chance
to engage with my father,
and that's a shame.
When we moved to DC,
the thought was we would
all live together in DC,
but that wasn't his plan.
And so he gave the keys
to my mom and said...
"I'm not moving in."
Getting to know him again
was difficult,
but I don't have
any anger with him now.
Did I when I was growing up?
Sure.
The times that I did finally
get to spend with him
in my forties,
um, meant more to me
than almost anything
in the 40 years before that.
And I got to know
the man a lot better.
And that's when
the forgiveness happens.
My dad and I,
at one point a few years ago,
had a really poignant moment
of reflecting.
We were sitting
on his back patio,
talking about the world
and his upbringing
and what it was like to be him.
Uh, and then, kind of,
out of the blue
turned to me and said,
you know, "I was a lousy dad,
and I'm sorry."
I sort of looked at him
and I said, "Yeah."
And you were also engaged
in a lot of interesting ways,
and it's important that you
hold onto that as well.
You know,
and I think he realized,
looking back at his life,
there were ways
in which he could have done that
differently. Um..
Good for him.
I have many good memories
of being his son
and a feeling like this was
a really interesting guy
to be the son of.
Getting exposed
to him as a person
was interesting to me,
and I got to appreciate it
more and more as I got older.
Not only his artwork,
but his intelligence
and his humor.
And I think that's where
we bonded was the humor,
because we would sit at dinner
and just, I don't know,
we'd have each other
cracking up, and that was fun.
I enjoyed that.
Pat had this plan
to be in Santa Fe
and be an artist,
which is a place he had wanted
to live for decades.
He made that move later
in his life than he wanted to,
and the point in his life where
he was gonna step
from the one ice flow
to the other,
his eyesight began to fail.
One of the unfortunate things
about the eyesight
is that it deteriorates.
A few years ago, we found
that he couldn't see very well,
and so they diagnosed him
with macular degeneration,
and then it got worse,
and they diagnosed him.
He also has glaucoma.
And you can take shots
for the macular,
which he gets every month,
in his eyes,
but the only thing you can do
for glaucoma so far
is certain drops,
and so he has drops,
I think four different things
he has to take every day.
Hopefully that'll
save something
as far as eyesight
is concerned.
It's really a very
difficult disease process
to control.
There are certain things
that be done to slow it down,
but it's not
really something that we have
a cure for at this point,
And as somebody whose whole life
has been centered
around visual world,
uh, that's been, I think,
a very devastating
process for him.
One thing that sort of sustained
political cartooning
was the old news cycle.
You'd have your newspaper
first thing in the morning,
and then the evening news
at night,
and then rinse and repeat.
There is no news cycle anymore.
It's... It's 24-7.
First came television,
which took away a lot
of advertising for artists.
Then came the computer,
which took away even more
advertising from the artists,
and put the magazines
out of business.
Suddenly,
there are very few cartoonists
who can make a living anymore.
Our country was born
from political protest,
yet it's sad to see
that the financial picture
of the media
is making it harder and harder
for that to happen.
That's what makes this kind
of work challenging
all around the country.
It is what is making
journalism challenging
around the country.
but it's not just the...
...changing nature
of the business model,
it's also the willingness
of editors and publishers
to take the heat
for doing honest work.
One of the trends
that is terribly disturbing
is the, uh,
profit-making corporations
taking over the media.
Rob Rogers,
who was the cartoonist
at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,
his publisher told him to stop
doing so many cartoons
about Donald Trump
because he was quote-unquote
"becoming too obsessed
with the president."
Rob was 30 years
on that paper.
I mean,
his publisher knew damn well
who he was and what he did.
I mean,
every editorial cartoonist
gets stuff spiked,
like a couple a year.
He got six spiked
in a matter of weeks,
all Trump cartoons.
When the president
of the United States
every day does something
that is newly offensive
and an affront to democracy
and civil liberties,
for a cartoonist
not to be doing that work
is absolutely insane.
The financial troubles
of journalism
are making it harder and harder
for cartoonists to work
and find jobs
and get their voice out there.
We should be able
to criticize our president.
That is American.
Liebling once said,
"Yes, there's a free press
in this country
for anyone who owns one."
Newspapers more worried
about the bottom line
and popularity
and things like that,
even though most
of the mastheads on newspapers
were there to seek the truth.
Political cartooning
is a form of satire
and satire turns on mockery
and mockery
is about giving offense.
So, if you can't
do that anymore,
you don't have
political cartoons.
In this new era
of political correctness,
one hurt feeling call
to an editor
may translate into
not just one,
but a whole movement
of "cancel my subscription"
or even worse,
an advertiser boycott.
When I was president
of the A.A.E.C,
the Association of American
Editorial Cartoons,
and Trump
had just become president,
my biggest concern was,
you know,
everything he had been saying
about the press,
you know, "We're gonna change
the libel laws."
I thought, oh, great.
You know, who's gonna be
in the firing line?
It's gonna be
an editorial cartoonist.
Because they are the fake,
fake, disgusting news.
The New York Times
doesn't like
editorial cartoons.
They have been looking
for a reason
to get rid of them for years.
So this was like the perfect
opportunity for them.
Did you see
that the New York Times
discontinued political cartoons
after being accused
of anti-Semitism
with that Trump cartoon?
I did see it, yeah.
What I remember, well,
he was being led by Netanyahu?
Yes, he was being led
by Netanyahu.
Yeah, well, in a way, he is.
What's wrong with that?
This is a common problem
that it's a mistake
that an editorial cartoonist
can do
that when you're criticizing
the state of Israel,
which we're allowed
to do, right?
Uh, you should always
use the flag,
not the Star of David.
The Star of David
is on the flag of Israel.
Come on, I mean, that's...
Editorial cartoons are really
tailor-made for today
and for social media.
They're visual,
they're instantly consumable.
They're in the format
of a meme,
but they're handcrafted and
they're layered with meaning
and they're curated
by an artist,
you know, trying to really
express his voice.
Social media has given
huge platform and power
to those of us
in partitions of free speech
and those of us
who want to speak out
for those of what's right
and express our voice,
like cartoonists,
writers, comedians.
Uh, social media is amazing.
That's what is great.
It's the old-school version
of what a satirical meme
is nowadays.
Newspaper satirists
are kind of a dying breed,
um, and memes are kind of
taking up that mantle.
There's always
a bunch of meme guys,
like people
that can always be memed.
Um, anyone in politics
is always fair game.
Especially during the
Trump era,
it's prime fodder
for jokes and memes.
Pat's style really lent itself
to, uh, getting a point
across quickly,
which is exactly what a meme
is supposed to do.
In modern day society,
people are only gonna look
at something for two seconds.
It has to be
a recognizable image
and they have to get
the point across
in a split second
before they
scroll away forever.
Pat Oliphant's hand
has been following his nose,
his instincts,
for nearly 30 years now,
his sharp pencil stabbing
at the heart of issues
and public officials.
Well, we shouldn't
think of the cartoon
as a funny drawing.
It's supposed to be
a serious expression
of political thought.
My favorite piece
that he ever did
was the running
of the altar boys.
First of all,
it was incredibly brave
when it came out.
It was the sort of
first wave of the scandal
emerging around pedophilia
and the Catholic church.
Hugely controversial.
Got a massive backlash
from people who thought
he was being unfair.
One of the greatest
cartoons of our time.
A brilliant, brilliant cartoon.
Everybody was all uptight
about letting you
make fun of the church.
By the 1970s, you could
make fun of presidents
and diplomats
and all sorts of that,
but you could never make
fun of the church.
It's a big
political organization.
Why not?
They're sitting there
with their asses
hanging in the wind
and, uh, you kick them.
I don't believe
that I deliberately
stay away from anything.
I've always found that, uh,
cartoons that touch
upon people's personal beliefs
are far more expl*sive...
... than cartoons that touch
upon their political beliefs.
In 2015 was the m*ssacre
at the offices of Charlie Hebdo
where five cartoonists and
seven of their colleagues...
...were assassinated basically
for the sin of satire
and for drawing.
Messing with people's ideas
around religiosity
is dangerous.
Pat uniquely showed courage
to go after folks
that were otherwise
beyond reproach
or too dangerous to touch.
Pat swallowed hard
and went after them.
They like to have
their, uh...
whether they know it or not,
their ideas upset
and then they can get mad
and react to it.
Yeah,
you got a lot of hate mail.
Frankly for a cartoonist,
hate mail is
high congratulation
that you've hit your target.
You know, I remember
him getting death threats.
He sort of
dismissed that rather lightly
and he even kept
a stamp on his desk
that was marked "Bullshit."
You can be
so savage with humor,
ridicule is probably
one of the strongest
forms of indictment.
He said, "You gotta wake up
every morning angry."
Most of all, I think
it's the start of dialogue
between people, make people
write to the editor,
"Get mad, get mad as you are."
One of the things a cartoonist
does for other people,
he articulates
their hates...
...and their dislikes as well.
He just didn't care
what the political
establishment wanted.
And he continued
to do that in confronting
all manner of establishment
over the years.
I think he challenges,
I think that he feels
that's what he must do,
you know.
If he sees some injustice or
some crooked thing happening,
I mean, I think he feels
it's incumbent on him
to say it.
Cartooning should be
a savage art, I think.
The function of a cartoonist
to be patting anyone
on the back, being friendly,
well, you can't have
a positive cartoon.
You shouldn't be able
to have a positive cartoon.
You're selling ideas,
and you're trying
to motivate the audience
to actually think
in a certain way.
Pat's often fond of saying,
"In a strong cartoon,
there's no
'On the other hand.'"
It's a r*fle shot
aimed at a target.
The core of cartooning
was to confront people
with difficult
or unpleasant truths
and to make them think
about whatever it was
that was the subject.
It's a way
of getting to the truth.
They really do have
that kind of power,
and this is why
King Louis-Philippe
was throwing people in jail.
They didn't want
those subversive ideas
out in circulation.
You know, there's
a mischievousness about him,
but it's
constructive mischievousness.
He was looking at life
through a different lens,
and that lens
was to look for the humor,
look for the thing
that would be his doorway
into confronting people
with a different reality.
Oddly, my... my dad, um,
who I think
tested the boundaries
all the time...
...also had limits,
and he had a sense of reverence
for moments
that were politically important
or just
in human terms important.
So in those moments,
he would refrain from humor
and he would refrain
even from inserting punk.
I also saw punk
in very serious cartoons
where punk would just be
standing there and looking.
I remember
Susan telling me
"Pat's made some sculptures
and we're gonna
have an exhibition,
I can't wait
for you to see them."
And I said,
"Great, I can't either."
But secretly I was thinking...
"Uh-oh,
you know, is this, uh,
is this really gonna work
or is it gonna
be like, you know,
those Hollywood celebrities
who suddenly decide
they're painters?"
I walked into the exhibition
and they were
outstanding sculptures.
He understands
three-dimensional form.
He never did any sculpture
until 1985, about.
He is
virtually self-taught
in all
of his artistic endeavors,
including painting,
lithography,
and as of a couple years ago,
sculpting.
What inspired him
was an exhibition
at the National Gallery
of Rodin's work.
He said to himself,
"I could do that."
People are so focused
on his political
cartoon drawings.
A lot of people still don't
know that he does sculpture.
They're finding their way
into the museums now.
Um, National Portrait Gallery
has a collection
of his presidents.
Sometimes it's kind of fun
to be a fly on the wall
and watch how people work
when they go
into certain gallery spaces
and what they see first
and what pulls them in.
It's a sculpture.
He says,
a few days of thinking about it
and a few hours of execution
created a Ronald Reagan
desperately trying to stay
in the saddle
of a bucking Bronco.
From a slumping,
mountainous Tip O'Neill
to what he calls
his gallery of bureaucrats,
it is clear Oliphant
is as piercing with wax,
plaster, and bronze
as he is with a pencil.
It's always been
a great enjoyment,
all of that stuff.
And one
has supplemented the other.
It's all been part of one thing.
This is a side of Pat's work
that's probably not
as well known
as it could be or should be,
but it's... it's definitely
right up there
with his two-dimensional work.
Painting was always part
of what he wanted to do.
He liked that as a form
of artistic expression.
My earliest memory
of my father painting
is also my earliest memory
of him doing cartooning.
He was always painting.
When I was a kid
growing up in Denver,
there were always paintings
that he was working on
or hanging on the wall
that he had done.
My father
was always experimenting,
painting, sculpture,
and stop-motion animation.
He was an artist.
He was focused
on whatever it was
that he was experimenting with
or doing at that time.
I think the last few years
have been very difficult.
It's been difficult
for his friends
to see kind of
his deterioration physically.
The idea of him
losing his eyesight,
I think is, uh, terrifying.
We both shared
this love of art and of museums
and conversations
about all that,
and now
he can't see those things.
There is a grace
that he's handled
all of that stuff with,
but it's, uh, it's hard to see
that kind of genius
just kind of blocked by age.
Watching my dad reach a point
where he had to stop cartooning
has been much more difficult
than I would have thought,
um, you know, in part
because a moment like that
confronts us all
with our own mortality
and the sense of time
catching up with any of us.
How do you tell somebody
who draws so great
and who's had such an incredible
prolific career,
uh, that they can't see?
It's made me feel closer to him
in an odd kind of way.
I wanna do everything I can
in my mind
for him to feel better
about it,
but how do you do that?
You know,
if Patrick is depressed,
which he doesn't show at all,
but we've talked about it,
and he says
he goes through spells of it.
But I mean, you think
of all of the assholes
that he's been around
over these last years
and it's totally understandable
for this depression.
You know,
the whole country's depressed.
I've hoped
to get back into the...
into the saddle again
and start drawing again,
but, you know, realistically...
probably not.
But at the same time,
I'd like to...
...like to kid myself,
maybe I can, so...
One of the wonderful things...
...that Pat has done
for the study of history
and the study of the presidency
and American politics
is he has left a generation
and a half's worth of views
through a single lens.
My dad and I
were talking yesterday
about what 60 years
of effort amounts to.
Like a lot of people,
looking back on their careers,
he wondered what difference
did that all make?
And as I thought
about that later,
but also as I talked
with him in the moment,
it not only chronicled
what happened
during those 60 years,
but he helped
shape the narrative
of what happened
in those 60 years
in a way
that is more influential
than many of us
will ever be able to.
He was read by decision makers.
They feared what he had to say
and they feared his pen.
They also loved it.
They feared
not being noticed by him.
And when that's true of you,
you're helping to shape
the narrative
of the times that you're in.
When Pat Oliphant came to work
at the Washington Star
in 1975,
we were all beyond excited.
We were going to have
the most famous
political cartoonist
in the world.
Pat could determine the fate
of a politician
with a few strokes
of his brush.
With a glint in his eye,
he referred to his work
as "stirring up the beast."
Besides Pat,
the most famous
person at the star
was Mary McGrory,
the liberal lioness,
the Pulitzer
Prize-winning columnist
who made Nixon's enemies list.
Mary had famous parties.
She made the politicians
and the journalists
do amateur theatrics.
Once Pat showed up,
Mary demanded
that he sing
"Waltzing Matilda."
He told Mary
what she could do with Matilda
besides waltzing.
And walked out
muttering, "The hell I will."
When I wrote
my first book, Bushworld,
about the rush to the Iraq w*r,
my publishers asked me
what I wanted for the cover.
There was only one person
I wanted to do it.
When the cover was finished,
it showed a tiny W
as a gunslinger
emerging from the scary,
gothic White House.
I was a little afraid
we would get hammered
from making W too diminutive,
a shrimpy cowboy.
I didn't have the nerve
to call Pat myself,
so I made
the managing editor call Pat
and asked him to make W
just a tad bigger.
When Pat's
revised cover came back,
W was even smaller.
We did one book event
for the book
together in Santa Fe.
Afterwards, I confessed
to Pat that the anger
and hate and vile comments
were beginning to wear me down.
He looked at me,
his eyes widening in surprise.
"You've got it all wrong,"
he chided me.
"That's the fun part."
"That's why we do this."
After Pat said that to me,
I suddenly realized
how much courage he had
and how much courage
I would need
to keep going
and do my job properly.
And I vowed
from that day forward
to stir up the beast
even more ferociously.
What Pat did in terms
of challenging the status quo
was to me
quintessentially American.
He got a lot
of blowback from people
who had the whole
love it or leave it mentality.
And we're
seeing it again now, uh,
this notion
that if you're challenging
the way things are,
you must not love America.
And I think the core
of being an American
is actually challenging
what you don't agree with
and being willing to call
a foul when you see a foul.
And that's
what Pat Oliphant did.
I told him even last time
I saw him in 2022,
I said, "I miss seeing what
you have to say about this,"
you know, because he had
such a good insight
and a clever insight
and a very cutting insight.
You know, he didn't...
He said how it was.
And I think we could actually
use some of that right now,
some intelligent analysis
in a humorous way.
Pat is
an outstanding cartoonist,
but he was lucky in his timing
because the country
was changing,
it was going crazy,
and you had these
larger-than-life figures
like LBJ and Nixon.
The man had to have the skills
to be able to meet the moment
the way he did.
So it's lucky for him, he came
over here from Australia,
but it's also lucky for us.
Pat's work and career
will be a beacon
to show you where the top
of the craft is.
The biggest thing
he gave to cartoonists
was the way he went
after both sides,
the way he went
after issues ruthlessly
and with such artistry.
I haven't seen a cartoonist
in my lifetime
achieve such excellence
in all categories of his work.
Did I influence
public opinion?
I'd like to think so.
I really have no...
I really don't collect
that sort of thing.
I don't... I don't really know.
If people can look
at my work and say,
"Hey, that wasn't bad,
that's pretty good."
If they could say that...
then I think then I've done
what I was supposed to do,
to leave a legacy
of... of drawing...
and humor.
And I think that'll be...
that'll be okay.
Things are not
always what they seem.
I was driving once, you know,
behind a car like this...
and there was a fella here
and there's an open sports car
and he's driving here.
And...
there's the windshield.
Beautiful...
long haired creature
next to him like this.
And, uh, I was just going
to get up alongside
and see what she looked like.
And, uh, she turned
and looked at him.
And so you have
to establish
what you're drawing...
and where the spare parts
are coming from.
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A Savage Art: The Life & Cartoons of Pat Oliphant (2025)
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