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Lee Heidhues 7.14.2026
Patrick Oliphant was the true embodiment of the old adage, “The pen is mightier than the sword.” Pat Oliphant – Wikipedia
There will never be another political cartoonist who can compare with Patrick Oliphant who passed away at age 90 on July 13th, 2026.
The blogger’s interest in Oliphant goes back decades when I began looking forward to his work, published several times weekly.
In the early 1970’s I was living in Germany. I kept a large number of his cartoons and pasted them in my journal. Following are a number of them. All of which were published during the presidency of Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War and the release of the Pentagon Papers.
Oliphant turned his attention to a multiplicity of subjects including the Catholic church, Donald Trump (shown above) and other individuals and institutions who came in the sight of his line of political fire.
One of my favorite Oliphant works is this masterful drawing in 1971 of a family bemoaning the state of the economy and its impact.
In 1967 Oliphant won his Pulitzer for a cartoon portraying North Vietnam’s revolutionary leader, Ho Chi Minh, carrying a dead soldier. The caption read, “They won’t get us to the conference table … will they?”
As Mr. Oliphant later told it, the cartoon he submitted for the prize was, intentionally, one of the weakest he had published in 1966. It was a kind of test. When it won, he criticized the Pulitzer Board for choosing it on the basis of its America-boosting point of view rather than the quality of his work. Thereafter, he scorned the Pulitzers and became a regular critic of the board’s selection processes. – New York Times 7.13.2026
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