Remember Herblock, the hard-hitting Washington Post cartoonist?

The Post doesn't. Sigh. How soon they forget.

When Herbert Lawrence Block joined The Washington Post-Times Herald in 1947, it wasn't exactly The Washington Post we know today.

Or rather, about 12 years ago, when Jeff Bezos, a small, bald man who wants to take over the world through slave labor and rapidly accumulating cardboard boxes, bought The Washington Post.

Before all that, before all the deception and the downsizing, the ethical blindness, the retooled editorial page, the mass staff defections, the inability to recruit even an executive editor who wasn’t some Fleet Street whore, The Washington Post was a beacon.

That beacon was all about shedding light so democracy wouldn’t die, Woodward and Bernstein, Bradlee and the Grahams, and the hundreds of top-flight journalists who plied a very challenging craft there.

Oh, and there was this Herblock guy, the three-time Pulitzer Prize recipient, the guy who took after Joe McCarthy when hardly anyone else (except Edward R. Murrow and CBS News) would, the guy who drew Nixon coming our of sewer, the guy who made Watergate fun.

When Herb died in 2001, the Post wisely replaced him with Tom Toles, a spectacular talent who ran the table there for 18 years.

Let me tell you about Herb, though.

Unassuming isn’t really the right word here. He looked like, well, some regular guy who you might mistake for a pleasant older accountant. He was kinda endearingly sloppy, with papers and junk falling out of his unfashionable jacket and pants pockets. One of his cartoonist colleagues from Chicago once observed that if Heywood Broun looked like an unmade bed, Herb looked like an unmade bed with Heywood Broun sleeping in it.

I met Herb a few times, and each time it was like meeting Ike or some major 1950s figure, like Stan Musial or Milton Berle, as in, wow, I cannot believe this is happening.

Herb wasn’t shy, exactly, but he was, as the tabloids say, “private”. He didn’t go around shooting off his off mouth, he just did his work, which is kind of the point.

His office was off the Post newsroom. Sometimes Ben Bradlee would walk in, find Herb asleep on his sofa, and what did you think he did? Yell?

Nope. He’d pull up his blanket and turn off the light. (This was told to me by a former high Washington Post executive now retired but still with us).

That’s how revered Herb was in the newsroom. He was a franchise player, an institution, a National Historical Landmark of a journalist.

Herb was also a writer himself, and his cartoon collections were full of long essays about campaign finance reform and freedom of speech that would make the ACLU proud to publish them.

I remember writing Herb in 1979, inquiring as to his availability for an aspiring cartoonist visitor. He responded promptly, inviting me to come in. For some reason, it didn’t happen, so one day I was visiting David S. Broder ( a prince and the nicest famous journalist ever) at The Post, and he took me to Herb’s office. Herb wasn’t there. Naturally, the office looked like a Cessna had made an unsuccessful emergency landing through the window. Sadness.

I still have the letter.

A year after that, due to the temporary sabbatical of Jeff MacNelly, I was subbed in for Jeff in national syndication, and found myself the second-most widely read editorial cartoonist in the United States for a New York Minute.

One day, Herb and some other major cartoonists, and I mean major—Herb, MacNelly, Peters, Borgman, and few others—were in an elevator together. One of them said, “If this elevator crashes, Ohman is going to have a lot of new clients”.

It’s in Herb’s memoir, but I heard it from Borgman first.

I was invited to a symposium in 1998 at the American Press Institute in Reston, Virginia. They did a cartoonist panel for two days. It was like the Model U.N.: huge circular dais and microphones, big National Security Supersized chairs, and tasteful arranged water pitchers. We were all in suits, like adults.

Then Herb came in.

All molecular motion ceased, like the President of the United States popped in for a glad-handing session. We all snuggled up to Herb, and I even got a photo of him with me. I was 37, an age I not only don’t recall being, but fifty years younger than Herb’s age then, which was 88. I was well-established by 37. I only had 50 years left to get it right.

88 and still hitting a daily Post deadline.

88.

Talking to Herb was like talking to your still-very with-it grandfather, and he was just as kindly as your grandfather, too. He died about three years later, and Herb had never married, nor did he have children.

As the great Philadelphia Inquirer editorial cartoonist Tony Auth, gone too soon in his early 70s, said, “Herb, we are your children”.

What no one, and I mean no one knew, when Herb died, this lightly disorganized, unassuming, funny man in a driving cap had been quietly accumulating a $50 million estate.

That’s in year 2001 dollars, people. Let’s do the CPI on that:

OK. The first time I plugged in “$50,000,000”, it said it would only take values up to $10,000,000. Let’s try this again and multiply times 5.

“$93,250,000”. Gulp.

How, precisely, did Mr. Block, as he is still referred to by his former assistants who run his foundation, get that money? Well, he strolled around The Washington Post newsroom, buying starving reporter’s stock options.

Since 1947.

Good long-term financial strategy. Now, Mr. Block had a solid home in DC, but he sure as hell didn’t spend it on clothes.

Oh, and his foundation has funded 1,000 students at a full ride, plus books, at local DC community colleges.

Those are his children, too.

I am currently unaware of a similar effort by Mr. Bezos, the guy who is currently destroying his former newspaper.

$93,250,000 might even be a price point where The Washington Post might be available for purchase— at this point in the Postie Psychodrama currently unfolding. Bezos got it from Don Graham for $250 million, or, as Bezos would say, sofa change.

You may have heard of one the Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonists Ann Telnaes, who also knew Mr. Block, and is his inheritor in many ways, although no longer at The Washington Post as of Friday. She resigned.

No one resigns the editorial cartoonist job at The Washington Post. Ann did. Imagine how bad it was when she did.

She had the Herblockian (I have heard this as a word) temerity to do her job, which is to go after the powerful, and the powerful currently include her former employers who have now surrendered entirely to Trump and his Praetorian Power Structure.

You know, the Techbros who are about to take the oath of office as the 47th Presidents of the United States. Oh, and Meta won’t fact-check any longer. Why bother? Trump is president. Lies are fabulous, so very fantastic.

While Trump drools in front of cameras, cotton-candy hair thinning to the point where it isn’t hair, spittle flying about taking over everything from Greenland to the Panama Canal (today was re-naming the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America”—that’s going to require a lot of GOP business stationery changing on the those red southern states), Ann just merely illustrates his lunacy.

The Posties didn't like that, at least the ones who stuck their head up from the foxhole to pile on. I know some of these opinion guys, and they’re really smart people who also know that their protestations aren’t, um, terribly well-founded.

I don’t expect them to call me for advice.

I do have some, though, and a few small observations, since I’m still typing.

First, what did they think would happen? Maybe the biggest journalism shitshow in the history? This makes Janet Cooke made-up-heroin-addict-child story look like a typo. I mean, it’s like the Post set out to systematically desecrate their reputation. Some Posties said, well, Ann is nice and all, but she wouldn't criticize the Grahams. Would she?

Let me help you with that.

The Grahams weren’t aiding and abetting a felonious insurrectionist moron to take over the United States of America.

One would think this would alarm the surviving Posties. Or, perchance, cause consternation, angst, and maybe a li’l soul-searching on their part.

Well, not yet (Final Jeopardy Theme Music rising).

One would think, that as Major Objective American Journalists, that they might note that their institution is now nearly unsalvageable, unless some White Knight/Heroine like tech journo Kara Swisher can pull together a group to purchase the Post. My candidate is Bezos’ ex-wife, McKenzie Scott, who has about $42 billion to throw around.

Hi, honey, I’m home.

Honestly, I don’t know why Bezos would keep it at this point. He’s already got the unfettered influence he wants, after Trump spent years publicly humiliating him (“The Amazon Washington Post”—so clever). You’d think an ethical journalism leader would want to fight back. No. No, he did not.

He floated to the surface like a dead carp.

Since there are other prestigious publications that these major Post journalists could apply to, why isn’t the exodus bigger? Oh, it’s big. It just takes time to revise those c.v.’s. and buy new suits and dresses for the interview phase at The Atlantic.

One of the editors said it wasn’t a good cartoon. Another said it was in somehow conflict with other opinion piece topics scheduled. Let me tell you something, I’ve been doing this for 45 years, and I’ve literally heard it all from hundreds of editors both who I have worked for and the client editors, and no one has crafted a less-effective excuse for not running a cartoon, ever, one time.

WWHD?

Well, Herb wasn’t subjected to the silly cartoon selection process that has been in place for a few years at The New Washington Post-Journalism. To wit: two utterly banal cartoonists ran on Sunday. No Ann.

But hey, maybe one of their Postie New Yorker cartoonists can bang another hard-hitting cartoon on blue jeans. This is kind of where they are now.

The Post has also run incredibly weak, lame-ass cartoons for several years, because they have privately told better cartoonists that they don’t want anything hard-hitting anymore. They used to run all the top people, and their artistic and writing talents were obvious. Now they run cartoons featuring elderly couples sitting in front of televisions, making some bland aside.

Unless it’s Mike Ramirez, the poster boy for an oh-my-golly-by-gosh-we-should-give-the-Pulitzer-to-a-conservative-once-in-awhile.

Sure. Give it to a conservative. If they don’t suck.

So Mike gets a few nice fat slots on The Washington Post opinion page, where he shovels inky shit that runs counter to objective reality (Oh! Jack! You libtard snowflake!). He does draw good airplane cockpits, however, but he can’t caricature to save his life. For some reason he also was in the employ of the Los Angeles Times, where he similarly sullied Paul Conrad’s chair for a few years, until Mike Kinsley came in and had him go work on his golf game instead of doing cartoons about gay soldiers having sex with sheep. “Don’t ask, don’t tell”. Ha ha. Which he did in Memphis.

But hey. Balance, right?

He’s enabled by the balance guys, of course, but now that we’re in a post (Post?)-truth environment, maybe that’s OK now.

You know what it really runs counter to, which is far more important?

Herbert Lawrence Block, baby.

Herblock is the only editorial cartoonist who got the Presidential Medal of Freedom, for no one has deserved it more, cartoonist or not. If they gave a medal to Ramirez, it would be for editorial cuteness and distortion, not commentary.

I really hate to go after a “colleague”, but he’s so offensive to the memory of the Herb that I just cannot sit here and bite my tongue any longer.

Especially in contrast to Telnaes, who is very much one of Herb’s children.

Rest in peace, Herb. And you, WAPO?

Thanks for burying your own reputation.

America mourns what you once were: the home of Herb Block.

And Ann Telnaes.

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.I have Ann’s back. And a tiny balding spot.

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Hey folks: Another thing that needed to be said, as painful and disturbing as I find it all. But Herb would have wanted it this way, because he took a stand. You know. That’s what opinion journalists do. —J.