Jan 26, 2014 4 min read

Before there was Jon Stewart, before there was Stephen Colbert, Americans looked to editorial cartoonists for barbed commentary on political and social events of the day. We still have some great cartoonists, of course, but the decline of newspapers as dominant messengers of information has diluted their influence.

When editorial cartoons still had the power to give politicians a good public kick in the behind, the best-known – and greatly feared – of them all was a toy-loving, middle-of-the-road Republican from Chicago named Herbert L. Block, whose father had suggested he combine his first and last names as his signature. Herblock’s career included 55 years at the Washington Post, three Pulitzer prizes and regularly ruining breakfast for many of Washington’s most powerful figures, as former Post colleague Jim Hoagland says in “Herblock – the Black & the White.”

The documentary, by Michael Stevens and George Stevens Jr., was released last summer and premieres at 9 tonight on HBO. Overstuffed with talking heads, it is competently but unimaginatively crafted, but manages to make its point: That Herblock was not only in a class by himself, but reinforced the importance of commentary in shaping public opinion and keeping politicians from abusing their power.

Herblock was the reigning master of inksmanship through much of the last century, turning out five cartoons a week until his final days when he grudgingly cut back to four. He published his first cartoon at 20 in 1929 in the Chicago Daily News, was on the verge of getting fired by the conservative head of the Newspaper Enterprise Association when he won the first of his three Pulitzers and spent his career at the Post committing what former Nation editor Victor Navasky calls “a daily act of courage” with his pen.

He went after Hitler long before the U.S. joined the Allied effort in World War II, raised with simple and indelible visual eloquence the dangers of nuclear arms, took on Sen. Joe McCarthy long before a nervous CBS gave the go-ahead to Edward R. Murrow to pillory the junior senator from Wisconsin for ruining lives and careers with his megalomaniacal anti-communist crusade, held Lyndon Johnson’s feet to the fire over the folly of Vietnam and made the connection between the “third-rate burglary” at the Watergate and the White House only days after that break-in.

In addition to commentary – some of it repetitive – from contributors such as Ted Koppel, Lewis Black, Gwen Ifil, Jules Feiffer, Jon Stewart and Tom Brokaw, the film features actor Alan Mandell portrays the elderly Block in a recreation of his chaotic office at the Post. As Mandell delivers dialogue from Herblock’s interviews and speeched, the film edges toward the sub-category of “docu-drama,” but the device works well enough.

The real stars of the film are the drawings, simple black and white drawings, whose genius is perfectly summed up by New Yorker cartoon editor Robert Mankoff when he says they “make the powerful look ridiculous even before we see the (caption) line.”

One of the most interesting moments in the film comes toward the end, when Mandell, as Herblock, observes that while conventional wisdom has it that the Watergate scandal took blinders off American eyes about what their political leaders were capable of, the truth was just the opposite.

“Watergate succeeded in numbing the public view” of political abuses of power. The magnitude of that scandal, and the Nixon resignation, was such that subsequent, “lesser” abuses are too easily tolerated, Herblock maintained,.

“The worst form of corruption is acceptance of corruption,” Herblock said. “It doesn’t need to be a Watergate.”

In taking admirable note of Herblock’s gigantic presence in the long history of visual commentary, from Daumier, to Thomas Nast, to the present day, the HBO film also makes the obvious point that television and Internet commentary has overshadowed if not supplanted the role of newspaper political cartoons. Yet, as pointed as Colbert, Stewart or Key & Peele may be, when you see the actual Herblock panels, their passion, conviction and focus, it’s impossible not to be awed not only by what he did but the difference he made through decades of American history.