The pen may be mightier than the sword, but in Paul Conrad’s hands it was a pencil that was just as lethal.
One of the giants of the dying breed of editorial cartoonists, Conrad skewered presidents from Truman to Obama — even making it onto Richard Nixon’s infamous “enemies list” — and spoke his mind on wars from Korea to Iraq.
“No one’s ever accused me of being objective,” Conrad, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, once said.
One of the country’s most controversial, most honored and most prolific editorial cartoonists, and the winner of The Denver Post’s first Pulitzer in 1964, Conrad died Saturday morning at his Southern California home of natural causes, his son, David, told the Associated Press. Conrad was 86 and is survived by his wife of more than 50 years, Kay, and four grown children.
A proud and vocal liberal, Conrad’s cartoons were marked by their simplicity and their short, biting captions.
In 1974, he depicted Nixon’s helicopter whisking him away from the White House after his resignation. The caption read: “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.”
He depicted a group of police officers clubbing Rodney King over the caption: “One Picture Is Worth Zero.”
And he showed George W. Bush as Sisyphus, pushing a giant boulder up a hill — with “Iraq” printed on the rock.
“Subtlety was not one of his strengths — and that’s actually a compliment,” said longtime Denver Post editorial cartoonist Mike Keefe. “He would hit really hard, and there was no doubt where he stood on an issue.”
Conrad arrived at The Denver Post in 1950 after tearing up a telegram from the paper’s managing editor, who had wired: “No jobs open, don’t come now.” Conrad talked his way into the newsroom, beginning as a touch-up artist and then making his way onto the editorial page.
“At his drawing board Conrad wields his pen like a stiletto dipped in vitriol,” Bill Hosokawa wrote in his book, “Thunder in the Rockies: The Incredible Denver Post.”
But despite his often acerbic renderings, he was popular with his colleagues — the kind of guy everyone wanted at their dinner party, said former Post society editor Pat Collins Smedley.
There was the night the Smedleys invited Conrad to a housewarming party. During the evening, he pulled out his pencil and drew a perfect cartoon likeness of Dr. John Smedley — right on the wall over the fireplace.
“We left it up for quite a while — everybody got such a kick out of it,” Pat Collins Smedley said.
Eventually, she and her husband painted over it.
“He was quite insulted,” she said Saturday, laughing at the memory.
Fearless with a pencil in his hand, Conrad was also not afraid of the powerful people in his own building.
To nearly everyone, Post owner Helen Bonfils was “Miss Bonfils.” Her closest friends were allowed to call her “Miss Helen.”
Conrad?
“He just said, ‘Hi Helen, how are you?’ — and she took it,” Collins Smedley said. “No one else, I don’t think, could have gotten away with it.”
Conrad left The Post in early 1964, heading to the Los Angeles Times. Four months later, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in editorial cartooning for his work at The Post in 1963.
Conrad’s response?
“My poodle, Ozzie, was lost over the weekend and still is,” he was quoted as saying. “Maybe when he hears about this he’ll want to come back.”
Conrad went on to win two more Pulitzers for the Times, in 1971 and 1984, and was a finalist for journalism’s highest honor in 1982 and 1998 — a remarkably long period of time at the pinnacle of his profession.
Conrad’s identical twin, Jim, a commercial artist in Denver, died in 2002.
Paul Conrad often said that his proudest accomplishment was making onto Nixon’s “enemies list” — a group of people that the former president considered political threats.
Conrad, however, may have had the last laugh: In 1977, he was named a Nixon scholar at the former president’s alma mater, Whittier College.
