A Word Guy’s Tribute to the Indelible Impact of a Cartoonist
By Brian Flaherty, Executive Vice President, Sullivan & LeShane Public Relations, Inc.
I am, by trade and temperament, a word guy. Putting aside my penchant for telling a never-ending story, I have spent the better part of my career coaxing the right words into the right order at the right moment. Words are my tools, my currency, my craft.
So it is with particular reverence that I pause to honor a different kind of communicator who never needed a single word to make a point.
Pat Oliphant, the Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist widely called the most influential editorial cartoonist of his time, died Monday, July 13, 2026 at the age of 90. His pen skewered presidents from Nixon to Trump, and fired the imaginations of the millions of people he reached through the publications that carried his indelible images worldwide. See yourself at “A Savage Art.”
There is something magical about the way a single image can do what a column of carefully chosen words often cannot: land instantly, land hard, and linger. Both words and images can change minds and hold power to account, but the cartoon does it in a single glance.
The father of political cartoonists was Thomas Nast, whose 19th-century cartoons in Harper’s Weekly helped bring down the most powerful political machine in American history. Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall controlled New York City with an iron grip until Nast’s caricatures made that grip visible to everyone. Tweed himself understood the threat.
Credit: From the collection of the Museum of the City of New York
“Stop them damn pictures,” he reportedly ordered. “I don’t care what the papers write about me. My constituents can’t read. But damn it, they can see the pictures.” They did, Tammany Hall fell, and when Tweed fled to Spain to escape justice, it was one of Nast’s cartoons that led authorities to identify him.
In the same tradition, Bob Englehart and Edmund “Ed” Valtman gave the readers of the Hartford Courant and Hartford Times their pointed view of governors and other Connecticut pols during their heyday.
Reprinted with permission from Bob Englehart and Cagle.com.
In a very real sense, Nast, Oliphant, Valtman, and Englehart are the original architects of what we now call memes, rendering images so sharp and so immediate that words ever could.
That, from this word guy, is the highest compliment I know how to pay. So thanks, Pat, and Godspeed!
**Feature Image Credit: Pat Oliphant, A Savage Art by Magnolia Pictures