Thursday, July 16, 2026
“Skewer,” “merciless” and “savage” are words that accompany the editorial cartoons that Pat Oliphant penned for half a century before his death on July 13.
Woe to presidents, politicians and institutions that got on his bad side. And they did. The cartoonist’s depictions of Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan are legendary — and did not spare Barack Obama either. He even came out of retirement to take a swipe at Trump with a Hitler Youth drawing.
Oliphant won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for his Vietnam War cartoon of Ho Chi Minh, saying of a dead soldier, “They won’t get us to the conference table … will they?” He thought this piece one of his lesser works and turned his back on the Pulitzers because he thought the judgment was too political and not artistically based.
The artist died of old age on Monday at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was 90. His son, Grant Oliphant, confirmed the death.
Arriving from Australia in the ’60s, Oliphant quickly gained recognition and was soon in the nation’s capital working for the venerable but stylish Washington Star. He seemed to be happy to be in the belly of the beast.
A Washington Post critic once said, “If Pat Oliphant couldn’t draw, he’d be an assassin.”
Oliphant met the owner of a Georgetown art gallery, Susan Conway, who became his business manager and his third wife. They enjoyed the neighborhood, where he continued his cutting cartoon commentary after the Star folded and worked independently through newspaper syndication. Oliphant also created bronze sculptures and painted in oils.
By the turn of the century, the Oliphants were residing in Santa Fe, New Mexico, full time.
Last year, Magnolia Pictures debuted the documentary film, “A Savage Art: The Life & Cartoons of Pat Oliphant,” at the DC/Dox film festival in Washington, D.C.
Oliphant’s survivors include three children, Grant, Laura and Susanne Oliphant; two stepchildren, Pauline and Daniel Conway; a brother, John; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. (His wife Susan died in December 2025.)
While Oliphant bashed presidents and others, he could be quite friendly. He even had a playful moment with President Ford.
“Pat Oliphant, one of the world’s best political cartoonists, and I became friends when he moved to Washington, D.C., in 1975,” writes David Hume Kennerly, Pulitzer Award winner and former White House photographer as well as a contributor to The Georgetowner.
“Among his fellow cartoonists, most of whom were wickedly good at their job, he was in a league of his own. When photographer and environmentalist Ansel Adams died in 1984, Oliphant reflected Ansel’s view of President Reagan quite accurately. (Mainly because Ansel was vehemently opposed to Reagan’s Interior Secretary James Watt). Pat, knowing I was a friend of Ansel, gave me the original with the admonition written in the lower right (“don’t give this one away!”). In my defense, the previous Ansel cartoon he drew I gave to the great man himself! This one is now in my archive at the Center for Creative Photography at the The University of Arizona that Ansel founded with Dr. John Schaefer in 1975.
“Pat was an Aussie who became a U.S. citizen, but that never stopped him from holding American politicians to account. ‘They’re all guilty until proven innocent,’ he said. Pat inspired a generation or two of cartoonists who wanted to be like him. There will never be another Pat Oliphant.”
Friend and colleague Nick Adde told The Georgetowner about a spicier incident: “Pat Oliphant, an extremely clever and brilliant man, and I became friends while we were at the Washington Star, where my last vestige of a gofer job involved making sure his cartoon got to the post office each night for shipment to a camera company in New Jersey. Two weeks before the paper closed on Aug. 7, 1981, I let him know casually that it was my birthday. He signed a cartoon and gave it to me; it’s framed and hanging in my office to this day.
“Years later, while I was a reporter for the Army Times Publishing Company, we reconnected when I was assigned to cover a ceremony at the Omni Hotel during which the American Legion presented the great Bill Maudin of ‘Up Front’ fame with a lifetime achievement award. Afterward, Oliphant, Mauldin, his wife Christine and our cartoonist Jack McLeod moved to an empty bar in the hotel.
“While three of us chatted it up, Oliphant asked the bartender for a blank bar tab and quietly went to work with pen in hand. It so happened that the John Wayne Bobbitt episode was in the news. [Look it up.] About 15 or 20 minutes later, Oliphant showed us what he had done. It was a very funny and very naughty two-panel cartoon depicting Bobbitt, an open window and a ferocious dog. After our hysterics subsided, he signed it for Mauldin’s wife.”