In Herblock: A Cartoonist’s Life (1993), Block’s chapter on Nixon is revealingly titled “Scene of the Crimes.” In it, Block acknowledges that while there were politicians he had “been interested in meeting, [and] some that I didn’t care about,” there were “a few that I didn’t want to meet at all. Nixon was one of the didn’t-wants.”

One of his most famous cartoons, done in 1954, showed Vice President Nixon emerging from a sewer, a metaphor Herblock used several times for his view of Nixon’s uniquely dirty style of politics. Just before this 1970 cartoon was published, a newspaper article described Vice President Spiro Agnew’s closed meeting with New Orleans newspaper editors in which Agnew attacked Nixon critic Senator Charles Goodell (R-NY) as the “Christine Jorgensen of the Republican Party.” Jorgensen had undergone one of the first widely publicized sex-change operations.