Paul Conrad: the premier editorial cartoonist

Paul Conrad was powerful, inspiring -- and a friend

By Tim Rutten

He never lost his sense of outrage.

My friend Paul Conrad, who died Saturday at 86, was the premier editorial cartoonist of his generation and, for many years, this newspaper's most visible public face. Outrage informed his journalism and animated his art. He woke up each morning angry about some new injustice and allowed sleep to overtake him each night only so that he could get up mad the next day and do it all again.

He was always and everywhere on the side of decency and ordinary men and women. His targets were the self-satisfied powerful, those indifferent to or antagonistic to our common good, and they included presidents -- as in these cartoons -- as well as governors, mayors, popes and corporate executives. Among his proudest accomplishments was making Richard Nixon's enemies list.

Conrad had the strength to speak out so forcefully -- through his incomparable drawings -- because he was, in Yeats' phrase, a "rooted man." His values were rooted in the New Deal's politics of remedy, in the social gospel of his Catholic faith and in the experience of the family he treasured beyond all else. The astonishing thing about his three Pulitzer Prizes was that he won them in three decades that were among the most tumultuous in modern American history. His willingness to engage our common condition, intensely and personally, was a hallmark of his work.

For those of us who came of age on The Times in the 1970s, he was an inspiration. Those of us who worked with him got up each morning hoping we'd live up to his example and knowing we'd fall short.