Oliphant's Veeps

"Promises, Promises" by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, April 1968

How many vice presidents do you count in the above cartoon?

I recently mused that since "Oliphant's Presidents" has already been done (you can buy the book at amazon), I could have commemorated Pat Oliphant's passing by collecting his Vice Presidents. Well, his career spanned several of them, so here they are.

"Click" by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, October, 1968

Lyndon Johnson picked Hubert Humphrey as his running mate in 1964 to shore up his support with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. To Baby Boomers too young to remember the Minnesotan speaking out on behalf of Black Americans' civil rights in 1948, however, Humphrey came to be seen as errand boy for the man sending that generation to fight and die in a far away forever war in southeast Asia.

Running for president in LBJ's place after Johnson withdrew from the race, Humphrey found it difficult to distance himself from the administration's unpopular war while promising to continue advancing its Great Society ideals.

Of course, Johnson qualifies as a former Vice President in this cartoon, too. I suppose it is possible that Aussie Oliphant penned a cartoon of LBJ sometime before November of 1963; John Kennedy's Vice President could well have said or done something to catch the attention of the Adelaide editorial pages.

"Our Earth Contact, Spiro, Is Pushing for a Landing Here by 1986" by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, September 1969

Humphrey lost the 1968 election to Richard Nixon, whose first Vice President, Spiro Agnew, served as the new administration's attack dog, speaking out against the media, liberals, antiwar activists, and the nattering nabobs of negativism.

Oliphant has some fun with one of Agnew's less controversial pronouncements in this cartoon, just two months after the first manned landing on the moon.

There has not, in case anybody is wondering, been a manned mission to Mars as of this writing; but NASA landed a craft on the Red Planet ten years before Mr. Agnew predicted.

Agnew was easily the most caricaturable of the Veeps we're looking at today — at least of the ones who never got promoted to the top job — so five versions of him show up in Oliphant's single-panel cartoon.

Did you remember to count Nixon as a former Veep at the top of this post?

"The Lone Ranger" by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, May 1974

Of course you did.

Less than nine months into Richard Nixon's second term, Agnew pled no contest to charges of bribery  and resigned the Vice Presidency, bringing about the first exercise of the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Passed and ratified after JFK's assassination, it provided a mechanism to fill a vice presidential vacancy.

Gerald Ford was quickly named and confirmed as Agnew's replacement at a time when the President had some legal problems of his own. Yet, while Agnew cartoons were instantly recognizable, six months into Ford's vice presidency Oliphant still found it necessary to write Ford's name on his chest.

"I'd Like You to Meet Our New Vice-President" by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, December 1974

No such problem with Nelson Rockefeller, the former Governor of New York who had run for the presidency in 1960, 1964, and 1968.

He did not make a lasting impression as Ford's second in command, however. Not long ago, contestants on Jeopardy! needed to come up with the name of the vice president who followed Gerald Ford, and none of the three knew who it was.

I'm sure my very intelligent readership had no problem spotting him in the cartoon at the top of today's post.

"Ah Plan a Highly Important Staff Role" by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, January 1977

The vice presidency is notoriously a thankless make-work job. John Nance Garner likened it to a bucket of warm spit, or something that rhymed with it. Thomas Marshall joked about two brothers, one of whom went to sea while the other was elected Vice President, and neither was heard from again. Julia Louis-Dreyfus's Selina Meyers in Veep was a character study in constant frustration and humiliation.

Jimmy Carter actually followed through with his promise to give Walter Mondale a substantial policy role in his administration. Mondale, the first vice president to have an office inside the White House, was Carter's adviser and trouble-shooter, the Georgian's conduit to Capitol Hill Democrats.

"There Is No Truth Whatever in the Rumor" by Pat Oliphant, October 10, 1988

There was nothing fair about that purse Oliphant always drew with Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush — Oliphant went further than almost any other mainstream editorial cartoonist in exploiting Bush's so-called Wimp Factor.

Having criticized Ronald Reagan's "voodoo economics" when Bush was a rival for the Republican presidential nomination in 1980, Bush served as a major cheerleader for Reaganomics and the rest of that administration's policies. Behind the scenes, Bush continued the Mondale model of the vice presidency: an experienced advisor who didn't seek credit for administration successes. By the same token, he also avoided the limelight during the Iran-Contra scandal.

The purse, and the Wimp Factor, disappeared once Bush as President dispatched troops to overthrow the government of Panama.

"How Come Is It" by Pat Oliphant, January 9, 1992

Young and handsome J. Danforth Quayle presented cartoonists with a real caricaturing challenge, which Oliphant answered by drawing him as a child. The vice presidency didn't lend Quayle much opportunity to dispel the cartoonists' depiction of him as a callow, inexperienced goofball; attempting to correct a schoolboy's flawless spelling of "potato" didn't help him.

It was a case of peaking too soon; he might have been taken more seriously after a few more years gave him a face fit for presidential central casting. I wouldn't have recognized him in the second pew at Dick Cheney's funeral over three decades later if he hadn't been sitting next to his wife.

"Where Do We Put Mr. Gore" by Pat Oliphant, November 8, 1993

Oliphant leaned into Al Gore's wooden reputation here, a product of the Vice President's extremely careful, measured, parsed, and deliberate speaking style. If Dan Quayle came off as a not-too-bright schoolboy skating by on his looks, Al Gore could have been the guidance counselor patiently explaining the importance of responsible life choices to a school assembly full of Quayles.

"The Energy Show" by Pat Oliphant, May 1, 2001

Dick Cheney was a completely different animal than any previous Vice President. Oliphant consistently portrayed him as the real power behind a frat boy President who got the job on the strength of having been a legacy student who made it to graduation because Dad's name was on a wing of the administration building.

Chief of Staff for President Ford, Congressman from Wyoming, and Defense Secretary under Bush the Elder, Cheney was more recently Chair of the Halliburton Corporation, a multinational oil service conglomerate. Tapped to find Bush the Younger a running mate in 2000, he found one in the mirror.

"I'm Smilin' Joe Biden and I'm Running for President" by Pat Oliphant, January 23, 2013

A commenter at Daily Cartoonist regretted that Pat Oliphant had never drawn Joe Biden. True, Oliphant's eyesight had failed him by the time Biden won the presidency; but he had drawn Biden as Vice President (and as Senator).

Which is where this Graphical History Tour must wrap things up. I know of no Oliphant cartoons of Mike Pence or Kamala Harris, and it's highly unlikely that he ever drew J.D. Vance.

On the other hand, I could have included cartoons he drew of former Vice Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Harry Truman, and there is probably one of Teddy Roosevelt somewhere along the line. But this post is already long enough.

And I could never be certain that I hadn't missed a cartoon featuring William Rufus Devane King or Charles Curtis.

Ranan Lurie, RIP

Another of the giants in my profession has gone to that great drawing board in the sky:

1968, Life magazine

Ranan Lurie, who died on Wednesday at the age of 90, was an outstanding caricaturist in his day, an Israeli-American published worldwide. (Albeit hardly ever in one place for very long.)

1969, Life magazine

And when I say he was a caricaturist, it's largely because he concentrated so much on getting the faces of politicians so exquisitely exact that he didn't bother to be so persnickety with the other elements of his cartoons.

1972

And it didn't detract from his cartoons in the slightest.

(But make no mistake: drawing someone riding a bicycle ain't easy.)

1973

Aside: Let this be a lesson, kids: don't ever use rubber cement to put newspaper or magazine clippings into a scrapbook. (You kids didn't understand a word of that, did you.) What appears to be grayscale in this cartoon of Henry Kissinger and the leaders of Germany, Greece, France and Great Britain is just my lousy choice of an adhesive staining the paper.

And I've cleaned up this scan considerably.

Oct., 1976

Even if you didn't catch Lurie's signature or the helpful title over his cartoons, you could recognize them by the little sun shining in each and every one.

July, 1976

There are more recent Lurie cartoons out there, but I'll have to leave them for others to display. These are just a few of the ones I saved in scrapbooks back in the day.

Rest in shalom, Mr. Lurie.

That Was the Monday That Was

 Illustrating a minor point in tomorrow's Graphical History Tour. 

Slouching Toward Fallujah

in UWM Post (Milwaukee, Wis.), Nov. 13, 1990

One of the currents running through these Somewhatback Saturday posts of mine has been 30-year-old cartoons of mine. That current is now hitting the warm-up to Gulf War I, which I've covered in a number of other posts already, including just four years ago. Which seems a long time ago, I know. Well, I will probably want to mark the 50th anniversary of Nixon's resignation if I'm still around four years from now, in spite of reminiscing about it here last week. I guess four years is long enough.

in UW-Parkside Ranger (Kenosha, Wis.), Nov. 15, 1990

So here we go again. In case you haven't gotten to 1990's history in whatever education system has been cobbled together in your area, the war came about in response to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's invasion and annexation of the emirate of Kuwait in August, 1990. U.S. President George H.W. Bush spent the rest of the year cobbling together a coalition of nations in support of diplomatic and military action against Iraq to restore Kuwaiti sovereignty.

in UWM Post, Nov. 15, 1990

Diplomatic pressure on Iraq yielded only defiance from Hussein.

in Journal Times, Racine, Wis., Nov. 23, 1990

This is one of very, very few of my Journal Times cartoons that were not about local or state issues. I would have preferred not to have to label Neville Chamberlain or Lyndon Johnson, but one can't always count on every reader to recognize every caricature.

in UW-Parkside Ranger, Nov. 29, 1990

The Bush administration reached out to and received encouragement from Syria's President Hafez al-Assad, long a foe of U.S. ally Israel and an ally of the Soviet Union. At this point, war with Iraq became inevitable.

in UW-M Post, Nov. 29, 1990

Even if Saddam Hussein refused to believe it.

Ripping GHWB

As promised, I'm rehashing cartoons of George H.W. Bush's political career for Desert Stormback Saturday today. I've posted some of these before, but I've made sure to dig up some previously unrereleased material.

And in case you thought Thursday's memorial cartoon whitewashed the Bush record, it shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with my work to discover that I was not much of a Bush fan in the 1980's.

Bush skipped from one government post to another throughout the 1960's and 70's, but most Americans only became acquainted with him when he ran for president in 1980. When he was vying against Ronald Reagan for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination, Bush famously labeled Reagan's promises to cut taxes yet balance the federal budget "voodoo economics." That all changed once Bush accepted the understudy spot on the GOP ticket, however.

For those of you too young to recognize 1980's technology, that's a reel-to-reel tape player hurriedly erasing in Bush's head. They didn't have a big "Erase" light, but one was necessary in the cartoon to show that he wasn't rewinding or fast forwarding.

Bush ended up sticking with the post of Vice President for longer than any other job in his career. Skipping ahead to the end of the Reagan administration, I drew this January, 1988 cartoon about Bush's role in Reagan's Iran-Contra scandal. In spite of his wide-ranging foreign policy experience, Bush was never directly connected to the complicated scheme of arms sales, pay-offs and funding of right-wing rebels, involving under-the-table dealings in Iran, Lebanon, Kuwait, and Nicaragua.

When it came time for Bush to name his own running mate, his choice of boyish Indiana Senator J. Danforth Quayle met with considerable derision. Quayle had a way to go, however, before he would catch up with some of George Bush's gaffes and malapropisms. In a speech to the American Legion on September 7, Bush mistakenly told the audience, "Today is Pearl Harbor Day — 47 years ago from this very day we were hit and hit hard at Pearl Harbor." His praise of the incumbent Governor of California overlooked the résumé of the incumbent President of the United States.

Fortunately for the Bush-Quayle ticket, their Democratic rival was Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, whose drab, wonkish demeanor just wasn't up to the slickly packaged Republican campaign. Dukakis's awkward photo op in an army tank stuck with voters longer than any harmless misstatements by Mr. Bush.

Again, you younger readers will be too young to remember "generic" grocery store products, which were a thing in the 1980's: cheaper versions of name-brand products sold in pointedly plain packaging. The ones where my mother shopped boasted feebly that while they might "vary in quality," they were "generally acceptable for household use."

As president, Bush had to deal domestically with a slowing economy. His campaign promise, "Read my lips: No new taxes," soon ran up against political and economic reality and broke. The pledge was the sort of thing that sounded good at the time; he needed to establish some bona fides with the ascendant wing of the party still suspicious that he wasn't sold on "voodoo economics."

Bush enjoyed greater success on the international front. The break-up of the Soviet Union left the United States as the world's only superpower. Quick and victorious U.S. military intervention in Panama established Bush's reputation as a bold, decisive leader.

Then Iraq invaded Kuwait, and Bush had to weigh the costs and benefits of going to war against one of the Middle East's most formidable (on paper, anyway) military powers, whose previous malfeasance the Reagan and Bush administrations had overlooked because Iraq served as a check against Iran. (For that matter, the Bush administration had sent conflicting signals about whether it had any interest in Iraqi designs on the emirate.)

Do I have to explain references from the 1930's and 60's to any young whippersnappers out there? I do hope not.

For a time, it appeared that all other issues would take a back seat to the war in Iraq, but as it happened, Iraq's army quickly turned tail and skedaddled out of Kuwait. The Bush administration chose not to press on for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, even as the Iraqi military turned its attention to foes less able to stand up to it.

Were we going to go back in to stop Saddam from gassing the Kurds? And meanwhile, did some skittishness in the stock markets signal that the economy wasn't recovering from recession after all?

I've run the Double Dip cartoon before because, in spite of the stupid wordplay, it has always been one of my favorites. My husband thought it heartless of me to make it my Facebook ID photo on Sunday morning, but I think that Bush had enough of a sense of humor that he might have gotten a wry chuckle over it.

Now, anyone who thinks that kinder and gentler days prevailed during the administration of Bush père clearly doesn't remember his nomination of Clarence Thomas to succeed Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. Out of some modicum of deference to the memory of President Bush (and because it's not the tone I want to close with), I'm choosing not to rerun my cartoons about that episode. I've run all the good ones before, and you're free to look them up.

I've also decided to skip the cartoons about the 1992 presidential campaign; again, I've dredged up most of the better ones before. Instead, I'll close with this cartoon from December, 1992, as Bush prepared to turn the White House over to a young upstart from Arkansas.

The Whole World Was Watching

Last week, Selective Serviceback Saturday shared cartoons from 150 years ago about the first presidential election held after the 15th Amendment extended the right to vote to African-American citizens of the U.S. Today, against my better judgment, we step ahead 100 years from 1868 to the last presidential election held before the 26th Amendment extended the right to vote to 18- to 20-year-old citizens of the U.S.

Others in the cartoon-rehashing game have a much better recollection of the 1968 presidential election than I, so this won't be a comprehensive retrospective by any means. So much of what I do remember is actually Frank Gorshin's and David Frye's impressions of the candidates. Here goes anyway.

"I Think We Can Start Bringing Them Home Soon" by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, September, 1968

The #1 issue of interest to those 18- to 20-year-olds had to be the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. They couldn't vote for president, but they did have to answer to their draft board.

President Lyndon Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, had won his party's presidential nomination. His long liberal record, at the 1948 Democratic Convention and as lead author of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was overshadowed by his association with Johnson and the war. He tried to promise to bring an end to U.S. involvement in Vietnam, only to be publicly contradicted by Johnson and Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford. (Laird in Oliphant's cartoon is Wisconsin Congressman Melvin Laird, who would become Richard Nixon's first Secretary of Defense.)

"Anchored" by Tom "Obadiah" Curtis in National Review, October 22, 1968

An eleventh-hour announcement that the Johnson was halting bombing raids over North Vietnam would fail to give enough lift to the Humphrey campaign. Perhaps today we'd call it Johnson Fatigue; liberals who ought to have agreed with Humphrey on civil rights and other issues remained disenchanted; Michigan's New Democratic Coalition and the California Young Democrats withheld their endorsements, and even Norman Mailer mused that Nixon wouldn't be all that bad.

"Making Like a Dove" by Roy Justus in Minneapolis Star, August, 1968

On the Republican side, Richard Nixon's anti-communist record should have indicated that he would continue the war in Vietnam, but he claimed to have a secret plan to end the war within 90 days. What he didn't tell America was that he meant within 90 days of his re-election to a second term, and that the plan involved spreading the war to Laos, Cambodia, and Kent State.

"The Newer Than New Nixon" by Robert Zschiesche in Greensboro Daily News, October, 1968

On domestic issues, Nixon's promises to bring Law and Order appealed to what he called the "Silent Majority" horrified by political assassinations and by riots in America's inner cities, universities, and at the Democratic National Convention. (Not to mention promiscuous sex and drug use. But there, I mentioned them anyway.) Consistently leading in the polls, Nixon offered mostly pablum, and — still smarting from his experience in 1960 — refused to meet Humphrey in any debates.

"The Fraidycat" by Cy Hungerford in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 24, 1968

Nixon's campaign themes included promises to appoint Supreme Court justices who would reverse the decisions of the Earl Warren court (Johnson would withdraw his filibustered nominations of Abe Fortas and Homer Thornberry in October), to fight inflation, and to replace the draft with an all-volunteer military. Behind the scenes, he urged South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu to refuse peace talks until Nixon could take office.

"Measuring Up" by Ranan Lurie in Life, October, 1968

Henry Luce's Life magazine endorsed Nixon in the election, but its cartoonist Ranan Lurie clearly was more ambivalent about the voters' choices. So were a number of others who put themselves forward as third party candidates. Most notably, Alabama Governor George Wallace ran at the head of the American Independent Party on a segregationist platform, declaring that "There's not a dime's worth of difference between the Republicans and Democrats."

"Foreign and Domestic" by Herblock in Washington Post, October, 1968

He chose as his running mate retired Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, who had advocated bombing North Vietnam "back to the stone age," using "anything that we could dream up, including nuclear weapons." Yet while LeMay was more hawkish on the war than Wallace, the general stood to the left of him on Wallace's signature issue.

"There Seems to Be More Than a Dime's Worth of Difference..." by Bill Sanders in Milwaukee Journal, October 25, 1968

On the left, the most notable third-party candidates were comedian Dick Gregory and Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver heading rival wings of the Peace and Freedom Party, and the Communist Party USA's Charlene Mitchell. Gregory made a tour of college campuses, where he promised to paint the White House black, then bring the troops home from Vietnam and "send LBJ with nothing but a barbecue gun." His counterfeit dollar bills won him considerable attention, not least from the Secret Service.

Mitchell's running mate wouldn't be old enough to serve as Vice President until 1980, and Cleaver (also not yet 35 years old) fled the country after a shoot-out between police and Black Panthers in Oakland, California. But then, getting elected was never really the point of their candidacies.

"Out of the Running," unsigned (perhaps Ted Shearer), in The Afro American, Baltimore MD, October 19, 1968

The Afro American, in an editorial accompanied by the above cartoon, counseled its readers against casting their vote for any of the three African-American candidates:

"Dick Gregory, Eldridge Cleaver and Mrs. Charlene Mitchell are all doomed to defeat this year, and all of them know it. Their exercises in futility would be more tolerable as means of protests against ills in the society in some other election year. ...
"The danger is that some voters, frustrated with conditions as they are or wishing to make an individual protest also, may throw away valuable votes."

As it was, their campaigns, even lumped in with votes for comedian Pat Paulsen and comic strip characters Pogo and Snoopy, were not enough to throw any state from one of the front runners to another.

"Remind Me to Get That Fixed" by Dan Dowling, Kansas City Star,

Wallace, on the other hand, carried Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, the last third-party candidate to win electoral votes by getting a plurality of any state's votes. But it was not enough to throw the election into the House of Representatives; even in the unlikely event that Humphrey had won Wallace's five states in a two-candidate race, he would still have fallen well short of a majority in the electoral college.

But since fewer than 500,000 votes separated Humphrey and Nixon, who can say how Wallace's 9.9 million would have divided up without him?

And yet, 50 years later, with one election decided by the Supreme Court, and two awarded to the second-place candidate, we still haven't fixed our cuckoo electoral vote system.

Thwart the Court

It may yet be early to foresee how the current Kavanaugh confirmation hearings will turn out. Nevertheless, Seriatimback Saturday takes a look at Supreme Court nominees who came up just a little bit short. In my own lifetime, anyway.

I wasn't drawing political cartoons in 1968 when President Lyndon Johnson tapped Associate Justice Abe Fortas to be Chief Justice upon the retirement of Earl Warren. Johnson had faced no significant opposition when he named Fortas to the Supreme Court in 1965, but by the time he announced his decision to elevate Fortas to Chief Justice, Johnson was politically weakened by Vietnam War weariness and had already announced that he would not run for reelection.

"Hear Ye, Hear Ye!" by Karl Hubenthal in Los Angeles Herald-Examiner,  July, 1968

A coalition of conservative Republicans and southern Democrats filibustered the Fortas nomination, initially claiming the grounds that Johnson was a lame duck who shouldn't be deciding the direction of the Supreme Court for years to follow. More to the point was Fortas's close friendship with LBJ — he'd be accurately described as a crony of the President — and his and the Warren Court's liberal record.

"Senate Judiciary Committee Members..." by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, July, 1968

Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC) attacked Fortas for his having voted with the Court's majority rulings in favor of free speech rights in pornography cases. In closed session of the Senate, Thurmond played a number of the porn films which had been at issue in those cases, even entering them into the official Senate record. Thurmond's tactic was widely ridiculed, but proved effective in blocking Fortas's nomination (and along with it, LBJ's nomination of Texas Congressman Homer Thornberry to take the seat Fortas would have vacated. Perhaps Clyde Peterson, Herc Ficklen, or some other Texan drew a cartoon or two about Thornberry's nomination, but I haven't seen one).

Richard Nixon got to name Warren Burger as Chief Justice in Fortas's stead, and every Chief Justice since has been a Republican nominee. Fortas would soon be compelled to resign from the Court over his financial association with a Wall Street financier in trouble for securities violations, opening another seat for Nixon to fill.

As a critical element of his "Southern Strategy," Richard Nixon came into office having promised Strom Thurmond that he would name a conservative southerner to the Supreme Court. To fulfill his promise he nominated Clement Haynsworth Jr., a South Carolina judge who had a record of foot-dragging on racial integration and of opposition to labor unions.

Support and opposition to the Haynsworth nomination were both bipartisan. Southern Democrats including Judiciary Committee Chairman Eastwood supported him, while liberal Republicans were troubled by accusations that Judge Haynsworth had ruled on matters in which he had a financial interest, and had bought stock in the Brunswick Corporation while hearing a case in which it was involved.

"Aw, What're a Few Conflict of Interest Stock Deals?" by Bill Sanders in Milwaukee Journal, October 11, 1969

A tangential relationship with Bobby Baker, a Senate staffer convicted of larceny and tax evasion in 1967, proved to be the straw that broke the camel's back. Following the Senate's 45-55 vote to reject Haynsworth, Nixon's next nominee was a Tallahassee, Florida judge named G. Harrold Carswell.

Civil rights leaders were skeptical of his repudiation of a 1948 racist speech he had given, yet Democrats were at first wary of mounting opposition to a second southern judge. Sen. Edward Brooke (R-MA), the lone African-American in the Senate, led opposition to Carswell.

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved his nomination 13 to 4 in spite of Carswell's spectacularly mediocre judicial record. Seven out of 24 of his rulings had been overturned on appeal. Florida State University law school dean Joshua Morse claimed, "I cannot think of a single thing of Judge Carswell's that I am familiar with." Harvard Law Dean Derek Bok said, "The public record of Judge Carswell's career and accomplishments clearly does not place him within even an ample list of the nation's more distinguished jurists."

"How Can You Ask Us to Support a Guy..." by Tom Curtis in Milwaukee Sentinel, March 18, 1970

Speaking in Carswell's defense, Sen. Roman Hruska (R-NE) famously replied, "So what if he is mediocre?  There are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers.  They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they?  We can’t have all Brandeises, Cardozos, and Frankfurters and stuff like that there."

"Holmes v. Carswell" by Pat Oliphant in Denver Post, March 25, 1970

Nixon pulled out all the stops to convince Republicans that they had a duty to confirm Carswell, but in the end, 51 Republicans and Democrats voted down the nomination. Grousing that Senators would never confirm any southern conservative, Nixon named Minnesotan Harry Blackmun as his third choice for Oliver Wendell Holmes' seat on the high court. (Blackmun would author the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, and conservatives would resolve never to nominate any but the most reliably right-wing justices ever again.)

I have no editorial cartoons to accompany this next item (nobody draws cartoons about the dog that didn't bark), but this is a good moment to point out that Jimmy Carter remains the only president since Andrew Johnson not to name a single justice to the Supreme Court. Even James Garfield, president for only six months and on his deathbed for almost half of that time, got to name Stanley Matthews to the Court.

We now come to appointments I had the opportunity to draw about myself, so I don't have to continue stealing other cartoonists' work. In 1987, Ronald Reagan raised liberals' hackles by appointing former Solicitor General Robert Bork to the seat vacated by Justice Lewis Powell. Bork had been the Nixon underling who fired Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox when his superiors, Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy A.G. William Ruckelshaus, resigned rather than carry out Nixon's order. He was also outspoken on his goal of overturning the civil rights and privacy rulings of the Warren and Burger courts.

After the Senate voted 42-58 to reject Bork, Reagan's next choice was Douglas Ginsburg (no relation to RBG), a 41-year-old whom he had named to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia a year earlier.

The Ginsburg nomination quickly collapsed after news broke of his marijuana use in the 1960s and 70s as a student and as an assistant professor at Harvard. Ginsburg withdrew his name from consideration after only ten days in the national spotlight, and the spectre of Reefer Madness breaking out in judges' chambers was averted.

George W. Bush had two Supreme Court vacancies to fill in the summer of 2005: longtime Bush friend Harriet Miers led the search for a successor to Sandra Day O'Connor, for which she recommended John Roberts. But when Chief Justice William Rehnquist died of thyroid cancer, Bush decided to nominate Roberts to replace Rehnquist and Miers to succeed O'Connor.

Democrats and Republicans alike found her answers to Senators' questions lacking, contradictory, and even insulting. Having no experience as a judge, elected official, or academic, her record was even thinner than Carswell's.

With Republicans in the majority, it was their reservations about her commitment to conservative orthodoxy that would doom her appointment. Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) saw to it that every one of her verbal missteps, especially statements that suggested that there was an outside glimmer of a ghost of a chance that she might perhaps uphold Roe v. Wade, made it into the press. Miers withdrew from Senate consideration before a vote could be taken.

Finally, we come to Barack Obama's foiled appointment of Merrick Garland after the sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia. Whereas Republicans this year have expressed a sense of urgency to fill the Anthony Kennedy vacancy, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) found no necessity to have nine justices on the court when its fall term was to begin nine months later, on the grounds that there was to be a presidential election a month after that and the inauguration of a new president after yet another two months.

Unlike Abe Fortas, Merrick Garland never even got a hearing.

Speaking of lame duck appointments, here's another bit of historical Supreme Court trivia for you. Having been defeated his reelection campaign in 1840, President Martin Van Buren nominated Peter Vivian Daniel to the Court one week before leaving office in 1841. The U.S. Senate confirmed Daniel's appointment in five days.