Featured in the journal of the White House Historical association. Even the coasters are updated with current political caricatures. We spoke with the Vice President and political cartoonist about the artwork on display. The hotel was built in 1928 on the site of the residences of john hay and henry adams. And after the family relinquished their rights to the site, in 1926, the developer built this hotel along with the cardinal hotel. The hotel has been in existence since 1928. This bar has been in existence somewhere starting in the 60s or 70s. With my arrival in 1999, this bar was known as off the record, a place to be seen but not heard. And it was not in this color and format and layout, but it was pretty much the same bar in the basement of the hotel, and its kind of like the speak easy place and it has become very popular over the years. The decorations are political cartoons that are displayed from various artists dating back to a collection of atwood. We keep some of the original artwork still in house. From what i know, is that the previous ownership in the 80s and 90s decided to bring in some artwork after having a few beers, i guess, over the bar and in the bar and thats how it really established. But we have built up on this more so now because were using local artists and Pulitzer Prizewinning artists in order to continue the tradition of rotating political art through the bar. My understanding is this goes back to about 2000. They redid the bar here at the hotel and they went with this classic washington cigar den, the dark burgundy walls and somebody had the brainstorm that they wanted to do cartoons for art. And the original genesis that was on the walls was from art wood who collected cartoons and ended up donating his 30,000 cartoon collection to the library of congress. And he made an arrangement with the hotel to loan them a bunch of classic caricatures from his collection. And since then, i got involved in 2008, thanks to my Buddy Richard thompson, when they wanted to update the caricatures to stuff that was more current. The wood collection mostly went back to the 60s, 70s, antibiotic80s. The newer clients didnt recognize the people from the nixon and reagan administration. They wanted people from the clinton and obama administrations. Thats when Richard Thompson who passed away a couple of years ago was brought in. And richard was just an astounding caricaturist. He did a lot of stuff for u. S. News and world report and the new yorker. Richard came in with a portfolio of drawings and richard said check with my friend matt who works at politico. I got to also fill in some of the more recent political theaters. I work as a caricaturist and a political cartoonist. Theres a difference. Political cartoonists use words, word bubbles. Im really a political come men at a timer. I draw my opinion and express it with a certain amount of humor and the poor columnists have to rely on using their words. The old saw about a picture is worth 1,000 words is actually quite true. Somebody who writing an 800word essay about tax policies or something has to rely on a reader whos being to invest five minutes to read those 800 words. But the magic of a political cartoon, humans pick up stuff fast, we recognize a face, a setting, a metaphor, a fun, and you can process a cartoon quickly. We have a certain advantage, i think. Theres some people that think political cartooning is going away, its sort of an archaic form of political expression and i feel just the opposite. I think that political cartoons are the perfect vehicle for our short attention span, twitter, social media culture and im sticking to that. The power of positive thinking. Caricaturists are different. They dont have the advantage of using word bubbles and captions. Its purely a visual thing and youre not really expressing a complicated political opinion, youre basically trying to capture a character. A good caricaturist can load that up with other stuff and insert a political opinion or maybe theres some detail or theres some wry commentary in the setting or clothing of the caricature. I learned this just recently after working as a caricaturist for 40 years. The word caricature comes from the italian word. It means to load as in a boat or a cart or a gun. A caricature, its not a portrait. Youre loading that portrait with a certain edgy humor hopefully, and a little commentary. If you do it right, you capture more than just the physical attributes of somebody. I was very lucky as a young man i grew up in los angeles and i when i was in high school and first interested in cartooning, i got to meet paul conrad. He was most proud of the fact that he was the only cartoonist that made nixons enemies. He opened the door to me that there is a viable career path which is a noncareer path if you think about it. He was very encouraging and inspiring and then, you know, you start out in my teens and 20s, i would look around and, you know, i love the work of pat oliphant, david lavine who is probably i dont know whats the right word. He was pivotal and very influential in the world of caricature. A lot of the you still see it in my work somewhat. Some of these other works like these he signed these prints. He was very similar to lavine. Lavine was a master of the fluid crosshatch, the big bubble head and the big body and the wry twist with some other detail that was put in there. Lavine, like a lot of other cartoonists was an early influence of mine. Thats where i fell in love with crosshatching. Its a wonderful collection of cartoons that spans a lot of decades, in fact, a century. And it goes back to another one of the great grand daddies of political cartooning, kepler who drew for a publisher of puck magazine. Kepler would do these beautiful color drawings for the magazine. And if you remember your American History books, you know, theres the wonderful standard oil cartoon of the oil tank with the tentacle of the octopus and it was to call it a cartoon is almost putting it down. Because it was a real work of art. It was an oil painting actually done as a color lithograph. Theres a couple of keplers here. Those are probably the oldest ones in the bar and these in this corner i think would be sort of the next ones. The cartoons are almost all from the reagan era. And i think thats that was when richard and i were brought in, it was when people were failing to recognize Jean Kirkpatrick and people like that. Some of the bartenders will come in or the new help and come in and go around and help us theyre constantly being asked who are these people. And youll go, thats bob dole. Dont you remember bob dole . No, i dont remember bob dole. This is a mismatch of different cartoonists works. Thats me. Thats Richard Thompson. These are a couple of color vaultmans that are interesting in comparison to the pure crosshatch ones. These are water color images. These were done in the 1970s. Richard thompsons style is just as a cartoonist, and i look at this, and its a beautiful combination of loose line. He was influenced a lot by some of the great english cartoonists, but he took it to his own sort of place. Is i s an inspire to this kind of looseness. This is one i did for politico. This is a caricature of bernie sanders. Richards approach was a classic sort of dip pen. He works in a style that would have fit in perfectly in the 19th century in some ways but is also very, very modern. This is an another Richard Thompson. You can see the difference in that i rely on lots of little lines, little black and white lines that harken back to the wooden graving of the thomas nast era. You can see the rendering is done in water color and he sees the paint render the shapes and heres the paul ryan that i did for politico. Heres a dick cheney and a karl rove and those are Dick Richards up there. This gets a lot of attention, and im sitting around and usually people as theyre leaving the bar will stop and this because its right by the door gets a lot of attention. Heres a shameless thing that i did for politico in the very beginning. One of our reporters did odd couples that you wouldnt expect getting a drink in a bar and of course, this is when i started doing stuff with the hey adams and this is rahm emanuel and Mitch Mcconnell and i situated them in a bar for this one. This was a cover illustration for politico back when rahm was chief of staff of the white house for obama. I was far too nice to Mitch Mcconnell in this one, but sometimes that happens. And then heres a biden and also one of mine and a couple more Richard Thompsons, laura bush, and again, just this lovely, sophisticated, it looks sort of simple and the sophistication and the color scheme and the painting of richards stuff is still sort of is annoying and wonderful, and up in the corn are thats our trump that Kevin Kelleher did with a twitter bird on his shoulder. A fabulous piece of color art. In the bar that 75 of the art thats on the walls are straight caricatures. There are a number of real political cartoons here, as well and this particular corner has one by me and one by Kevin Kelleher. This is something he did for the economist and this is something he did for politico. He can tell the difference in that hes got a word bubble and theres more information and opinion, of course, which is really what were about. Kevins is a lovely cartoon and built around a clever, visual metaphor that again is conveyed very quickly. In this case its the boxing ring and its israel and palestine going at it and obama is the new ref and its around 3,487,000 and the old refs from the boxing ring, bush, clinton, bush again, reagan all beat up and its a lovely example of how to take a lovely, political issue and ideally if youre doing a good, political cartoon you can disstill it down to a nice, visual nugget that con vase the complexity, but quickly and hopefully with a little bit of bite. This is a cartoon i did that they like at the hey adams which is the chamber of commerce that happens to be next door and the money they were spending on the campaign, and this one is from 2008 and resistance is futile and theyre blasting the democrats with piles and piles of cash. I understand he actually likes this cartoon which fills me with mixed emotions. These two are the oldest ones in the bar and really represent the age of political cartooning which you would have found in puck magazine and theyre color lithographs. I wish i knew the exact details of the politics at the time, but here you have a classic political cartoon trail and the big thumb of the big interests and being held down on the speaker and the kapgd down here is very small. The leader of the minority and he cant get the speakers eye because its under the thumb of the big interests and this is, of course, uncle sam. Uncle sam being the creational cartoonists and i believe some people credit uncle sam creating what cartoonists utilize all the time, but this is the lithographic pick and the wonderful thing about puck is they gave cartoonists lots of space. Cartoonists these days we get shrunk down like that when were in print, but back to sort of my optimistic graph of political cartooning and this is perhaps some of the best Color Printing especially at the time to display a political cartoon, but in 2018, cartoonists are working in the digital realm and retina displays lets us do all kinds of water kohler and nuance that begins to rival the cartooning that we got to do like kepler got to do. In some ways were getting back to cartooning. Anne who draws on the Washington Post on the digital side and political cartoons that are often animated gifs. She won the Pulitzer Prize i think back in 2000 for her static, political cartoons and it has moved on to animation and i think these were done that she creat created for the inauguration of obama. She went to cal arts and it was a trained animator and you can see it in her very strong line style that really stands out. She now works in water color. The first time i came in the bar was probably 17 years ago ask you can still smoke in bars in washington and this was a smoking bar and this was a cigar bar and we came in on a cold winter night and i had just moved to washington from the west coast and was fascinated by the culture of the city and you walked in here and there was this inversion layer of cigar smoke and there were these people all dressed up in suits sitting around having conversations in wingback chairs and it was right out of a cartoon and this is the den of inequity that you imagine being in the white house or something and with that, this is the cave. This one booth in the back that they would close off and its really no place in washington and besides providing cartoons that decorate the walls and hans had the idea of doing coasters and they commissioned original art for these and tao and anne and myself and they design caricature in the news and theyre coasters and handed out to people here and theres an interesting exercise in american politics because certain caricatures like Hillary Clinton will be sort of evergreen and shes not going anywhere. But some of the other characters that we draw, youre not sure if theyll be in the news. For instance, sean spicer is one that were doing when trump came into town and fortunately, we didnt do one for spicer because he came and went, likewise, scaramucci and the like. We situated politicos in the bar doing these things and usually add if you can Little Details like this is cals caricature and hes drinking from a beer stein that looks like donald trump. And heres hillary and bill carrying the luggage and baggage. You get the joke. These were done by Ron Covington in the 80s, and covington has a distinctive style and he took it in his own direction and theres light cross hatching in here with a gray scale. Caricatures are are a very strange thing. When youre trying to caricature somebody, you exaggerate features and then there are limits to the exaggeration and some are good of taking it right to the very edge and taking it away as something you would recognize as that individual. Covingtons stuff is like that. This Boris Yeltsin is a wonderful, extremely exaggerated pushing of the forms and its just wonderful. Heres senator bird and jerry brown. Sometimes ill talk to art students and do work shops with caricature. Its amazing how you dont always have to be so rendered and detailed. A president ial caricature in particular but its true of political figures and george bush and barack obama, i could draw six lines and people will go, oh, thats george bush or theres barack obama and once youve done the outline of the face and say that and people can tell what youre drawing. Its a mystical thing. Our facial Recognition Software in our brains is very acute and something caricaturists can use to their advantage. You can be nonpartisan when doing the things for the coasters. What i pay is to have a political opinion and express it strongly and same with ann and same with cal and we have to dial that back which i understand is not just that we dont want to unnecessarily royal people when they come in at the bar or Something Like that, but one of the nice things about the bar and about frankly, i learned about the culture of washington is theres this lovely word of members of comedy, but you can sit down and have a drink with them and thats sort of the spirit of the bar and sort of the spirit that i think we all bring to the coasters so well suspend our political opinions and save it for our political cartoons and well have fun with the caricatures and coasters. All week were featuring American History tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan3, lectures in history. American artifact, reel america, civil war, oral histories, the presidency and special event coverage about our nations history. Enjoy American History tv now and every weekend on cspan3 American History tv products are available, go to cspan. Org to see whats new on American History tv and check out all of the cspan products. The house will be in order. For 40 years cspan has been providing america unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the Supreme Court and Public Policy events from washington d. C. And around the country so you can make up your own mind. Created by cable in 1979, krashgs span is brought to you by your local cable and satellite provider. Cspan, your unfiltered view of government. Hi, everyone. My name is adam koch, and im a cspan 2018 winner. I am here to continue to wrap up the competition and the deadline is pretty close and dont worry, youre not out of time. This is the first year i entered it. Im in the d. C. Offices right now and i am just going to tell you that cspan student cam was an Incredible Opportunity for me to express my thoughts and views of the Political Climate in the current day as well as connect with local and state leaders in political office. Im extremely excited that you all are interested in this and are pursuing this because its a once in a lifetime opportunity and im so excited that youre all still taking it. Theres still time for you to enter the student cam video competition. You have until january 20th to create a five to sixminute documentary to explore the issue that you want the candidates to address during campaign 2020. Were giving away a total of 100,000 for a grand prize of 5,000. For more information go to studentca studentcam. Org. Next on the presidency, former white house Staff Members analyze the work of cartoonist pat oliphant, and bill clinton and george w. Bush and include Barack Obamas 2008 election. The university of virginias Miller Center hosted the event. Were going to get started here of round two of president s on whom oliphant was able to bestow his gifts and a