And general manager hans bruland and matt wuerker 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 and the st. Regis. 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, back then you could smoke in bars in washington. They had the dark booths and the dark walls and 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, 80s. And then there was a big gap, and when people started to come into the bar, people did not recognize people from the nixon and reagan administration, and so they wanted people from 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 drawingsed and they got some of those in the bar, and then richard said, check out my friend matt who works at politico. So i came into the bar. 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 commentator. 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 little 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. The bar has 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, keppler who drew for a publisher of puck magazine. Keppler 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 representing rockefeller reaching out. To call it a cartoon is almost like 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 kepplers 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 when i come over to have a drink or the new help and they will ask, if we go around, will you help us, because they are constantly asked about the 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 like robert sorelle, and then he sort of took it to his own place. I aspire to this kind of looseness, but i am still at age 50 still wor 60 still working on it. 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 and he likes the drawing there. There is one i did for politico and dick cheney and karl rove, and so this wall is going to get at will of attention when i am here in the bar, and some people will stop, and watch, and that is because it gets a lot of attention. This is shameless selfpromotion that i did for politico way back in the beginning. This is a very beginning piece of describing getting a drink at a bar, and of course, this is when i started to do adams and this is rahm emanuel and mitch mcconnell, and i situated them in the bar for that one. So this is a cover illustration for politico when rahm was chief of staff at the white house for obama. So there is a couple more Richard Thompsons and laura bush and the sophistication of the painting of richards stuff still sort of fabulous piece of art. In the bar, about 70 of the pieces on the walls are straight caricatures and there are a number of real caricatures here, and in this corner, it has one by me and one by calvin cal la her a laher, and this is what he did, and i did one for politico and you ski the bubbles and the opinions conveyed in these, and that is what we are really about. Kevins is a lovely example of good political cartoon that is sort of built around a clever visual metaphor, and conveyed quickly, and so in this case, it is the boxing ring, and israel, and palestine going at it, and obama is the new ref. It is round 3,487,000, and then you will see the old refs from the boxing ring, bush, clinton, bush again and reagan all beat up up. It is a lovely example of how to take a very complicated issue, and idealideally, if you are do good political cartoon, you can distill it down to a new method that is going to convey the complexity of a little bit of bite. This is a cartoon that i did that they would like to have the head of the chamber of commerce which happens to be next door, and all of the money that they were spending to and the campaign, and i should not date the cartoons, but this is from 2008. The resistance is futile, and they are going with piles and piles of cash. This fills me with mixed emotions. These are the two old nest the bar and really represent the golden age of american political cartooning, and which you would have found in the puck magazine which is a political cartoon magazine, and these were done by kepleer, and so we know the details of the politics at the time, and here we have a classic cartoon trope, and the big interests, and being held down on the speaker, and the caption down here is small, and the leader of the minority cant get the speakers eye, because it is under the thumb of the big interests, and this is of course, uncle sam. Uncle sam being a creation of political cartoonist, and i believe that most people credit thomas nast with creating the uncle sam that most of us recognize and the cartoonists recognize all of the time. But this is the not, and this is the actual print, and the nice thing about puck and the wonderful golden age of political cartooning is that they give the cartoonists lots of space. Most days we get shrunk down like that when we are in print. Back to my optimistic wrap on the editorial cartooning, and this is perhaps some of the best color and printing especially at the time to display the cartoon, and in 2018, cartoonists are work hg ting in the digital rea and it is on the smart pads and retinal displays allows us to do elegant watercolor and nuance that is going to begoin rival the big scale like kepler, and so in a way, we are getting back to this way. And anne does the political cartoons that are often animated gifs and she won the Pulitzer Prize in, i think it was back in 2000 for the static political cartooning and now move odd on the animation. These are some that anne did for animation that she created around the inauguration of obama. Anne has a different style. She is not a crosshatcher, but she went to cal art and is a trained and may or the, a eed i see it in the details. And in the bar in particular, the first time i came into the bar was probably 17 years ago and a friend of mine came down here and you could still smoke in bars in washington, and this was a smoking bar, a cigar bar, and we came in here and i was fascinated with the culture of the city, and there was an inversion layer of cigar smoke, and there were people sitting around and having conversations in wingbacked chairs and right out of the cartoon. It was like, oh, my god, this is the den of inequity that you would imagine around the basement of the white house, and within that booth, there is one cave that you can close off. It is going to be no place like it in washington. And two years ago besides buying cartoons to paint the walls, hans had the idea of doing the coasters, and so they commissioned original art for these, and carol and anne and myself, and every six or so months, we will design little caricature cartoons of people in the news, and they have no use for coasters for people handed out here, and it is an interesting exercise in american politic, and certain caricatures of this is a Hillary Clinton which is somewhat evergreen, and she is not going to go anywhere, but some of the characters that we draw, you dont know if they are going to be in the news, and for instance, sean spicer was an obvious one, and unfortunately, we didnt do a coaster for spicer, because he came and went and likewise for scaramucci, and these are fun assignments. We separate the politicos in the bars doing various things, and usually add, if you can, Little Details like this is cals pence caricature and he is drinking with a beer stein that looks remarkably like donald trump. And little touches like that. And this is hillary leaving the hotel and she has bill carrying all of the luggage or the baggage. And anyway, you get the joke. And these are more cartoons from the art wood collection and these were done from Ron Covington in the 80s, and covington has a distinctive style, and he is related to the david lavine school of caricature, but he took it his own direction, and the very light crosshatching in here with a lot of gray scale, and they are beautifully done. The, ka ch shcaricatures are a thing, because you can exaggerate the features, and then limit them. Some are very good of going to tej of taking it away from something that you would recognize as the individual. Covingtons stuff is like that, the Boris Yeltsin is a wonderful extremely exaggerated pushing it into forms there, and there is senator byrd from west virginia. Jerry brown. It is always fascinating when you also work with people, and i will work with art students and do workshops on the caricature, and it is amazing that you dont have to always be so rendered in the detail, and the president ial caricature is true of all political figures and can become a simpleiconic thing. George bush and barack obama, and six lines people would say, that is george bush or barack obama, and so once you have done the outline of the face in the years of obama, before you have completed it, people can tell what you are drawing, so it is a mystical thing. So the facial Recognition Software in our brains is very acute in one of the things that the caricatures can use to their advantage. It takes a little effort to be nonpart san when yisan when you the coasters and things. At politico i am paid to have an opinion and express it strongly and the same with anne and carol, and we get to dial it back. Which i also understand is that it is not just that we dont want to unnecessarily roil people when they come in for a drink at the bar, but one of the nice things about the bar and what i have learned about the churl of washington culture of washington is there is a culture of comedy, and you learn to get along with people that you may disagree with politically, and you can sit down and have a drink with them. That is the spirit of the bar, and the spirit that we all bring to the coasters. So we will suspend our political opinions and save that for the political cartoons, and in this case, some light hearted fun with the caricatures and the coasters. All week, we are featuring the tv programs as a preview of what is available all weekend on cspan3, and American History, american artifacts, reel america, 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 at the cspan online store. Go to cspanstore. Org to see what is new from cspan American History tv and 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, and created by cable in 1979, cspan is brought to you by your local cable or satellite provider. Cspan, your unfiltered view of government government. Hi, everyone. My name is adam cook and im a 2018 cspan student cam winner. I am here to encourage you the wrap up this competition as the deadline is getting pretty close. Dont worry, you will have time. This is about the time i started filming my documentary, the first year i entered it. Im in the d. C. Offices right now, and i will tell you that cspan student cam was an Incredible Opportunity for me to express my thoughts and views about the Political Climate in the current day as well as connect with local and state leaders in political office. I am extremely excited that you are interested in this and pursuing this, because it is a onceinalifetime opportunity, and excited that you are taking it. There is still time for you the en thor the cspan student cam video competition. Make a five to sixminute documentary that expressing an issue that you want campaign 2020 to cover. There is a grand prize of 5,000. For more information, go to our website cspan student cam. Org. From the president , the Staff Members analyze the work of political cartoonist pat oliphant and they focus on george h. W. Bush, and barack obama and george bush, and this is hosted by the miller institute. We are going to get started here with round two of president s upon whom oliphant was to bestow the gifts in a country in which he is able to bestow his gifts by commenting and vill