applicants. Oliphant moved to the United States with his wife, Hendrika DeVries, and his two children. The Post placed a small snippet of the day's Oliphant cartoon on the paper's front page as a "teaser" for what would be found on the editorial page. Announcing his arrival, Time magazine stated, "Few U.S. cartoonists have so deftly distilled the spirit of [Lyndon B. Johnson and Barry Goldwater] as Australia's Patrick Bruce Oliphant, 29, a recent arrival who has not yet set eyes on either Johnson or Goldwater." Less than a year after Oliphant began working at the Denver Post, in April 1965, his work was syndicated internationally by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. Oliphant's reputation grew swiftly, and in 1967, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning for his 1 February 1966 cartoon They Won't Get Us To The Conference Table ... Will They? In this cartoon, Ho Chi Minh carries the body of a dead Vietnamese man in the posture of a Pietà. Oliphant had intentionally submitted a cartoon that he felt was among the weakest he had published that year. When it won, he roundly criticized the Pulitzer board, stating that they had selected the cartoon for its subject matter rather than the quality of the work. He refused to be considered for the award ever again and became a regular critic of the Pulitzer. According to Ralph Steadman, Oliphant would have been Hunter S. Thompson's "first choice of a 'cartoonist collaborator.'" The Washington Star years In 1975, Oliphant moved to The Washington Star, wooed by editor Jim Bellows. In 1980, he switched syndication companies, joining Universal Press Syndicate. The Star went out of business in 1981. The independent years After the Star folded, Oliphant had offers from other newspapers, but decided to remain independent, living off the earnings from his extensive syndication. He was the first political cartoonist in the twentieth century to work independently from a home newspaper, a situation that provided him with a unique independence from editorial control. By this time, he had become a nationally recognized figure. In 1976, a survey of 188 cartoonists had found that fellow professionals saw Oliphant as the "best all-around cartoonist" on the editorial pages. A decade later, a similar survey made the same conclusion; at this time, the reasons given were Oliphant's original and influential aesthetic. He had become "quite simply the standard by which all