Pulitzer-prize-winning cartoonist Paul Conrad

LOS ANGELES — Paul Conrad used his pencil like a weapon. His long lines and jagged angles seemed to point directly at the leaders he deemed charlatans and fools in need of deflating.

In a career of more than 50 years he won three Pulitzer Prizes, made Richard Nixon's enemies list and ruined Ronald Reagan's breakfast.

The political cartoonist with an unmistakable style died at 86 of natural causes Saturday at his home in the Los Angeles suburb of Rancho Palos Verdes, his son David Conrad said.

Paul Conrad took on U.S. presidents from Harry Truman to George W. Bush, mostly in the Los Angeles Times, where he worked for 30 years and helped the newspaper raise its national profile.

The Los Angeles Times said in a Saturday story that its longtime publisher came to expect that his breakfast would be interrupted by an angry phone call from then-governor Reagan or wife Nancy, peeved by a cartoon that made them look foolish.

Mr. Conrad's favorite target was Nixon. At the time of the president's resignation, Conrad drew Nixon's helicopter leaving the White House with the caption: "One flew over the cuckoo's nest."

"He always said he was most proud of being on Nixon's enemies list," David Conrad said.

An exceptional single-mindedness made many of Mr. Conrad's cartoon's jump off the page: During the Watergate scandal, Nixon, tied down like the giant, Gulliver, by reel after reel of his secret Oval Office audiotapes. Nixon, again during Watergate, nailing himself to a cross. Nancy Reagan's pricey new White House china captures the reflection of a stooped homeless woman, picking through the trash.

He also took aim at Democrats. President Lyndon Johnson and Vice President Hubert Humphrey were cowboys riding a Dr. Strangelove bomb down on Vietnam in 1968. Years later, when Robert McNamara expressed regrets over that war, Mr. Conrad drew the former defense secretary at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., (beside the names of 58,000 dead) saying, "Sorry About That."

After Jimmy Carter admitted that at times he had "lusted in his heart," Mr. Conrad drew him mentally undressing the Statue of Liberty.

In 1993, Mr. Conrad accepted a buyout and left the Los Angeles Times. But he continued to produce cartoons that were syndicated for years.

He drew Nixon and George W. Bush side by side, chubby pals in beanies, called "Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber." After the 2008 election, he depicted Gov. Sarah Palin, of Alaska, the losing vice-presidential candidate, holding a smoking AK-47 in one hand and, in the other, the trunk of a dead GOP elephant.

In a 2006 interview, Mr. Conrad compared his favorite target, Nixon, to then-president George W. Bush.

"I felt two ways about Nixon. First, how did an idiot like that become president," said Mr. Conrad, a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, native. "And, secondly, how soon can we get rid of him. Almost the same thing applies to Bush."

One of Mr. Conrad's final images showed Bush as Sisyphus, rolling a huge boulder labeled "Iraq" up a hill.

Mr. Conrad and his identical twin, James, were born in 1924, the sons of a railroad worker who dabbled in art.

After serving in the Pacific during World War II in the Army Corps of Engineers, he majored in art at the University of Iowa, and a family friend persuaded him to draw cartoons for the college paper.

His first job after college was at The Denver Post, where he worked for 14 years before moving to Los Angeles.

He worked in the heyday of political cartoonists, and he was among the elite. His total of three Pulitzers — in 1964, 1971 and 1984 — is matched by just two other cartoonists in the Post-World War II era.

By late in his life, only a small number of newspapers had cartoonists on staff, and many had abandoned the traditional single-panel image for a comic-strip approach that Mr. Conrad disdained. "It's dialogue, long conversations, from one panel to another," he said.

Mr. Conrad's drawings were always a single panel and often a single figure, rendered in sharp, long lines that made his subjects look bony and sometimes sinister. He rarely used dialogue and kept words to a minimum.

Despite the humor in a lot of his work, Mr. Conrad's style had a seriousness that other cartoonists lacked.

As narrator in a PBS documentary on Mr. Conrad, Tom Brokaw said: "Every line he draws cries out to the powers that be, 'We're watching you.' "

In addition to David, Paul Conrad is survived by another son, two daughters, and his wife of more than 60 years, Kay.

Material from the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times

is included in this report.