"That Stinking Hypocrite"

MURDERED! screamed the headline in a two-column, black-bordered box on Page One of New Hampshire's Manchester Union Leader (circ. 46,517). The victim, said the editorial by Publisher William Loeb, was Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy. His assassins, said the publisher, were 1) the Communists, who wore down McCarthy's "adrenal and other glands": 2) Vermont's Republican Senator Ralph Flanders, "who practically accused McCarthy of being a homosexual on the floor of the Senate"; 3) "piously hypocritical newspapers." In bold-face capitals Loeb added: "Finally, we come to that stinking hypocrite in the White House who recently asked every other Senator and Representative to his reception except Joe McCarthy."

In the New Hampshire senate, politicians long inured to the alarums and excursions of splenetic Publisher Loeb agreed last week that his latest blast--"that stinking hypocrite in the White House"--was too offensive to ignore. By 15 to 8, the senators voted to hold a hearing this week on a Republican resolution to censure Republican Loeb.

But Publisher Loeb is made of more carefully tempered stuff than Wisconsin's McCarthy; few New Hampshiremen expect a censure resolution (a questionable step in this instance) to crimp his rambunctious style. A Neanderthal Republican whose father was Teddy Roosevelt's secretary, Oyster Bay-born Bill Loeb, 51, insists that, the G.O.P. is riddled with Communists, in 1952 was one of the few of any party to endorse the late Bertie McCormick's proposal for a simon-pure "American Party." Spry, restless Loeb brags that the Union Leader will print any letter it receives, pointed out a recent Page One example from a student: "Mr. Loeb, you are a goddamn reactionary."

For most New Hampshire Republicans --and many others who have sampled Loeb's sometimes neuro-individualistic politics--reactionary is too mild a label for balding, black-eyed Bill Loeb. "What New England needs," he argues, "is the two-party system." In New Hampshire and Vermont (where he owns the Burlington News and St. Albans Messenger) he has frequently supported Democrats for state office. When Republican Governor Lane Dwinell announced this month that he would never again give a statement to Loeb's Manchester Sunday News, the publisher chortled: "That's par for the course. He's the fourth governor in a row who's said that."

Publisher Loeb's combative instincts have also resulted in some notable crusades by the Union Leader. In 1955, for example, when lawmakers opposed an increase of the state's share of pari-mutuel receipts, the paper printed the names of 42 legislators who were on a racetrack payroll. But Loeb himself derives his keenest joy from an editorial page that ranges acrimoniously from "gulliberals" to Detroit ("overgrown, overdecorated, over-expensive U.S. cars"). "Newspapers," he maintains, "should be run for fun. not profit." From the Manchester Union Leader Publisher Loeb gets both.

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