The Front-Page Fulminator

William Loeb: 1905-1981

Every four years, like a recurring nightmare, the cherubic visage and satanic fulminations of William Loeb, cantankerous, ultraconservative publisher of the Manchester, N.H., Union Leader, would turn up on the front pages of newspapers across the country. As aspiring Presidents trooped up to New Hampshire for the nation's earliest presidential primary, Loeb's relatively small daily (circ. 65,298) became an influential voice in American politics. That voice was Loeb's alone: petulant, scurrilous and unfailingly infuriating. For more than thirty years, Loeb put his splenetic opinions where no one could miss them: in boldface type on the front page of the Union Leader, which, at his death last week at 75, was still New Hampshire's largest--and only statewide--daily. His editorials were often headlined in red and blue, but his beliefs were black and white. Said he: "Things are either right or they are wrong."

When it came to presidential politics, Loeb was egalitarian in his prejudices: he treated virtually all Presidents and would-be Presidents with derision. His vituperation began with Harry "General Incompetence" Truman. In 1957 he labeled Dwight Eisenhower a "stinking hypocrite" for snubbing Red-baiting Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Loeb hero. In 1961 he declared John Kennedy to be "the No. 1 liar in the United States."

Loeb's most notorious attack came during the 1972 presidential campaign. The Union Leader published a spurious letter claiming that Democratic Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine laughed at an ethnic slur aimed at Franco-Americans, and an item suggesting that Muskie's wife was overly fond of cocktails. The candidate's tearful denunciation of Loeb outside the Union Leader offices, captured on network television, was thought to have doomed Muskie's presidential chances.

If Loeb showed disdain for many presidential candidates, it may have been that he measured them against the one he considered his mentor, Theodore Roosevelt.

Loeb's father, William Jr., was Roosevelt's private secretary when William III was born in 1905. After Roosevelt's final term, the Loeb family moved with him to Oyster Bay, L.I., and young William grew up in the reflected glory of the old Rough Rider. Loeb attended Connecticut's Hotchkiss School, Massachusetts' Williams College and then spent two years at the Harvard Law School.

With money borrowed from his mother, he bought the St. Albans, Vt., Messenger in 1941. Five years later, he bought a share in the Union Leader and took full control in 1948.

Loeb inconsistently practiced what he published. He was ardently militaristic, yet he strenuously, and successfully, avoided military service in World War II. He once condemned Nelson Rockefeller as a "wife swapper" for divorcing his wife and marrying a divorcee--precisely what the twice-divorced Loeb himself did in 1952, when he shed his second wife to wed Nackey Scripps, granddaughter of Newspaper Tycoon E.W. Scripps. He advocated that a publisher should have only one newspaper, yet for years he owned and controlled four. He became a major force in New Hampshire politics, hand-picking Senators and Governors. Yet he phoned in his editorials from a 30-room mansion in Prides Crossing, Mass., 50 miles from Manchester, and claimed Nevada as his legal residence to avoid paying Massachusetts income taxes.

Loeb's tangled finances were a source of damaging ammunition for his critics. He borrowed $2 million from the Teamsters' Central States Pension Fund in 1965, and thereafter became a vociferous defender of jailed Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa. In 1979 he vowed that he would place 75% of his newspaper stock in trust for his employees. But in his will, control of the paper goes to Nackey, now 56, and after her death to a nine-member board of trustees.

Loeb seldom let accuracy stand in the way of his prejudices. The masthead of the Union Leader featured the axiom of Daniel Webster: "Nothing is so powerful as truth." Loeb typically failed to inform his readers that the quotation was taken out of context. "There is nothing so powerful as truth," said Webster, "and often nothing so strange.''

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