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.