New Age conservative

The Union Leader's new editorialist is young, female, and thoughtful -- the antithesis of the vitriolic men who've held the position in the past

by Dan Kennedy

MANCHESTER, NEW HAMPSHIRE -- Bernadette Malone Connolly, the new editorial-page editor of the Manchester Union Leader, is wired. It's Friday, December 3. Last night, right after the Republican presidential forum, the arch-conservative paper announced its endorsement of Steve Forbes, citing his respect for "innocent life" and "free enterprise." It was a hectic night, and it's been an equally hectic day after. Now, late in the afternoon, Malone Connolly is running on adrenaline.

She's got CNN on in her office (a glass house adjoining the expansive newsroom), unashamed to admit she's hoping for a replay of an interview she'd done earlier in the day. Soon she'll be explaining the Forbes choice to New England Cable News. And at this particular moment, she's got a reporter (myself) and a photographer seated before her.

The main topic of discussion: how a rising young conservative journalist based in Washington ended up following in the footsteps of the late William Loeb, the vitriolic Union Leader publisher who struck fear in the hearts of presidential candidates -- and who, in his more rancid outbursts, referred to Henry Kissinger as "Kissinger the Kike," to former New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Sr. as "the Jew, Sulzberger," and to Gerald Ford as "Jerry the Jerk."

"I don't take that approach. I don't criticize the late Mr. Loeb for doing so; he did it very effectively. But that's not my style," Malone Connolly says, smiling but clearly a bit uneasy. The paper, after all, is still owned by Loeb's widow, Nackey Scripps Loeb, who retired as publisher earlier this year. The publisher who succeeded her this past spring, Union Leader lifer Joe McQuaid -- the author of the Forbes endorsement -- is a protégé of Loeb and the son of a former editor-in-chief.

Malone Connolly fits in well ideologically at the paper, where she began working in October. She is, after all, a real live conservative: anti-choice, anti-tax, anti-affirmative-action ("I'm dead set against it, unless that's how I got this job," she jokes), anti-gay-marriage, and anti-regulation -- though, somewhat surprisingly, anti-death-penalty.

But her style couldn't diverge more from the Union Leader's gruff, flinty image. Just 26 years old, tall, blond, and outgoing, she spent the five years before she joined the Union Leader in Washington, working for syndicated columnist Robert Novak and writing occasionally for conservative publications such as the Heritage Foundation's Policy Review and the Weekly Standard. She combines conservatism and smarts with something the Union Leader has never had before: mainstream credibility. Those attributes make her a key to the paper's future in a changing media environment. Like newspapers everywhere, the Union Leader is losing circulation. But as an independently owned paper, it's under pressure not to let a slide turn into a rout. Compared to the bombast of old, Malone Connolly's more thoughtful, less acerbic tone is likely to resonate far better with the high-tech New Hampshire newcomers who've been pouring in over the border from Massachusetts.

Malone Connolly's hiring is Joe McQuaid's most visible effort so far to modernize the Union Leader without abandoning the past. It's a tricky balancing act, and one he denies he's even engaged in. "There was no impetus to hire a young, out-of-state woman for the job," he says, flat-out rejecting the notion that he was looking to change the paper's voice in any significant way.

Indeed, far from repudiating Loeb's toxic legacy, the Union Leader has embraced it. The paper's massive nine-year-old plant, in the midst of a generic office park, is located on William Loeb Drive. Its walls are lined with pictures of William and Nackey Loeb, posing with conservative luminaries from the exalted (Ronald Reagan) to the ridiculous (Oliver North). But though Loeb's malignant spirit continues to loom large, McQuaid -- his denials to the contrary -- is too savvy to think Loeb's paper can thrive without significant change.

"The Loeb paper couldn't exist in this New Hampshire. We're too sophisticated, too high-tech," says Deborah "Arnie" Arnesen, a Democratic activist who's now with WSMN Radio, in Nashua. Arnesen sees the Malone Connolly hiring as an attempt to establish "a different voice," adding: "I think it's fascinating that Joe McQuaid would run such a tremendous risk. But I think he did it because he knows no one is reading newspapers anymore."

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The Union Leader and its Sunday edition, the New Hampshire Sunday News, are steeped in legend and myth. The legend was embodied by William Loeb, who ranted on the paper's pages from the time he bought it, in 1946, until 1981, when he died. As the owner of New Hampshire's largest paper, and the only one that circulates statewide, the bow-tied Loeb -- from his manse in Prides Crossing, Massachusetts -- wielded enormous influence for good and bad, but mostly for bad. As documented in the late Kevin Cash's 1975 biography, Who the Hell Is William Loeb? -- now, sadly, out of print -- Loeb saw his paper primarily as a vehicle for advancing his own right-wing agenda, mainly by tearing down enemies both local and national. A hater of the worst sort, Loeb was so virulently anti-Semitic, according to Cash's book, that he once reproduced his baptismal certificate on the front page of the Burlington Daily News, a now-defunct Vermont newspaper he used to own, in response to rumors that he was Jewish.

The myth surrounding the Union Leader involves its power in the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary, power that has been exposed as fiction far more often than it's been confirmed as fact. Loeb backed a winner in 1980, when he endorsed Ronald Reagan. In 1996, the Union Leader's support for Pat Buchanan may have made a difference in his exceedingly narrow victory over Bob Dole. But the Union Leader has never shown much ability to help the sort of marginal, flaky candidacies the paper tends to find attractive, such as those of Democrat Sam Yorty and Republican John Ashbrook in 1972, and Republican Pete du Pont in 1988. The main difference between Forbes -- who even the Union Leader concedes is a "geek" -- and du Pont is that du Pont, at least, had once held elective office. Nevertheless, the Republicans' leading candidates, George W. Bush and John McCain, can expect to be tormented continually from now until the February 1 primary. As McQuaid told the Washington Post this past Saturday: "The Union Leader's style is we don't just endorse once. We endorse every damn day."

The best-known incident involving the Union Leader took place on a snowy Saturday morning just before the 1972 primary. The Union Leader had published editorials claiming that Edmund Muskie, the Democratic front-runner, had referred to Franco-Americans -- an important ethnic group in New Hampshire -- as "Canucks" (the claim was based on a letter later exposed as a fake planted by Richard Nixon's dirty tricksters), and also impugning the reputation of Muskie's wife. Muskie showed up outside the Union Leader's building, then in downtown Manchester, and denounced Loeb in emotional terms. It was widely reported that Muskie broke down in tears, though Muskie later denied it. In any case, the incident played a big role in Muskie's blowing his once-formidable lead.

If the Union Leader's ability to dictate the outcome of the New Hampshire primary has long been exaggerated, the paper is even less influential today. Smaller, regional papers such as the Concord Monitor (recently hailed by the Columbia Journalism Review as perhaps the best small paper in the country), the Nashua Telegraph, Foster's Daily Democrat, and the Portsmouth Herald thrive in its shadow. WMUR-TV (Channel 9) has emerged as a strong rival in statewide coverage. And with the state's southern tier filling up with Massachusetts expatriates, a substantial part of the state's population base is now little more than an extension of the Boston media market.

"Ten years ago or 15 years ago it was all these crusty old goobers with a high-school education, working at the mill or the plant," says Boston University communications professor Tobe Berkovitz, a part-time political consultant. "Now it's all émigrés from Massachusetts."

Between 1990 and 1998, New Hampshire's population rose by nearly 76,000. More than 60 percent of that growth -- accounting for 47,000 new residents -- took place in Rockingham and Hillsborough Counties, the two of the state's 10 counties that are closest to Boston. The Union Leader's circulation is still the state's highest: about 63,000 Monday through Friday and 85,000 on Sunday, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. But guess who's number two? The Boston Globe, which sells 28,000 papers in New Hampshire on weekdays and 51,000 on Sundays.

Jon Keller, a political reporter for Boston's WLVI-TV (Channel 56) and a caustic critic of the New Hampshire primary, argues that the event is well on its way to irrelevance. In 1992 Bill Clinton became the first modern candidate to lose in New Hampshire and win the presidency. This year, the candidates are increasingly moving away from face-to-face politics and toward the same kind of larger-scale media campaigns that prevail elsewhere. This, too, makes it difficult for the Union Leader to exercise the kind of power -- real or imagined -- that it had in Loeb's heyday. Sneers Keller: "They're the biggest print outlet in New Hampshire at a time when print doesn't matter anymore and New Hampshire doesn't matter anymore. Other than that, they're great."

Keller exaggerates. But Bernadette Malone Connolly clearly has her work cut out for her as she ponders how to make the Union Leader's editorial pages matter again.

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Born and raised on Staten Island and educated in Catholic schools, Malone Connolly figures she would have come from a typically large Irish-Catholic family were it not for tragic circumstances: her mother suffered from multiple sclerosis. Bernadette Malone was an only child. Her mother died while Bernadette was in high school; her father works for Chase Manhattan Bank.

Conservatism struck during her freshman year at the State University of New York at Binghamton. A white resident of her dorm had painted a mural of Marvin the Martian, the ant-like character in Romanesque uniform from the Bugs Bunny cartoons. Some African-American students, offended by those big white eyes on a black face, insisted that it be taken down -- and it was. Outraged, she joined the Binghamton Review, a conservative campus weekly that railed against political correctness and diversity requirements. Eventually, she rose to the editor's chair. "I was 18, but it instinctively burned me up that feeling would triumph over reason," she says. (There must be something in the air about Marvin the Martian: this past Sunday, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd compared Alan Keyes to ol' Marvin.)

Not sure what to do with her philosophy degree, Malone Connolly considered joining the Marines before accepting an internship with Novak and his former co-columnist, Rowland Evans. The internship was funded through the National Journalism Center, which is affiliated with conservative activist M. Stanton Evans. It's an increasingly common career path: other young journalists who've been helped along by a network of wealthy conservative benefactors include the Weekly Standard's Matthew Rees, Salon's Ruth Shalit, and authors Dinesh D'Souza and David Brock. "The gray-haired eminences of the conservative movement looked at the journalistic landscape and decided that conservative voices were being given short shrift," says Brookings Institution guest scholar Thomas Toch, a contributing editor at U.S. News & World Report, who wrote about the conservative-journalism network for the Washington Monthly in 1996.

Novak quickly put Malone Connolly on staff; she wrote for his newsletter and did legwork for his column. She also wrote occasional pieces for Policy Review -- densely reported articles on the state of conservative politics around the country. "She was a very fine young reporter, and we were proud to publish her work," says editor Adam Meyerson. This past summer, she wrote a hilarious piece for the Weekly Standard on subsidized massages for PBS employees, and a managing editor, Richard Starr, says he was hoping she'd become a regular contributor. Around the same time, she married Mike Connolly, Representative Henry Hyde's press secretary and a nephew of Pat Buchanan. (Malone Connolly sets just one ground rule in talking about herself: she will not discuss Uncle Pat.) Her career -- and her life -- were coming together in Washington.

But then she saw an ad in the American Spectator. The Union Leader was looking for an editorial-page editor. She applied.

The manner in which the job became vacant in the first place says much about what may be expected of her. Not long after Nackey Loeb retired and Joe McQuaid became publisher, editorial-page editor Richard Lessner, who'd been on board for four years, announced he was leaving. McQuaid says the move was voluntary, and Lessner said at the time that he wanted to rejoin his family in Arizona. Within weeks, though, Lessner had joined Gary Bauer's presidential campaign, and he's now spending nearly as much time in New Hampshire as he did when he was at the Union Leader. "I'm not inclined to comment any further about it," Lessner said when contacted by the Phoenix. But Chip Griffin, a Republican political consultant and the impresario behind the Web site PrimaryScoop.com, says it's widely believed that McQuaid wanted a chief editorialist less bombastic than Lessner, a Vince Foster conspiracist who has compared Bill Clinton to Aaron Burr, "a traitor."

The Union Leader may seem an unlikely place for someone with Malone Connolly's background, but she says she couldn't be happier. In response to a what's-a-nice-girl-like-you-doing-in-a-place-like-this type of inquiry, she expresses mainly bafflement, as if she can't imagine why anyone would look at her new job and her new paper as anything other than a veritable heaven on earth. She speaks glowingly of looking out her office window and seeing a deer, of listening to a tape of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged on the bucolic 45-minute drive from Portsmouth, where she and her husband are renting an apartment (he's currently splitting his time between New Hampshire and Washington). Agrees Bob Novak, her former boss: "I think the Manchester thing is a terrific opportunity for her."

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To be sure, after just six weeks it's too early to evaluate Malone Connolly's work in anything other than a cursory way. Many of her pieces (Union Leader editorials are signed) are conservative-libertarian boilerplate, criticizing the FCC for a proposal to mandate closed-captioning for the blind and scolding OSHA for a plan to require ergonomically correct workstations. She and the paper are pro-gun, which led her to whack John McCain for sucking up to the "media elite" when he modified his previously NRA-friendly stance. She came out foursquare against "heresy" in her endorsement of the Catholic Church's decision to enforce theological standards at its universities. She wrote a strikingly uninformed editorial about the Microsoft anti-trust case, calling the alliance of government and Microsoft's competitors "one that would make Joe Stalin proud." (The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, to offer a contrast, has been just as withering about the government's case, but has argued its position in a far more nuanced manner.) She criticized gay adoption as a violation of "God's reasoning," while conceding that "some homosexuals are nurturing, upstanding, moral citizens with values any child would be lucky to learn." In her most controversial editorial, she blasted George W.'s support for Puerto Rican statehood, citing the island's "weak economy, abundance of welfare cases, and steep language barrier" -- factually true, if insensitive enough to prompt a flurry of letters.

Compared to Richard Lessner -- or, of course, to William Loeb -- she strikes a measured, thoughtful tone. But too often, as with the gay-adoption editorial, she does that by taking an extreme conservative position, then adding some on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand leavening until the result is rhetorically less offensive but no less reactionary.

"My husband says I have an angry mind," Malone Connolly says. The Union Leader's editorial page is no stranger to anger. If that anger is now directed at ideas and issues rather than at individuals and religions -- well, at least that's an improvement. The question, though, is whether it matters. The voters of New Hampshire proved a long time ago that they were perfectly capable of tuning out William Loeb. Can anyone make them tune back in?

Malone Connolly offers a partial answer. She says she wants to put out editorial pages that don't just hector, but call attention to overlooked issues and comment intelligently on them. "I'm trying to pluck out issues that others might not be aware of, and in that way I think we might still be influential on the editorial page," she says. It's a mainstream vision of what a newspaper editorial page should be -- a source of news and commentary as well as more-traditional jeers and cheers. Obvious? Sure. But at the Union Leader, it's nothing less than visionary.

Research assistance by Mary Beth Polley. Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.

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Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

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Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here

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