Joe McQuaid, President and Publisher at the Union Leader Corp., spoke with DEMOCRACY IN ACTION in his office at the Union Leader.  This was two days after the June 13 debate, which the Union Leader co-sponsored at Saint Anselm College.  Equally important to many Granite Staters and New Englanders, on June 13 the Boston Bruins and the Vancouver Canucks played game six of the Stanley Cup finals. 

The first part of the interview goes into a bit of primary history.  The playoffs recalled to McQuaid one of the more famous incidents in New Hampshire primary history, the "Canuck letter" and Ed Muskie's emotional appearance in front of the Union Leader building during the 1972 primary.  McQuaid provides some very interesting details and observations on that episode, while recalling the paper in a different era under legendary publisher William Loeb. 

In the second part of the interview, McQuaid discusses his paper's coverage of the ongoing primary campaign, including its partnership with Politico, the decision to drop the Associated Press, its approach to providing material online, debates and endorsements.

Democracy in Action: What was the first primary you were involved with?  I was reading your piece on Johnson.  You mentioned I think the '72 campaign and Muskie, and he was sharing the platform with some guy with a rat.  How far back do you go on these.

[In his June 13 Publisher's Notebook column titled "May date obviously wrong: World actually ends at 8 tonight with presidential debate," McQuaid discusses Gary Johnson's exclusion from the recent debate and recalls a debate from the 1972 campaign with Ed Muskie, George McGovern and a guy who waved what appeared to be a dead rat at one point.]

Joe McQuaid: Well as far as working here, I'm trying to remember.  [In] '68 I probably really wasn't involved; I was still in high school and college.  [In] 1972 I was the editor of the Sunday paper, so I got the great privilege of calling my boss a liar in the main headline.  I wrote the headline which said, "Muskie calls Loeb—that was Bill Loeb [owner/publisher of the Union Leader from 1946-81]—calls Loeb a liar."  Eight-column, eighty-four Bernhardt, caps.

I came to work that day.  I didn't show up for Muskie's little thing in the snow; I had my reporter cover it.  So that was the first primary I was directly involved with in the news.  And I wasn't on the questioners for Muskie, McGovern and this guy.  I knew his name, I just didn't want to put it in the story—his name was Ned Coll and he was, I think he had been a social worker in Connecticut and he was in this televised debate that New Hampshire Public TV put on. 

It was very dark.  They had lousy cameras, and their studio was literally in the basement of the Memorial Union Building at UNH.  And he held up a rat.  I don't know if it was a real rat or not.  He said it was a real rat, it looked like a real rat—and said this is our problem, insufficient housing.  Ned didn't make it after that, and for that matter neither did Muskie. 

And I think that was the primary that really sort of made the Union Leader's reputation with William Loeb going after candidates that they didn't like.

I thought Gingrich really missed the boat the other night.  He should have used Canucks like Muskie allegedly used Canucks in 1972.  Do you know the story about the Canuck letter? [1]

Democracy in Action: No.

Joe McQuaid: Well you know about Muskie showing up in front of the paper on a Saturday...?

Democracy in Action: Oh, right, in the old location.

Joe McQuaid: And the reason he did ostensibly is because he was upset with a letter to the editor that Loeb had run in the paper the previous week allegedly from a guy in Florida who had attended a campaign appearance that Muskie had made at a drug rehabilitation center in Florida.  I still remember the guy's name, allegedly, Paul Morrison from Deerfield Beach, Florida...  Loeb ran it on the editorial page.  And it was to Mr. Loeb, publisher of the "Manchester Guardian," New Hampshire, and we went to see Muskie and we asked Muskie if he had any problems in Maine with racial relations.  And Muskie said not with blacks, but with Canucks.  What's a Canuck, which the guy had spelled wrong.  This letter had all the markings of being a phony, so I wasn't going to bother William Loeb.  He runs it on the editorial page, runs a front page editorial "Muskie insults Franco-Americans." 

So Muskie was outraged by this, and he was also upset because we had re-run from Newsweek magazine, which had re-run it from Women's Wear Daily, a little piece about Jane Muskie, his wife.  And it was a color piece which Newsweek had boiled down to a little snippet, and we ran it on the editorial page and said is that the kind of—I think we said in the intro to it—you know is this the kind of person we want as a First Lady?  And it was about how Mrs. Muskie kicked back on a bus, said she like highballs and smoked cigarettes.  Pretty tame stuff.  But Muskie was outraged, and his voice choked up when he defended his wife, demanded that Loeb come down from the building, which Loeb was rarely in anyways and certainly wouldn't be in on a Saturday.

But my theory, never proven, it's my theory that Muskie was losing traction in the state.  He expected to do really well, and he in fact did win the primary, but it was pretty close with McGovern—and I think he was trying to get his oompf back. 

So I think he knew what John F. Kennedy had done eight years [ed. should be twelve] before, the night before the general election in November. [2]  Kennedy, across the street from the paper, has a big rally.  Kennedy has thousands of people in the park, gets up on the podium and says [McQuaid imitates Kennedy], "There may be a worse newspaper and a worse publisher in these United States that the Union Leader and William Loeb, but if there are, I can't think of them right now."  The crowd goes wild.  Kennedy's advisors had also told him, don't mess around with Loeb, but he said screw you and he did and he got away with it. 

So I think Muskie tried to do the same thing, but Muskie gets all emotional about his wife.  [McQuaid imitates Muskie] "A good woman."  Half the reporters said he cried.  My reporter didn't say he cried; he said he got emotional.  Anyhoo that was a big thing and even though Muskie won the next week it wasn't by the margin, the expectations game that he was supposed to win by.

Democracy in Action: So where does New Gingrich fit in that; what should he have done about Canucks?

McQuaid: I was kidding him and kidding you that the so-called debate that we held the other night which was no more of a debate than you and I talking—it was seven people answering questions—was held the night of the turns out to be the next to the last game ironically between the Bruins and the Canucks.  And the Canucks were a hockey team even then, the Vancouver Canucks, event back in 1972.  So I find it ironic.  It used to be a slur, the word Canuck, in New Hampshire.  This was a Franco-American mill town—[McQuaid imitates French Canadian accent] the French Canadian came down from Canada and worked in the mills, and the non-French would make fun of that accent, and call them Canucks, so it was a slur here, but that was fading.  I mean they had a hockey team in Canada called the Canucks.  I thought it just sort of a touch of—I don't think irony's the right word—but 40 odd-years after that presidential primary now we get the Canucks playing the Bruins.

*  *  *

Democracy in Action: The date of this debate.  It was originally the 6th...[sic, actually the 7th]

Joe McQuaid: Yeah and that got changed I think because of the NBA playoffs.

Democracy in Action: And it ended up being a dumb change because it conflicted—

Joe McQuaid : Well I think our TV pals, they don't carry the hockey.  I think the ABC affiliate carried the basketball, so they though about the basketball.  They didn't think about the hockey.  They would have had it on a different night if they'd known.

The big question is whether Romney gained votes or lost votes by telling the score during the debate.

Democracy in Action: Oh, I think that was a winner all the way around.

Joe McQuaid: Well then you weren't my buddy who was sitting right in back of me at the debate, who during the debate is telling people don't tell me 'cause I've got the thing TiVo'd.

*  *  *

Democracy in Action: How about your paper and its coverage?  What are you doing this cycle?  I mean I think I've seen you have a partnership with Politico.

Joe McQuaid: Yes we do.

Democracy in Action: Is that something new and how does that work?

Joe McQuaid: Yes.  That's merely a trade of stories, pretty much.  Sometimes it's a phone call with Politico about what we're covering and they're covering.  That doesn't happen so much as merely they look at what we have on our site and we look at what they have, and we say he can we use this?  Sure.  Can you use that?  Sure.  I carved out, so I don't have to ask every time Roger Simon's column.  I want to use Roger when he runs and I don't have to ask permission and they said that was fine.  Sometimes Roger is on our Op-Ed page, sometimes like today he was on the editorial page.

Democracy in Action: So its strictly a trade; there's no financial kind of—?

Joe McQuaid: No.  Why?  Is somebody getting paid by Politico?  No.  I think it works well.

Democracy in Action: Have you done other partnerships in like the 2008 cycle or—?

Joe McQuaid: ...No but we were a member of Associated Press in the 2008 cycle and for a long time before that.  We're no longer in Associated Press.

Democracy in Action: What happened?

Joe McQuaid: Their price went to high.  I wasn't using that much of their national and international stuff and half of their New Hampshire stuff was mine.  So I kicked 'em out.

Democracy in Action: When did that happen?

Joe McQuaid: January 1st.

Democracy in Action: Of this year?

Joe McQuaid: Yeah.  So instead, for a lot less money I have a bunch of different wire services that I use—Washington Post-Bloomberg, the McClatchy papers, Scripps—all for considerably less, and on the national and international front I haven't been hurt at all by that.  And as I say in the state they've cut back; AP has cut back, and they've cut back quite a bit in New Hampshire.  I would use some of their stuff in the 2008 and other cycles covering candidates around the state.  We do it ourselves now.

Democracy in Action: And how about your web presence?  Are you doing anything unique or how are you approaching that?

Joe McQuaid: Well I don't think it's unique.  I think it's ubiquitous—I don't know.  We do a lot...  John DiStaso, who's my chief political guy, is up there every day with updates to his national political column or his Granite Status state column, but they're sort of all about presidential politics these days, and he's updating that regularly.  And some of our independent correspondents in the field will file things when the candidate is in their area and we think they've done something newsworthy.  So that's getting a lot of traction and with all these news companies suddenly discovering they should put stuff behind pay walls—

Democracy in Action: That's what I wanted to ask you about.  Are you going there?

Joe McQuaid: We will be going there, but I think we'll have an easier time of it because we don't put a lot of our print stuff up now.  We've never put the whole paper up for free on line.  That's insanity.  We put maybe—if you look this morning at the most there are half a dozen hard news stories up there, but the political ones—  I took our political columns—I have three—I have a City Hall column, I have a State House Dome column and John's column—and more than a year ago, a year ago in November I took all those three off the website, said I wasn't going to keep them up there for free, and people, companies came forward and said well we'll sponsor it if you'll put it on there.  That was an easy call at the time.  So now, it's very involved, we needed a new content management system to make it easier to move stuff from print to web, etcetera.  That is now in place, so that is now going to give us the opportunity to experiment with different pay levels and registration, etcetera.  That's just getting underway.  But those three political columns will probably stay free because they've got a sponsor.

Democracy in Action: Did you do a lot of research, or you have probably a chief technical officer, somebody who figures out what's the best system?  I mean it's a very big decision, obviously to get locked into one CMS or another.

Joe McQuaid: Yeah, we went with an outfit called SAXOTECH which has a regional office here.  We looked at a bunch of different ones for it, and that provided the best.  None is perfect.  And when we do go to, we have a registration system now for the free site.  We're going to allow our paid print subscribers to have access on line to anything that's in print if they're away from home, etcetera, and then the people who aren't paid subscribers, and they want to see a story, they're going to have to pay for it.  That will be through a third-party provider that will bolted onto the CMS.

Democracy in Action: ...[on the columns] you said you were going behind the pay wall and the sponsors just came forward and said let's do this?

Joe McQuaid: Well no what I said was—this was before pay walls came into consideration—I just said I'm not going to put my columnists up online for free.  So I"m taking them down.  You're going to have to read them in the paper.  And within two or three weeks, three companies came forward and said hey if we sponsor these—and they're sponsoring them for a pretty penny—would you put them up on line again.  So they're getting actually a great bang for the buck, especially the one that sponsors DiStaso because DiStaso cannot stop writing.  So where as his column used to be once a week on a Thursday and maybe occasionally on a Sunday, now he's up there every day and the sponsor's up there every day.

Democracy in Action: He's— by temperament or by contract.

Joe McQuaid: ...John, he's a newsman.  He likes to put news [inaud.]  He can't stop himself.  Which I'm very happy for.

Democracy in Action: How else are things changing at the paper here versus 2008?  You mentioned AP.  What are some other big changes.

Joe McQuaid: Well the big change has been in the newspaper business in the recession that we've all been going through—

Democracy in Action: Right.  I know at Concord Monitor and Nashua Telegraph I've seen some changes there.  Is that hitting you pretty hard or—?

Joe McQuaid: I don't think as hard.  I think we had—I think we're in a better position and we were able to cut some stuff out without cutting the bone of our reporting staff.  We did reduce the number of independent correspondents we have and we did I think probably have a downsizing in house of maybe 5 percent.

Democracy in Action: When you have a debate like that, how much input do you have in any of it, like the format—?

Joe McQuaid: I personally have absolutely none.  My retired executive editor, a fellow named Charlie Perkins, who's a political nut—maybe he's just a nut—no, Charlie's a political nut.  He's still under contract to me, and he likes this stuff and he's well respected so he's the Union Leader's point guy on these debates.  And he had some input, I don't know how much percentage wise with CNN and WMUR, which is the local TV station. 

And then last weekend Charlie plus John DiStaso plus Tom Faheey, who's our State House bureau chief, they participated in vetting like 46 pages of potential questions that they'd all participated in to get them down to a chosen few, and then they with John King and the CNN people made final cuts with I gather leeway to do some ad lib depending on what kind of answers they got and how things were going.  But I think it probably went pretty close to the scripted questions although John told me that on the issue of Northern Pass, which is a hot local utility issue on eminent domain, that he freelanced a second question to Romney on it after Ron Paul's answer.  Which was good.  So by in large I wasn't a big fan of you know Coke or Pepsi.

Democracy in Action: No, that was the weakest question of all.

Joe McQuaid: Well I didn't like any of those...I thought those were the weak questions, and I thought John King could have let people answer a little longer than 30 seconds on some—

Democracy in Action: That's the question I want to get to.  You say, you note in your column and here, they're not really debates.

Joe McQuaid: They're not.  Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Romney, you know, here's a position or something.  Give us your position on it and you feel free to respond to it.  Now that of course is tough when you have multiple candidates, but even so I would have—  It wouldn't have been as sexy and probably wouldn't have drawn as many casual viewers—and that's the nature of TV I guess—but I would have gone with fewer questions and fewer issues so you could get into the meat of the issue and go back and forth with it.

Democracy in Action: I'm big on process and how can the process be improved.  Do you have any other suggestions—

Joe McQuaid: Well not suggestions.  I mean if I had the wherewithal and time, which we don't because we've got a newspaper and website to put out regularly, I might have a forum that is more to our liking that you and I are talking about and if TV wanted to cover it, they could cover it, but it would be just covering it, it wouldn't be the input on it.  I suppose if I did that I could get my buddies at C-SPAN to show it.

Democracy in Action: So any possibility of that happening or—

Joe McQuaid: Well you know the other problem with that, besides having the time to devote to it, is getting the candidates to agree to it.

Democracy in Action: Well I think you're in a pretty powerful position.

Joe McQuaid:  I am until I endorse one of 'em.

Democracy in Action: Right, well that's not going to happen until I assume the week before.

Joe McQuaid: Well, no.  It'll be closer, but I don't know whether it will be the week before or the month before.  Somebody asked me the other day, when do you endorse?  Well with Ronald Reagan, Loeb endorsed him in 1976 and never stopped, although I guess before 1980 he hedged his bets a little and said a few nice things about John Connally but it was pretty clear to me that Loeb was in Reagan's corner, and in '96 with Pat Buchanan I think that was fairly early on.  McCain was actually late.  McCain was I think December and the primary was in January. 

And that God rest his soul no good Timmy Russert, a friend, when I did endorse McCain this last time around Russert, who was famous for this anyways, you know hanging people with their past quotes, dug up some anti-McCain things that we had said in the previous cycle when we endorsed—who did we endorse?—Steve Forbes.   So here's the endorsement by the Union Leader of McCain and here's what we said about him four years earlier.

Democracy in Action: One final question.  You've got all these candidates trekking around.  What words of wisdom would you give to them as they go into the final [eight months]?

Joe McQuaid: Listen to what's on people's minds and meet as many of them as possible because that's what New Hampshire likes, and I think that's good for the candidate and good for the country that you actually get some give and take from the average person.  The way it's getting to be with talks of regional and national primaries and even the way it is now with huge money, the closer it gets to the primary, the more removed they get from the average voter.  So the more they can get out and meet with people—Romney was doing that yesterday...although my editorial guy had to whack him today because he's already talking about I'll be back in four years with my Secret Service.

Democracy in Action: Who else did you hit in your—?  Huntsman, you had a little barb at Huntsman too.

Joe McQuaid: [inaud]...I guess my editorial guy changes his mind and this morning it's "Huntsman should have been in that."  Which I agree, he should have been in that.  And if Giuliani's going to run, he should have been in the game.

Democracy in Action: Right, I don't know what he's doing.

Joe McQuaid: I don't either.  He was in that chair for an hour two Fridays ago, and I said, get in the debate.  Even if you decide not to run.  If you decide not to run, no harm, no foul; nobody's going to think ill of you.  But if you get in the debate, it may inform your decision to run.  You might get a good response.  [McQuaid imitates Guiliani]  "I'll consider that."

Notes:
1. For more on the Canuck letter, see Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward.  "FBI Finds Nixon Aides Sabotaged Democrats"  Washington Post.  October 10, 1972.

2. Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy, Park, Manchester, N.H., November 7, 1960.

From the archives...  DEMOCRACY IN ACTION's 1999 interview with Joe McQuaid.

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