Remembering Bob McManus

For decades, Bob McManus carried in his wallet a yellowing news clip he’d plucked sometime in the 1960s from the Albany Times Union morgue files—a brief account of a domestic homicide in a neighboring upper Hudson River town. What McManus valued wasn’t the story but the writing. “He thought it was so perfect—you couldn’t take a word out of it,” recalls his widow, Mary.

That anecdote won’t surprise fans of Bob’s columns in the New York Post or his articles in City Journal and Commentary—not to mention countless unsigned editorials over 40 years. His prose—a pithy amalgam of Damon Runyon, Raymond Chandler, and (especially) Red Smith—reflected a preference for the skewer over the meataxe. And what a sharp and at times hilarious skewer it was. He wasn’t stingy with praise, either, when he thought it was earned (even by Andrew Cuomo).

McManus, who died Saturday at 81, played an indispensable role in chronicling the highs and lows of New York politics and government for more than half a century. He began in Albany and spent 40 productive years at the city’s largest-circulation tabloid, serving as editorial writer, deputy editorial page editor, editorial page editor, and columnist.

Bob exemplified the best of his journalistic generation—above all, an unshakable commitment to facts, accuracy, and fairness. Among his peers, the highest compliment was to say a reporter could “get it and write it.” Bob did both. The getting was diligence; the writing was the joy. He prized economical prose—hence the clip in his wallet.

He was, as Mary recalled, one of the few people who knew the correct definition and usage of “presently.” Not that he was pedantic or stuffy. As his longtime deputy editor Mark Cunningham wrote in a Post tribute, McManus was “restrained in a generation when most real newsmen hollered.”

His was a wholly made-in-New York story. The eldest of nine, he was born in Buffalo, spent his early years in Binghamton, and attended high school in Albany. His father, Robert L. McManus Sr., a former reporter, became a press aide to Governor Averell Harriman—a job he kept even under Harriman’s Republican successor, Nelson Rockefeller, a tribute to his professionalism. The McManus family had writers on both sides. His mother’s brother, Robert Manning, had worked with Bob McManus Sr. at the Binghamton paper, and ultimately became editor of The Atlantic.

Before moving to New York City, McManus Jr. would spend 17 years at the Albany Times Union, working his way up the newspaper ladder. But preceding this was a crucial interval of four years enlisted service in the U.S. Navy, where he served on the destroyer (the USS Joseph P. Kennedy Jr.) and then on a diesel submarine, the US Sablefish. Though reticent to a fault about almost everything else, Bob didn’t hide his personal pride in that service, remaining active in a submarine veterans’ group for the rest of his life.

Returning to Albany—after a thankfully brief interval as an apprentice elevator repairman—McManus began his journalism career in 1967 the traditional way: as a copy boy, then writing obituaries and high school sports roundups, before being assigned a local beat. He took courses at Siena College while rising through the ranks but left three credits shy of a degree.

Bob become an award-winning executive city editor at the Times Union by the mid-1970s, shifting in the early 1980s to a special projects beat, in which he produced a memorable (and prophetic) early series on the cost and management of New York State’s Medicaid program, ending his tenure in Albany as a memorably sharp political writer, producing weekly Sunday columns that were a warm-up for what would follow at the Post, to which he moved in 1984. He retired as the Post’s editorial page editor in 2013 but continued churning out columns at an impressive pace until just a year ago.

Not long after that final column—where he skewered “the latest stunt from the Hochul administration,” the deployment of National Guard troops to combat subway crime—Bob shared some personal news. A minor fall had prompted X-rays that revealed a possible cancer. True to form, he downplayed it: “I achieved my biblical three score and ten 11 years ago, and I’ve been playing with house money ever since,” he emailed a few of us.

Bob McManus’s work survives in the form of hundreds of columns and articles. Somehow, no one has compiled his greatest hits in a single volume. Here’s hoping someone does it now. The tough part will be figuring what to leave out.