Bob McManus, the trenchant editorial page editor of The New York Post and a columnist for other conservative publications who prided himself on his unambiguous common-sense commentary about public policy and other topics, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 81.
The cause of his death, in a hospital, was complications of bile duct cancer, said his wife, Mary McManus.
An influential and respected editorialist, Mr. McManus pulled no punches but still managed to be widely liked.
He could unleash a fusillade of zingers against public officials and other prominent targets he branded phonies or hypocrites. But he could also leaven his caustic criticism with wit.
“His prose style might best be described as a punchy amalgam of Damon Runyon, Raymond Chandler, and — a particular McManus favorite — Red Smith,” Edmund J. McMahon, a friend who is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, and the founder of the Empire Center for Public Policy in Albany, N.Y., said in an interview.
After a police officer was assaulted in Times Square last year by a group that included some migrants, Mr. McManus contrasted “a time when slugging a cop would get you bumps on your head” with what he described as the current anarchic system of justice.
“These days, when you mob-attack two cops in the Crossroads of the World you go through the system like dirt through a duck,” he wrote, “and presto, you’re back on the street and boosting goods from an outer-borough department store.”
He ruthlessly compared former Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York, who would sometimes invite Mr. McManus to his office in the State Capitol to ruminate about baseball, with his son Andrew, also a former governor, whom he characterized in an essay for Commentary magazine in 2020 as “more pile driver than persuader, satisfying to those who share his worldview but off-putting, and sometimes deeply disturbing, to those who don’t.”
In 1984, Mr. McManus joined The Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. (The paper had another owner from 1988 to 1993, when Mr. Murdock reacquired it.)
In 2000, when he was named editorial page editor, he became the voice of the pugnacious tabloid. He retired in 2013 — leaving behind, the newspaper wrote, the “pain of his withering gaze” — but he later returned as a columnist.
When Eric Garner died in a New York City police officer’s chokehold after selling loose cigarettes on Staten Island in 2014, Mr. McManus described him as “a career petty criminal” who had failed to cooperate with the authorities.
“There are many New Yorkers — politicians, activists, trial lawyers, all the usual suspects — who will now seek to profit from a tragedy that wouldn’t have happened had Eric Garner made a different decision,” Mr. McManus wrote. “He was a victim of himself.”
In his last column for The Post, in March 2024, he called Gov. Kathy Hochul’s decision to deploy National Guard troops in New York City’s subway system a “political stunt” to divert attention from her unwillingness to confront progressive policies that tolerated criminality.
A year earlier, writing for City Journal, a Manhattan Institute publication, he suggested, apparently in all seriousness, that the arrival in New York City of Banksy, the enigmatic British street artist known for his offbeat political commentary, as Bill de Blasio was preparing to take office as mayor might have been another of the “eerie reminders of the city’s turbulent past.”
Robert LaValle McManus Jr. was born on April 8, 1943, in Buffalo, the eldest of nine children of Robert and Jeanette (Manning) McManus. His family lived in Binghamton shortly after he was born and moved to Albany in 1957.
Bob grew up steeped in journalism and local politics. His father was a reporter for The Binghamton Press and later served as the press secretary to two governors: W. Averell Harriman, a Democrat, and Nelson A. Rockefeller, a Republican.
His grandfather was a coal dealer who had been the Democratic boss of Broome County, and a maternal uncle, Robert J. Manning, was the editor of The Atlantic magazine.
He attended public school in Binghamton but contracted polio when he was 12 and missed a year. In Albany, he graduated from the Vincentian Institute, a Roman Catholic high school, while working full time as the manager of the pets and plants department at a W.T. Grant store.
Instead of going to college and law school as his parents urged him to, he joined the Navy in 1962 and served on a destroyer and on the submarine Sablefish. After he was honorably discharged in 1966, he briefly apprenticed as an elevator repairman until he was hired as a part-time copy boy at The Times Union of Albany.
He dropped out of Siena College three credits shy of graduation when, after covering local sports and writing obituaries for The Times Union, he was promoted to a local beat. He later worked as executive city editor, special projects reporter, political writer and columnist. Mr. Murdoch hired him for The Post because he was impressed by his columns.
In addition to his wife, Mary (Bogaard) McManus, whom he married in 2001, Mr. McManus is survived by his daughter, Kathleen McManus, a writer for Newsmax, from his marriage to Victoria Lupo, which ended in divorce; four brothers, Tom, Terry, John and Tim McManus; and three sisters, Kathy Bruin, Christine Witkowski and Mary Beth McManus.
For decades, his wife said, Mr. McManus kept in his wallet a faded clipping from The Times Union about a domestic assault near Albany. It was written by William Kennedy, who went on to win a Pulitzer Prize as a novelist, and John Maguire.
Her husband treasured the clipping, Ms. McManus said, “because it was so perfect — you couldn’t take a word out of it.”
Mr. McManus was, his friend Mr. McMahon said, “the last of a dying breed in what’s left of journalism: Underneath the editorial writer and columnist was an old-school, no-nonsense reporter, a stickler for accuracy and fairness.”