Colourful leader writer retires

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32958, 3 July 1972, Page 13

Colourful leader writer retires

(N.Z. Press Assn. —Copyright) NEW YORK, July 2.

Reuben Maury—for whom Joseph Stalin was “Bloody Joe,” Nikita Khrushchev, “Naughty Nikky, the Red Butcher of Hungary,” and the former British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, “a stumblebum” — retired yesterday from his post as chief editorial writer for the “New York Daily News,” the largest newspaper in the United States.

It announced that Mr Maury l , who is 72, would remain with the newspaper as a consultant, and continue his writing career privately. Mr Maury’s vituperative at-.

tacks in the “Daily News” have been a feature of the New York newspaper scene since 1926, when he joined the newspaper’s leader-page staff.

Conservatives bought the newspaper to read his pithy and witty expressions of their views; Liberals often bought it simply to laugh. Mr Maury once described the United Nations as “a glass cigar-box jam-packed with pompous- do-gooders, nervy deadbeats, moochers, saboteurs, spies and traitors,” and said: “We Americans would be better off if we’d just quit being polite and threw the lot out.”

His position on virtually every issue was predictable; Mr Maury was against taxes, for capital punishment, against detente, for arms spending and against welfare and anything that even smacked remotely of socialism.

He called Franklin D. Roosevelt a “spoiled child,” but also disliked two Republican Presidential candidates of the 1930s—Alf Landon ("a dumb-bell or a hypocrite”) and Wendell Wilkie (“a laugh”). Mr Maury did like William Shakespeare, whom he described once as “winner, and still champ.”