3 takeaways from Boston magazine’s Howie Carr profile
"There’s a kind of exquisite irony that the guy who was seen as the great white hack-hunter has suddenly become just an unabashed shill for Trump."
Howie Carr may be a longtime fixture of Massachusetts media and politics, but Simon Van Zuylen-Wood had a question:
What the hell happened to him?
The Boston Herald columnist and talk radio host wasn’t always the unabashed loyalist to President Donald Trump, nor even the partisan rock-thrower, that he is today.
“You may think Howie Carr has been a bigot forever and are therefore not surprised by his lateral move into Trump bum-kissery,” Van Zuylen-Wood wrote in a profile for Boston magazine published Tuesday. “But it wasn’t always this way.”
To find out why Carr changed, Van Zuylen-Wood traveled around Massachusetts to try to get answers from the 66-year-old. And while Carr didn’t (at least intentionally) participate, the resulting piece revealed a lot about the journalist-turned-“shock jock” and his remarkable career turn.
1. Former colleagues are aghast at Carr’s transformation.
Before he became a conservative commentator and Republican booster, Carr played foil to the local Democratic establishment — from Billy Bulger to Sen. Ted Kennedy — with actual journalism. As a Herald reporter in the 1980s, Carr spent his time “gleefully exposing the corruption, nepotism, and depravity that pervaded Beacon Hill,” Van Zuylen-Hood writes.
His former self is what makes Carr’s love affair with Trump all the more puzzling — even “demoralizing” — since the Republican president is accused of the exact same types of offenses for which he used to call out Democrats, according to Carr’s former co-workers.
“Donald Trump is everything that Howie says everybody else in politics is,” a former longtime Herald colleague told Van Zuylen-Wood. “A liar, a grifter, a womanizer. You know, take your pick.”
Peter Gelzinis, a recently retired Herald columnist who spent decades working across from Carr, agreed.
“There’s a kind of exquisite irony that the guy who was seen as the great white hack-hunter has suddenly become just an unabashed shill for Trump,” he said.
Adding to the irony — or, perhaps, hypocrisy — is that after Carr spent the 2016 campaign stumping for Trump, the president hired Carr’s daughter as an intern at both the Trump Organization and the White House. She now reportedly has a job in the Trump administration.
Such an apparent exchange of favors between Democrats on Beacon Hill in the 1980s probably would not have gone over so well in the pages of Carr’s Herald.
2. ‘She’s the power behind the throne.’
The former WRKO host formed his own Howie Carr Radio Network in 2014. And according to Van Zuylen-Wood, the “architect and driving force” behind the network is Carr’s wife, Kathy, a former WRKO salesperson.
A petite, tightly wound woman, her aggressive sales tactics have hastened her husband’s transition from celebrated local journalist to human moneymaker. She is lauded in the industry for creating a syndicated radio network from scratch, though closer to home she is appraised less kindly. “She’s gonna work that guy till he dies, making sure that he’s making money,” says a local media figure who knows Howie well.
Kathy joked to Van Zuylen-Wood that the Howie Carr Radio Network has two goals: “Number one, to make money. Number two, to make money.” Those goals also apparently stand for Carr’s other endeavors, such as “churn[ing] out hastily written, self-published books,” selling right-wing paraphernalia online, and staging events — even if it means crossing a few partners.
Casey Sherman, a local writer and co-author of the book Boston Strong, organized a series of true-crime storytelling stage shows nearly six years ago, and got Carr to participate and tell stories about James “Whitey” Bulger, the former Boston mob boss. However, after a few shows, Sherman said Carr called him to say he had to pull out.
“He says, ‘My wife doesn’t want me to do it anymore,’” Sherman told Van Zuylen-Wood. “He said, ‘Will you talk to her?’ And for the next 20 minutes, she goes off to me in a way that would make Mel Gibson blush. It was the most bizarre, outrageous phone call I’ve ever had in my life, accusing [Howie] of gathering groupies at the show, which was crazy, because the only people showing up were 64-year-old women and Howie’s crazy fans.”
Kathy claimed that her husband wasn’t making as much money as promised, but “not long after” Sherman received an announcement for a virtual ripoff of his own show, “An Evening of Crime with Howie Carr, Coming Soon to a Town Near You.” Kathy told Van Zuylen-Wood that she and Carr made “way more” money with their own version.
“Everybody that she meets or talks to, she tries to steamroll,” Sherman said. “She’s the power behind the throne.”
3. Even in wealth, Carr has stuck to his ‘cheapskate tendencies.’
Carr did not grow up with the riches he now enjoys; in fact, both his parents made their careers serving those with wealth. He was able to attend Deerfield Academy after his mother took a job as the assistant to the headmaster of the selective boarding school. Carr says he was accepted to Brown University but couldn’t afford the tuition, so instead went to the University of North Carolina (his parents kept a home in Greenboro, Kathy said, so he paid in-state tuition).
By the 1990s, Carr had his own radio show, which elevated the newspaper columnist to “a new tier of wealth and fame.”
“Yet he clung to his blue-collar persona—and cheapskate tendencies,” Van Zuylen-Wood wrote.
Gelzinis said that Carr was among a number of Herald staffers who were known to fraudulently inflate their expense reports. He also reportedly drove demo cars loaned out by dealerships and lived in a rent-controlled Cambridge apartment in the early-1990s after breaking up with his first wife. To this day, Carr’s producer, Steve Robinson, says he still saves empty cans and bottles for the five-cent recycling deposit.
A former WRKO colleague even remembers Carr swiping toilet paper and paper towel from the station’s offices.
“His arms were full, like he was making a trip to BJ’s,” the unidentified person said.
According to Van Zuylen-Wood, neither Carr nor his wife would comment on his line-pushing cost-saving measures.
“I’m not going to respond to the Peter Gelzinis stuff,” Kathy said. “You can write whatever you want.”
Read Van Zuylen-Wood’s full piece over on Boston magazine’s website.
