Meade joins top Boston PR agency

Hub fixture sets up shop at Rasky

Peter Meade was a TV host.

Peter Meade, a fixture on the city's civic and corporate scenes for decades, yesterday joined Rasky Baerlein Strategic Communications of Boston, a leading public relations and lobbying firm. He will be the company's managing director.

In February, Meade, 62, left Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts, where he was executive vice president of corporate affairs. Yesterday, he said rumors of his retirement were premature.

"I have a consulting relationship with Blue Cross-Blue Shield, and it was my intention to have maybe one or two other clients," he said. "It became clear that I needed to go set up my own shop or go some place. At Rasky, I'm joining a firm that's the best at what they do."

Meade said he will spend part of his time at Rasky Baerlein's Washington, D.C., office, and will also work with senior corporate executives on media and presentation training.

"This is a unique opportunity to combine a lot of the things I do civically and work with a group of people I know very well," he said.

Larry Rasky, the chairman of the company, said that early in his career, he and Meade had been on opposite sides: Meade worked in the administration of Boston Mayor Kevin H. White, and Rasky was a spokesman for state Senator Joseph Timilty, who sought to unseat White in his third run for office in 1979. Timilty lost.

"It feels to me we've been on the same side ever since then," Rasky said.

In fact, Blue Cross-Blue Shield is a client of Rasky Baerlein, and both men serve on the board of Emerson College, Meade as chairman and Rasky as vice chairman. They also worked together to defeat a 2000 ballot initiative that would have guaranteed universal health insurance. Meade later played a behind-the-scenes roll in crafting the 2006 healthcare reform law.

From 1983 to 1992, Meade was a prominent television and radio host on WBZ-TV and WBZ-AM. He later served as the president and chief executive of the New England Council, a regional business lobbying group that seeks to influence national policy for the benefit of the six-state region.

Meade is the chairman of the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway Conservancy, the group overseeing the parks taking shape on the site of the former expressway. He also is a director of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, the Anti-Defamation League of New England, and AAA of Southern New England. He was recently inducted into the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce's Academy of Distinguished Bostonians.

Meade said he and his wife, Rosanne Bacon Meade, share an ambition beyond work. "Our goal is to visit every national park and every major league ballpark," he said. They had recently visited AT&T Park, the home of the San Francisco Giants, but it "didn't count," he said, because a game wasn't being played at the time.

Jeffrey Krasner can be reached at krasner@globe.com.