A Man Who Loved People, the Gritty Nature of Life and All of the Human Comedy
By Juan Williams
NPR Senior Correspondent/FOX News Political Contributor
Tony Snow and I traveled parallel paths through Washington. We are a year apart in age –Tony is a year younger at 53 –and both loved politics and debate.
Our love of debate may have been due to the fact that we both studied philosophy in college (Tony went to Davidson, I went to Haverford). And before joining FOX News we both spent time as editorial writers. Tony wrote editorials at the Greensboro Record in N.C., and the Virginia Pilot in Norfolk before becoming the editorial page editor of the Newport News Daily Press and then writing editorials for The Detroit News. We got together when he came to Washington to be the editorial page editor of The Washington Times. I was working as a White House correspondent, editorial writer and columnist for The Washington Post.
But being philosophy majors in the news business and caught in Washington's political storms didn't guarantee that we'd be friends. After all, he was a true red conservative, a white guy born in Kentucky and raised in Cincinnati while I am moderate to liberal black guy from Brooklyn, N.Y.
It turned out none of that mattered because Tony and I loved to argue.
Tony was the first host of "FOX News Sunday" and I remember being one of his first guest panelists. We had done some local political discussion shows and even sat across from each other on CNN's Crossfire. When "FOX News Sunday" got going he called me up and literally said he wanted a good argument. So off we went to an old stone house in a garden in the Georgetown section of Washington. It was an odd site for the first studio of "FOX News Sunday" but it fit Tony's sense of politics as a good discussion among friends at the dinner table.
And the debates, the conversations, the needling that started even before FOX News did not stop until Tony died early today.
Once at an Orioles baseball game a man came over and stared at us as if he was hallucinating. Then he said our names out loud. When we nodded to confirm that yes, it was really the two of us he broke into a big smile. He said he thought it was us but he had told his friends that it couldn't be because we argued too much on FOX News to spend time hanging out at a baseball game. Then he shook our hands and asked for pictures.
What the viewer couldn't see by watching Tony on FOX News or in the White House press room is that Tony Snow, the human being, was bigger than the political arguments and debate that define Washington. He knew tough times and real grief. His mom was nurse who died of colon cancer when he was 17. His father was a social studies teacher and Tony followed that path when he traveled to the backwoods of Kenya after college to teach science and geography. He went home to Cincinnati to teach math and art and also to work with disabled kids.
That love of all kinds of people and life and arguments also included a love of music. He was no great shakes as a musician but Tony had no fear in getting on stage to play the flute (his best instrument, I think} the guitar or the sax. In fact he did play with Jethro Tull, which gave him one hell of a thrill.
It tells you something about Tony that his wife was not a fellow journalist or political player. Jill is a lovely, unpretentious and strong woman he met while working in Detroit. He loved his kids, obviously, but even when his Virginia house caught on fire he had funny stories to tell about reassuring the family about the wild, scary world behind the walls, — bad electrical wiring — and rebuilding and then deciding to find a house in rural Maryland so he could have more family time.
So, behind the sharp debate, Tony was a man who loved people, the gritty nature of life and all of the human comedy.
Oh, and I should mention we both loved basketball. Tony could dunk a ball from a running start while I could just grab the rim. He would rib me about being a black guy who couldn't dunk although he was five inches taller. He also poked fun at my favorite but woeful pro-basketball team, the Washington Wizards and I would give it to him about his rag-tag home town football team, the Cincinnati Bengals.
One day when he became White House press secretary he had me over to lunch in his office. Half way through lunch I said to him that it was cool to have a job that gave him free lunches. What free lunch, he asked. He said he'd paid for it. After the laughter I told him he couldn't buy lunch for me, a working journalist. He said he was buying lunch for a friend. I told him it was just like Tony to be looking out for a friend, even in a town where friendships tend to be matter of political convenience.
It was just that attitude that allowed Tony to change the role of press secretary in the Bush White House. He argued the president's case with the press. He was not defensive about it. To the contrary he told me time and again that he was having a great time as Bush's press secretary. Tony got the job at a time when the Iraq war was going badly, when the President's party had lost control of both the House and the Senate, and the public approval ratings for the Bush White House were at an all-time low. Tony made the briefing his stage for taking President Bush's case to the press and the American people. And you should remember that before he took the job Tony was critical of President Bush, describing him as "something of an embarrassment" among conservatives. Nonetheless, Tony was up to defend the President and make the case with his TV skills and his warm, persuasive and witty ways.
It went so well for Tony at The White House that he once called me up from the road to tell me he was getting "rock star" treatment from conservative audiences. He ended up on the front page of The New York Times because Republican candidates, aware of his popularity, had him appear at fundraising events for their campaigns. No press secretary had ever done that before — largely because no press secretary had that kind of following before Tony got the job.
We became friends when Tony came to Washington to work for The Washington Times and I was at The Washington Post. We met in a small studio at Howard University discussing local Washington politics with national politics as filler. The show had a heavy dose of black issues because most people who live in the city are black. What initially fascinated me about Tony was his total lack of fear in getting down and dirty on black politics. He never had a problem being the one conservative on a panel of pundits. To the contrary he loved the intellectual fight and usually was on the offensive even as a white guy talking about local corruption and political shenanigans among black Washingtonians. By contrast, most white journalists did not even accept invitations to come on the show.
It was that love of engaging the debate without fear that set Tony apart for me. He loved to argue and we became friends because we loved to argue with each other. He could argue without pretense or holding a grudge. To show just how human he could be despite his high rank as White House Press Secretary he loved to take time with kids. He had met my youngest son a few times at FOX's Washington bureau and at a ball game.
One day while riding in the car the news came on and from the White House came the voice of the Press Secretary. My son, Raffi, and I were talking when he held up a hand and said: "That sounds like Tony Snow." I told it was Tony. He said "Our Tony Snow is the Press Secretary." I said that was right but in my mind I was wondering how many people felt that they were not listening to the press secretary but to "our" Tony Snow.
foxforum.blogs.foxnews.com |
