Moving to the Right

"Sure, I'm a conservative, no doubt about it," Hume says. "But I would ask people to look at the work." He does not accuse his fellow journalists of pursuing a partisan agenda, saying their bias is "unconscious."

Hume and his wife, Kim, abandon Washington every Thursday night for their country home in Fauquier County -- in the tiny town of Hume, Va., named for one of his relatives in a clan that emigrated from Scotland in 1721. But that doesn't mean Hume is unmindful of his standing in the capital.

"One of the things he needs is to be respected and thought of as somebody who matters in the world, and he's very upfront about that," says Kim Hume, who is Fox's Washington bureau chief. "But he is not egocentric in the normal sense of what you think of a TV anchorman."

A Move to Television

Hume's first job was not what you would call glamorous.

It was 1965, and he had married his first wife, Clare Stoner, in his senior year at the University of Virginia, where by his own account he barely managed to graduate. The son of a Washington manufacturing rep who marketed his own inventions, including a bird feeder, Hume had attended St. Albans but had no great media contacts. So when an employment agency landed him a $5,000-a-year job as a reporter for the Hartford Times in Connecticut, Hume grabbed it.

Hume fell in love with the paper, which has since folded, and then jumped to United Press International. A year later he joined the Baltimore Evening Sun, which led to a fellowship at the Washington Journalism Center, where he was befriended by Ralph Nader. The consumer advocate suggested that he dig into corruption at the United Mine Workers and even put Hume in touch with his publisher. The book research led to an article in the Atlantic, and that, in turn, persuaded Anderson to hire the young reporter.

"I was in hog heaven," Hume says.

Hume loved working for Anderson and came up with a huge scoop. Anderson had obtained a memo from an ITT Corp. lobbyist that linked a $400,000 contribution to the Republican National Convention with the Nixon Justice Department's settlement of a major antitrust suit against the corporation. Hume confirmed the story with the lobbyist, Dita Beard, and wound up testifying on the Hill amid a tidal wave of publicity. Attorney General Richard Kleindienst later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for failing to tell a Senate hearing that President Nixon had told him to settle the ITT suit.

After Anderson had to retract a 1972 charge that Democratic vice presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton had been arrested for drunken driving, Hume concluded that his boss's credibility had been tarnished and resigned. But he was thrown together with Anderson again when a former general counsel for the mining union sued for libel over a column based on information from a confidential source.

"I was so worried about this," says Hume, who admits that part of the story was wrong. "It hung over me for six years." The case took a crucial turn when his lawyer persuaded the source -- the daughter-in-law of a senior union official -- to testify. A federal jury acquitted Hume and Anderson in 1975.

By then Hume had become a consultant to ABC News, and the following year he was offered a correspondent's job. Hume says he was "terrible," often standing with his head cocked to one side or looking stiff and unnatural, and that "it was humiliating." But eventually he learned the craft and covered the House for 11 years. Hume became more conservative as he saw how much money Congress wasted, and found the coverage of President Reagan "so biased," including the use of the derisive term "trickle-down economics."

When he was assigned to cover Walter Mondale's campaign to unseat Reagan in 1984, Hume says that "personally, I didn't want Mondale to win the election. But I admired him and liked him and felt it was my job to give him a fair shake." Hume was "a real favorite of Mondale's," says Joe Lockhart, who worked on that campaign. In 1988, however, Michael Dukakis's campaign complained to ABC that Hume's coverage of Vice President Bush was much softer than the network's reporting on the Democratic nominee.