Moving to the Right

After moving up to the White House beat in 1989, Hume occasionally got into arguments with anchor Peter Jennings over how stories should be handled.

"He and Peter had some clashes over coverage of the White House," says Charlie Gibson, who worked closely with Hume before becoming a co-host of "Good Morning America." "I saw Brit make arguments to Peter when he felt Peter was taking a position that was left of center, or wrong."

Hume says he came to feel "out of step with ABC News's natural tendencies." He recalls challenging an assignment about how the first President Bush "isn't doing anything" by saying: "Has it ever occurred to you that this guy's a Republican and Republicans don't believe that government is the solution to all the country's problems?"

When Bill Clinton took office, Hume found him "the most charming man I ever met." But on June 14, 1993, he felt the new president's wrath.

Clinton had just introduced Ruth Bader Ginsburg as his Supreme Court nominee, and Hume told the president that his consideration of other candidates and withdrawal of another nominee "may have created an impression, perhaps unfair, of a certain zigzag quality in the decision-making process here. I wonder, sir, if you could kind of walk us through it and perhaps disabuse us of any notion we might have along those lines. Thank you."

Clinton glared at Hume. "How you could ask a question like that after the statement she just made is beyond me," the president said, and abruptly ended the news conference.

Clinton quickly found a way to make amends. After learning that Hume had just returned from his honeymoon in Hawaii with his new bride, Kim, an ABC producer, Clinton -- who had a rough first six months with the press -- joked,"I'm just jealous that you had a honeymoon and I didn't."

During White House briefings, says former Clinton spokesman Mike McCurry, Hume would sit in the front row doing crossword puzzles. "But you could not get anything past him," McCurry says. "If you tried to slip a little spin in, he'd suddenly erupt and say, 'Wait a minute!' "

Hume drew some flak at ABC by writing pieces for the conservative American Spectator, although he had also written for the more liberal New Republic, where Barnes was an editor. Feeling increasingly out of place, Hume was intrigued in 1996 when he heard that Rupert Murdoch was launching a cable network.

Hume had met Murdoch at a Spectator dinner at the Brasserie (and wound up giving him a ride) and knew Roger Ailes, the president of the new network, from his role in the 1988 Bush presidential campaign. Months after Kim Hume signed on with Fox as the D.C. bureau chief, her husband gave up his ABC career to join the fledgling network.

At Hume's last White House news conference, Clinton told him: "I think all of us think you have done an extraordinary, professional job under Republican and Democratic administrations alike."

In his new job as Fox's Washington managing editor, Hume began building a bureau for a network with few viewers. He had been in discussions about starting a Washington-based news show at 6 p.m., and in February 1998, in the midst of the Monica Lewinsky furor, Kim Hume told her husband that the story was so hot he should start the program immediately. After checking with Ailes, Hume launched "Special Report" that night.