Come Again?

"You play a much more vital role working for a president than sitting behind a mike hurling stones," says former Fox News man Tony Snow, the new White House press secretary. (Andrea Bruce -- The Washington Post)

A host of questions swirl around Snow: Can he be an effective advocate for the press, as he has promised, and still please the president's people? Will he be an active participant in policy debates, as he has been assured, or wind up out of the proverbial loop? Will his relationships with Washington reporters, who generally like him, help with Bush's coverage, at least at the margins? And will he be comfortable defending policies -- such as leak investigations that could lead to jail time for journalists -- with which he might disagree?

Snow, 50, already knows something about deflecting questions. When asked about his wife, Jill, Snow says she hates publicity and he politely insists that he will keep that part of his life private.

"I'm under a fatwa never to have so much as a surprise party," Snow says. "Lord knows she's been put through enough with my various careers."

A Long-Ago Liberal

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Dirk Allen has no trouble coming up with a phrase to describe the young man he knew in junior high and high school in Cincinnati: "long-haired hippie liberal."

Snow was more than that, says Allen. Varsity tennis player. President of the National Honor Society. Played in a marching band. And, in a harbinger of his future career, member of the debate team.

"I grew up in an idealistic family," Snow says. "We felt very strongly about fighting poverty and race relations, and it wasn't working." Snow's father was a teacher and assistant principal, and Snow was especially influenced by his mother, an inner-city nurse who died during his senior year in high school.

At Davidson College in North Carolina, where he sported a beard and ponytail, Snow again joined the debate team and also tried out for the baseball team. "He had a really good arm but no control," says former roommate Ed Jones, now an advertising copywriter. "You'd better duck if you were a batter. He had a great vertical leap for a white guy. He used to show that off at the most inopportune times at dances, hitting the ceiling tiles. For a guy who was so quick with words, he was pretty awkward at first" around the opposite sex.

"He was fairly intense," says Peyton Marshall, another former college roommate and now a technology executive. "He wasn't a party animal. He was a guy who always had a slightly offbeat sense of humor." Snow also tried to master the flute, says Marshall, "and the rest of us suffered through his self-teaching."

Politically speaking, Snow says he was a "socialist" in college until he started reading Marx and thinking through the implications of equitable distribution of property. "We both came pretty much as McGovernites and left kind of Reaganites," Jones says.

Snow majored in philosophy and wasn't sure what to do after his 1977 graduation. He was a caseworker for the mentally ill in North Carolina, driving tens of thousands of miles dealing with what he calls "really hard, gut-wrenching cases." He spent time teaching in Cincinnati and also in Kenya, which he says convinced him of "the incredible failure of socialism." And he spent a year doing graduate work in economics and philosophy at the University of Chicago.

Snow broke into journalism in 1979 as an editorial writer for the Greensboro, N.C., Record, followed by stints on the editorial pages of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot and Newport News Daily Press.

Tom Bray, who was editorial page editor of the Detroit News when he hired Snow as his deputy in 1984, recalls him as smart, principled, funny and "disaffected from liberalism. It wasn't so much that he'd become a conservative as that he and I were having a hard time squaring our ideals with what liberalism was becoming." All this sounds like the evolution of a compassionate conservative.