Come Again?

While dating a Catholic woman in Detroit, Snow converted to Catholicism. He later began dating Jill Walker, secretary to the paper's editor, who worked just down the hall. "We didn't have any idea they were an item until they were pretty far along," Bray says. "He was discreet." They were married in 1987, the same year that Snow became editorial page editor of the Washington Times.

For the next four years, Snow held forth on a wide array of topics, including sex:

"Any fool can master the intricacies of sexual technique, and many have. But in focusing on the how-tos, we teach people to be jerks. The most important part of sexual relations is not lust, but love."

He also emerged as a critic of the mainstream media, and was particularly steamed during the Persian Gulf War:

"The press has gotten itself in the soup because it has behaved erratically, careening from idealism to cynicism and back. Much of the reporting from the front has been rushed, ill-informed, feckless. As a result, readers, viewers and listeners haven't gotten news. They've received a walking tour of press bias and ignorance."

And Snow did not always let George H.W. Bush off the hook. As the Boston Globe recently noted, he called the 41st president a "cipher" who "sold his party's soul" and was "an utterly removed head of state."

Bush offered him the speechwriting job anyway. Snow later became a media affairs adviser -- a "glorified op-writer," he conceded -- and buried his superiors with memos about reviving the struggling Bush reelection campaign.

When Snow's two-year stint ended with Bush's defeat, he became a jack-of-all-media-trades, writing columns for USA Today and the Detroit News, filling in on the radio for Rush Limbaugh and Diane Rehm, doing commentary for National Public Radio and appearing on ABC's "Good Morning America" and CNN's "Late Edition."

"He's about as easy a guy to work with as I've come across, but he can still kick the hell out of you," says Bob Beckel, a former Democratic operative who often appeared with Snow on television and on the speaking circuit.

Snow also appeared on a talk show at WHMM, based at Howard University. "Most white conservative commentators would feel like a duck out of water," says Juan Williams, another regular panelist who is now a Fox News contributor. But Snow, he says, easily waded into the discussions of African American issues.

In 1996, Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes, a former Republican consultant who had worked with Snow in the first Bush White House, launched a Sunday talk show and hired Snow to host it.

"Tony's really a policy wonk and understood Washington, but not the mechanics of hosting," says Marty Ryan, executive producer of "Fox News Sunday." "He had to learn how to do lead-ins and how to thank guests. We rehearsed a lot, and it finally clicked after a while." Ryan also credits Snow's "sunny disposition" with helping the staff in the early months, when they did the show from historic houses around Washington because they had no studio.