Press Secretary Relished Job

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Tony Snow: 1955 - 2008

Conservative commentator and former White House press secretary Tony Snow has died of cancer at age 53.

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He shuffled from job to job, first as a caseworker for the mentally ill in North Carolina, then as a teacher in Cincinnati and Kenya before doing graduate work in economics and philosophy at the University of Chicago.

In 1979, he discovered journalism. He started as an editorial writer for conservative editor Terry Eastland at the Greensboro Record in North Carolina, then followed Eastland to the Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk and eventually moved to the Daily Press of Newport News. In 1984, Snow became deputy editorial editor for the Detroit News, where he met and married the editor's secretary, Jill Ellen Walker. In 1987, the same year as their wedding, he became editorial page editor at the Washington Times.

President George H.W. Bush recruited him to the White House as a speechwriter, although infighting later relegated him to a backwater job in the media affairs office. After that, Snow wrote a syndicated column and branched out to broadcast, filling in for radio hosts Rush Limbaugh and Diane Rehm and doing commentary on NPR, CNN and ABC's "Good Morning America."

Roger Ailes, who met Snow in the first Bush White House, hired him in 1996 to launch a Sunday show for the upstart Fox News network. Snow made a national name for himself during the next seven years at the helm of "Fox News Sunday." He also played a bit part in the Monica Lewinsky scandal that nearly felled President Bill Clinton: He introduced a friend from the first Bush White House named Linda Tripp to book publisher Lucianne Goldberg, helping set in motion a chain of events that resulted in an investigation and impeachment of the president.

After Snow was replaced at "Fox News Sunday" in 2003 by Chris Wallace, he launched a Fox radio talk show, heard on 125 stations nationwide, and was sometimes tough on the second President Bush. In columns and on the air, Snow lambasted Bush as an "impotent" president with a "listless domestic policy" who had "lost control of the federal budget." At one point Snow said, "George Bush has become something of an embarrassment."

When Bush announced Snow's appointment as press secretary, the president made reference to the criticism. "I asked him about those comments," Bush told reporters, "and he said, 'You should have heard what I said about the other guy.' "

Survivors include his wife and their children, Kendall, Robbie and Kristi Snow, of the Mount Vernon section of Fairfax County; and his father, Jim Snow, and stepmother, Dottie Snow, of The Villages, Fla.

Peter Baker is a former Washington Post staff writer who covered the White House. Staff writer Michael Abramowitz contributed to this report.