As Good as His Words
Spokesman Tony Snow Earned Press's Respect

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 14, 2008

From the moment he took the White House podium, Tony Snow was a pugilist and performance artist, relishing the daily combat with White House correspondents.

When Martha Raddatz's cellphone went off during a briefing -- her son had programmed the ring with a rap song -- Snow made the ABC reporter blush by proclaiming, "Play that funky music, white girl."

"You could get into some pretty serious back and forth with Tony," Raddatz says. "You could make each other angry. But when you walked out of there it was over. He was a really genuine guy."

Snow, who died Saturday at 53, had the knack of making people like him, even those he would slap around as a commentator, television host or presidential press secretary. He once told CNN's Ed Henry to "zip it" during a tense exchange over the war, but would later flash that smile and let you know he could separate the personal from the political. CBS's Jim Axelrod had a phrase for it, saying Snow knew how to play the "affability card."

No one clashed with Snow more sharply than David Gregory, to the point that the White House spokesman accused the NBC correspondent of being partisan. When Gregory asked why President Bush had not acknowledged more shortcomings in an assessment of the battle against terrorism, Snow accused him of expressing "the Democratic point of view," prompting a vigorous objection from Gregory.

"Let's not let you get away with being rude," Snow said.

"Excuse me, don't point your finger at me," Gregory said. "I'm not being rude."

"Yes, you are," Snow insisted.

After one such exchange, Snow mulled over his words for days and then apologized. "He was really a mensch about it," Gregory says. "He said he was wrong. He said that to me, and then he said it publicly."

When Snow suffered a recurrence of the cancer that he had battled the year before becoming Bush's spokesman, it was Gregory who persuaded him to participate in a day-in-the-life piece. That included a chemotherapy session at Georgetown University Hospital, with cameras rolling.

"I could just never look at him the same way," Gregory says. "We're both dads. I was just thinking about him, his wife, his kids, and what a decent guy he was."

Snow was such a self-assured figure, at least in front of a microphone, that he didn't mind reciting the stage directions. Asked once about how then-Speaker Dennis Hastert was handling the House page scandal involving Florida lawmaker Mark Foley -- which Snow had dismissively described as a bunch of "naughty e-mails" -- he told reporters: "I will dodge it, and I will tell you exactly why I'm going to dodge it." It was spin with a grin, pleasantly delivered.

In a 2006 CNN interview, I asked Snow if he remembered who had made the following comment: "President Bush hates responding to the press, hates responding to political enemies. He thinks it's beneath him. He's got a stubborn streak." Snow didn't know. It was him, months before joining the White House staff. Rather than turn defensive, he laughed off the quote and segued into an answer about how the president was holding more frequent news conferences.

This was a man with a healthy attitude toward life, even as his body betrayed him. His rock group was called Beats Workin', but you never got the sense, no matter how many hours he put in, that he considered any of his jobs to be a grind.

While he will be remembered mainly for his 17-month White House tenure, Snow had a successful punditry career that included stints as Washington Times editorial page editor, Rush Limbaugh substitute and National Public Radio commentator, along with his service as a speechwriter for the elder George Bush.

When Snow became host of the newly launched "Fox News Sunday" in 1996, he grew into the job, dropping such early gimmicks as a "rumor of the week" to moderate a solid program. I later asked him about criticism that he was too gentle with the politicians he interviewed, never quite nailing them down.

"My role was not to sit there and club people with a baseball bat," he said. "You don't get the best answers from someone who's being clubbed."

When there were unconfirmed reports two years ago that he might become Bush's spokesman, Snow quickly returned my call and was happy to confirm, on background, that he would accept the offer if his doctors gave him a clean bill of health. He also needed to be assured of a policy role in the White House. Snow, it was clear, wanted to be a player.

But I was equally struck by his domestic duties at the time. With his wife out of town with their 13-year-old daughter, Snow was shuttling their 10-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter between lacrosse practice and piano and guitar lessons.

He was the most prominent journalist ever to take the job, and he used his talk-show skills to the fullest, becoming the administration's most visible pitchman at a time when the Iraq war was turning from bad to worse and the president's popularity was sinking. Still, Snow had that selling-ice-to-the-Eskimos quality, a relentless cheerfulness.

He made mistakes, went too far in challenging reporters' motives and probably crossed a line by moonlighting as a Republican fundraiser. But he also did something more lasting than any momentary political fight, and that was talking openly, honestly and emotionally about his cancer. In one of those chilling moments you never forget, Snow told me how he felt about receiving a diagnosis in 2005 of the same disease that had killed his mother when he was 17.

"The ghost of colon cancer stalked me from the time she died until the time I got it," he said.

When that cancer returned, Snow battled on, both in his waning months at the White House and in his subsequent career as a commentator and lecturer. My family ran into him at the airport a couple of months ago -- carrying his bag after a long day that had begun with a speech in Upstate New York -- and he looked tired and gaunt. But he was as gregarious as ever, chatting about how much time he was spending on airplanes and how he was enjoying his new life.

Snow was living on borrowed time, as he once put it to me, which perhaps is why he tried, with striking success, to milk every minute.

Terror on the Newsstands

The magazine cover is packed with canards about Barack Obama. The illustration, by Barry Blitt, shows him wearing Muslim garb in the Oval Office, a portrait of Osama bin Laden on the wall. He is delivering a fist bump to his wife, Michelle, who has a rifle slung over her shoulder.

The cover appears, at least at first glance, highly offensive. What was the New Yorker thinking?

"It's clearly a joke, a parody of these crazy fears and rumors and scare tactics about Obama's past and ideology," Editor David Remnick says. "And if you can't tell it's a joke by the flag burning in the Oval Office, I don't know what more to say."

But won't some readers see this attention-grabbing device as a slur against Obama? There is no editor's note -- a tiny line inside the magazine titles the picture "The Politics of Fear" -- and it has nothing to do with the accompanying article on the Illinois senator's rise in Chicago politics.

"If I started self-censoring myself and my writers and artists because someone might take it askance, I'd publish nothing that wasn't bland and inoffensive," Remnick says. "Satire is offensive sometimes, otherwise it's not very effective."