GOD'S MAN IS GONE, BUT HE MADE HIS MARK AND WILL ALWAYS BE REMEMBERED
Tony Snow was perhaps the best and nicest newspaper friend I knew over many years at The Washington Times, and afterwards.
He came to The Times as editorial page editor when the Soviet democratic uprising of rebel Boris Yeltsin was seriously taking hold. Having won his spurs years earlier as a newspaper reporter and editor in Virginia and Michigan, Snow was early to recognize the importance of Yeltsin’s uprising as Soviet Communist party secretary that came to fruition in March 1989.
Snow and his superb editorial page staff at The Washington Times, including Cort Kirkwood and Terry Jeffrey, pumped out daily editorials reporting how Yeltsin was sacked as Communist part chief for criticizing the slow pace of Mikhail Gorbachev’s supposed economic reforms.
Snow’s push, when other papers and news organizations were slow to front-page the unfolding Yeltsin story, put it on the president’s desk every morning. It was Snow’s editorial page that the president and vice president of the United States, secretaries of state and defense, anyone who mattered in Washington, D.C. read each and every day.
Snow’s editorial pages, more than the newspaper’s national and foreign sections, catalogued the break-up of the Soviet Union, in partnership with editor-in-chief Arnaud de Borchgrave, with news and commentary from a wide variety of voices. They absolutely knocked the socks off every other news organization.
At the time, I was shooting out my own tough investigative stories that were eclipsed by Snow’s foreign coverage, but he told me he wanted to feature our stuff in his editorials, and his editorial writers Kirkwood and Jeffrey made it happen.
Tony and I had lots of talks over the years about the marriage of impending news with his opinion push. He was the opinion guy, I was a news guy, but the beauty of our relationship over many years was that Tony Snow also was the quintessential news guy.
He knew that readers needed a thorough and honest report, but the truthful factual story was the bottom line. We had our strongly held conservative point of view, but that was always instructed by the factual story in every instance.
Tony’s ultimate objective always was to write and publish a thoroughly honest report, with commentary that pushed facts in the direction he wanted, but he never let his point of view get ahead of the facts, which always came first, because Tony’s heart was always foremost a reporter’s heart.
He was also anxious to help new young people coming into the business. I was teaching graduate journalism courses for Regent University and undergraduate courses through the World Journalism Institute and asked Tony to be a keynote WJI conference speaker when he was anchor for Fox News Sunday. "No problem," he said when I called him. "I'd love to." How much, I asked him? "My going rate is $10,000, but I'll take whatever you're offering," he said.
Tony loved the session. The conference group kept him for more than an hour and loved him too. As we walked to his car in the parking garage, I asked him, "How much do we owe you?" "Don't worry," he said. "Just pay for my parking and a few bucks extra. I enjoyed the session a lot. Those were our kind of people."
I loved Tony’s White House press briefings, because everyone in the room knew he was as good a reporter as all of them – better, in fact, than the liberal-left toadies Helen Thomas, David Gregory, and others.
Tony made mincemeat of these idiots every day on nationwide television with his wonderful good looks, winsome smile, and terrific ability to parry all of the White House press corps on any subject they raised – even telling them their questions were stupid and so were they every time he had the opportunity – always with a smile, debating stiletto, and with a flourish that always demolished them but never made him the bad guy.
The side of Tony Snow I knew quite well was the private Godly side, very prayerful and spiritual. This is why he was able to handle the ongoing cancer so well for many years, while holding strong with help of loving wife, Jill, and adorable children Kendall, Robbie, and Kristi, who he loved with all his heart, and they him.
What a guy. There are few like Tony Snow. We miss him terribly, but the legacy he left us is huge.
