Monday, July 14, 2008

Snow Before He Was a Rock Star   [Lisa Schiffren]

In the end, which came too soon, Tony Snow was a well-known TV personality, who gave it up to articulate the views of a White House that couldn't talk straight. In the beginning, he was the deputy editorial page editor at the Detroit News, the place he became the man everyone knew later. I worked with Tony there, for the three years that I was an editorial writer on his staff. Our editor, Tom Bray, had come to Detroit from the Wall Street Journal in 1983 to turn a stodgy, traditionally Republican editorial page into an exciting, powerful voice of the Reagan Revolution. For this mission he assembled a staff of mostly very young people — there weren't many seasoned Reaganites back then, and fewer still willing to leave Washington.

Bray's job offer inevitably came after taking the candidate to lunch at a prestigious local club, and then for a drive around downtown Detroit, pointing out the burned out businesses, the "riot glass" (a.k.a. brick) still in many storefronts from 1968, the projects, the urban blight, deserted neighborhoods, visible poverty and the government building projects of the past two decades which had had the perverse effect of destroying commerce and urban life somewhere else. On top of that, there was a prolonged rustbelt recession, and the auto industry was well along in its demise. These conditions, the wasteland that was Detroit in 1983, Tom would point out, could all be traced to the Great Society, with its often misguided policies and unintended consequences. Who wouldn't jump at the chance to work in such a place, preaching small government, supply-side economics and opportunity-society policies to people who were profoundly hostile to those ideas? Who would?

Tony, and the rest of us, were true believers. But, while the rest of us occasionally wanted to flee, and some did, Tony never flagged in his enthusiasm for the task, or his sincere conviction that he could make a difference in people's lives for the better. He was ambitious, of course, but his ambition included a real passion for changing the thinking in the city that embodied America's failed liberal experiment.

As an editor, Tony gave me one of the two best pieces of professional advice for producing readable journalism I ever received. Editorials and columns are a short form of essay writing, often about complicated, interwoven matters. Though we worked hard to bring new reporting and analysis to our arguments, the pieces still had to fit into a limited space. Being young and earnest, I wrote long, to explain it all. I can still hear Tony saying, as he slashed sentences and paragraphs, "You don't have to tell them everything you know. You'll get another crack at it." I'm not saying I loved it at the time, but to this day I repeat it while writing – though perhaps not enough.

Despite writing short, it was always important to Tony to master the details of policy, the history of the issue, and the philosophy that under-girded it. He had utter disdain for the typical journalist's inch-deep familiarity — and conventional liberal assumptions — about the topic of the day. The effortlessness he later showed on TV came after much hard work.

The other thing I learned from Tony, by example not instruction, was that getting people to listen to then alien conservative policy arguments, required that they believe you cared about them. It was not enough to criticize. Cold analysis, even with really good data, was not going to move real people, mired in the effects of policies that led them to self-destructive behavior. Tony went out and found people practicing the virtues he espoused in print. Perhaps this seems obvious. But it was not the usual practice of big city editorial pages then or now to do the leg work, to get to know the local black ministers, for instance, well enough to turn up the conservative ones (and to sit through their services); to court the city councilwoman thinking about running for Congress, and explain why she should promote opportunity not welfare. That took real passion and commitment, with no hint of cynicism.

Tony, who had taught in Kenya, hated that our page's crusade against welfare as we then knew it allowed critics to call us racists. So he spent time forging relationships in Detroit's various black communities, where he could soften the message with personal diplomacy. In those bitter, racially -charged years that mattered.

Lest this all sound grim, a tremendous sense of irreverence pervaded those offices. Tony had a fine sense of the humor in the passing political theater.

In those early years we spent a lot of time wondering about the future and how to get there. It was pretty clear that with his natural good looks, charm, and intelligence Tony would succeed in the world of media and politics — as he so impressively did. What could not have been clear was that he would become such a loving family man, a devoted husband to Jill, who worked there too, a generous soul, and ultimately an example of true Christian humility. Those virtues don't frequently accompany good looks and charm, all of which makes his early death a bigger pity still.

07/14 03:14 PMShare