Sandy Hume, 1969-1998
Sandy Hume, 1969-1998 By last week, my friend Sandy Hume had become, at age 28, the hottest new reporter in Washington. He had single-handedly turned the Hill newspaper into must reading. Sandy...
...At the Heidelberg Bakery where we went for dessert, the girls behind the counter would break their lanes (to use a special-teams metaphor Sandy would have liked) to wait on him...
...Sandy came to Washington as an intern at the American Spectator six years ago, fresh out of Middlebury...
...The motto of his life could have been that throwaway line you see in a lot of book introductions: "My good points owe much to my friends...
...Sadly, Sandy always had a higher opinion of other people than he did of himself...
...He was, as a friend once put it, the kind of guy who danced with wallflowers...
...You could safely tell Sandy things you would tell no one else...
...He added to his craftsmanship the key element that would eventually have made him not just a good but a great reporter: an unfeigned fascination with others...
...He was informal— but with perfect manners...
...He was the kind of Washington Redskins fan who mistakes the team's fortunes for his own...
...News and this magazine...
...Instead, he decided to teach himself the reporter's trade the grueling, inglorious, lonely—and only—way: by covering fires and zoning disputes and two-bit court cases for a smalltown paper in rural Virginia...
...Look at the variety of people he wrote about: Christian conservatives, Ron Brown, gay-rodeo fans (the article was called, in a burst of collaborative genius, "Bum Steer"), the plutocrats in the Clinton administration, McDonald's employees spewing venom at the plutocrats in the Clinton administration, anti-Gingrich coup plotters (like Dick Armey), opponents of the anti-Gingrich coup (like Dick Armey), and so on...
...Of one particularly un-shut-up-able woman, he once whispered, "She seems to have been electrocuted on the security fence of her narrative...
...But it was enough to lead to freelance work at the New Republic, George, and the Texas Monthly...
...Now there's no way to repay it...
...Sandy insisted on eating there every time he came back to visit...
...He had all the attributes of a natural cad—extreme handsomeness of the rugged type, a sense of the ridiculous, and a quick wit that was a marvel...
...But Sandy's virtues weren't accompanied by the usual corresponding vices...
...It led, about a month ago, to Sandy's taking up a regular spot as a political analyst on Fox, and a prospect nearly as tempting from ABC...
...These imitations were of roll-on-the-floor hilarity, the best being his account of a boss who had hurriedly left town and called Sandy from the plane to ask him to retrieve a stool sample from his house...
...Sandy broke the major congressional story of 1997— that of the House Republicans' botched coup against Newt Gingrich...
...In this he showed good character and bad judgment...
...Sandy didn't do that...
...His autumn Sundays were a ritual of cat-and-mouse with the ushers at RFK Stadium, who were always trying to take away his flags and banners and placards, and Mondays after the 'Skins had lost were a horror...
...At the Spectator, editor Wlady Pleszczynski and I used to think that Sandy's greatest strength was a modesty, even humility, that extended to every facet of his character...
...No wonder, once Sandy came to Capitol Hill, he was "in the back-field" on so many stories...
...jockish (all-conference in lacrosse)—but without the jock's cavalier indifference to others' feelings...
...On Friday, after Sandy came by the office, we walked out onto 17th Street, smoked a few cigarettes, and ran through our repertoire of reliably funny jokes about old friends...
...Sandy was being courted by U.S...
...my errors are all my own...
...But what a friend he was...
...If women were wild about Sandy, it wasn't because he was a lady's man...
...Viola Lee, the generally reserved owner of the China Rose restaurant where we ate daily, would run to the door to meet him...
...Viola never let him pay for a meal...
...He was a mimic who could imitate anybody: not just voices but walks, tics, posture, and subject matter...
...He was well-connected and well-liked enough to have coasted into a number of jobs that would have kept him in Washington with a minimum of effort and a maximum of recreation...
...Because Sandy, for good and bad, had a boundless capacity for empathy...
...Sandy promised he would call over the weekend...
...manly— but without aggressiveness...
...Now he has made a horrible mistake that has cost us beyond reckoning...
...This made him questing, curious, honest, and, above all, diligent...
...it was because he was a gentleman...
...And last Sunday, Sandy killed himself...
...Christopher Caldwell...
...To be with Sandy was to laugh and laugh and laugh...
...This was only a small corner of what he was working on...
...By the time he came back to Washington two years ago, he was a top-notch reporter...
...All of us who knew him had occasion to draw—and overdraw—on Sandy's generosity...
...Sandy read a lot, heard a lot, knew a lot, but, rare among Washingtonians, he was always more interested in what he didn't know than in what he did...
Vol. 3 • March 1998 • No. 25
