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 broke the major congressional story of 1997 — that of the House Republicans’ botched coup against Newt Gingrich. This was only a small corner of what he was working on. But it was enough to lead to freelance work at the New Republic, George, and the Texas Monthly. 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. Sandy was being courted by U.S. News and this magazine. 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 promised he would call over the weekend.
And last Sunday, Sandy killed himself.
Sandy came to Washington as an intern at the American Spectator six years ago, fresh out of Middlebury. 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. (Of one particularly un-shut-upable woman, he once whispered, “She seems to have been electrocuted on the security fence of her narrative.”)
But Sandy’s virtues weren’t accompanied by the usual corresponding vices. He was informal — but with perfect manners; manly — but without aggressiveness; jockish (all-conference in lacrosse) — but without the jock’s cavalier indifference to others’ feelings. 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. 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. This made him questing, curious, honest, and, above all, diligent. He was wellconnected 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. Sandy didn’t do that. 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.
By the time he came back to Washington two years ago, he was a top-notch reporter. 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. 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. No wonder, once Sandy came to Capitol Hill, he was “in the backfield” on so many stories. You could safely tell Sandy things you would tell no one else.
Because Sandy, for good and bad, had a boundless capacity for empathy. He was the kind of Washington Redskins fan who mistakes the team’s fortunes for his own. 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.
He was a mimic who could imitate anybody: not just voices but walks, tics, posture, and subject matter. 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.
To be with Sandy was to laugh and laugh and laugh. Viola Lee, the generally reserved owner of the China Rose restaurant where we ate daily, would run to the door to meet him. Sandy insisted on eating there every time he came back to visit. Viola never let him pay for a meal. 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. He was, as a friend once put it, the kind of guy who danced with wallflowers. If women were wild about Sandy, it wasn’t because he was a lady’s man; it was because he was a gentleman.
Sadly, Sandy always had a higher opinion of other people than he did of himself. 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; my errors are all my own.” In this he showed good character and bad judgment. Now he has made a horrible mistake that has cost us beyond reckoning.
But what a friend he was. All of us who knew him had occasion to draw — and overdraw — on Sandy’s generosity. Now there’s no way to repay it.
CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
