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July 14, 2008
Tony Snow, R.I.P.
by Victor Davis Hanson
PajamasMedia.com
In 2003, I was the visiting Shifrin Professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, and did a few Sunday morning appearances and other things with Tony Snow in the D.C. Fox studio. I remember how he came in with cut-offs and a tie and coat above for the camera, with an infectious laugh and aw-shucks persona. I liked him a lot, and later did his radio show a few times, and saw him at some D.C. events. The chorus that he was “a nice guy” is exactly the impression I got every time. But one thing I noticed was that he had an excellent memory and could remember the exact details of our past conversations despite months in-between.
His decision to lecture nonstop while very, very sick to take care of his family reminds me of Grant with throat cancer refusing opiates so that he could finish his memoirs (after the disastrous collapse of Grant and Ward that bankrupted him). He did just that and the royalties kept his family going years after Grant died (remember the sad photo of Grant under a blanket writing furiously at Mount MacGregor).
Nothing is more demanding than the lecture circuit (up at 5 a.m. to fly 9 hrs in and out airports, the mandatory pre-talk dinner, the lecture, the hostile questions, the media interview, and often the next day teaching a class or additional meetings, and then the travel back [I’d rather disk on a Massey for 14 hrs in the summer than fly to New York for a university lecture and fly back.]). How Snow kept at it with metastasized colon cancer, radiation and chemotherapy is almost inexplicable.
In the last two (wierdly bad) years, I’ve had a ruptured appendix and the resulting mess taken out on a wooden table in a Red Crescent clinic in Libya, and subsequent peritonitis, and another operation for kidney stones, in addition to passing 5-6 jagged stones in the last 12 months and having 15 root canals and crowns since December in an effort to save my teeth (apparently soft teeth connected with the stone-making), all the while speaking about 35 times out-of-state per year. On bad days, I would often think of Snow and realize how minor my own ailments were in comparison — and again wonder how he did it.
©2008 Victor Davis Hanson