Howard Fineman, a Newsweek political correspondent and television commentator for decades who brought behind-the-scenes insight to news cycles often dominated by horse-race campaign coverage, died June 11 at his home in Washington. He was 75.
His death, from pancreatic cancer, was confirmed by his son, Nick Fineman.
Mr. Fineman spent 30 years at Newsweek beginning in 1980, serving as chief political correspondent and deputy Washington bureau chief during the era when the magazine, then owned by The Washington Post, was one of the most widely read newsweeklies in the United States.
He was also an analyst for NBC and MSNBC for years and became familiar to television viewers through his appearances on shows including “Hardball With Chris Matthews,” PBS’s “Washington Week in Review” and CNN’s “Capital Gang Sunday.”
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Deeply sourced on both sides of the political aisle, Mr. Fineman earned the admiration of news junkies and newsmakers alike.
“Anybody who dealt with him during his career found him to be fair-minded but tough, and a guy who did his homework,” Karl Rove, the Republican political operative and adviser to President George W. Bush, said in an interview. “He was on top of everything,” Rove added, “constantly checking and rechecking what he was hearing.”
Mr. Fineman delivered a steady supply of cover stories for Newsweek about the major political figures of the day and the forces, seen or unseen, that sent the political winds in one direction or another.
During the 1996 presidential race, Republican candidate Bob Dole, the former U.S. Senate majority leader, often emphasized his childhood in dust-bowl Kansas and his World War II combat service that left him with a permanently disabled arm.
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“It’s worthy, inspiring stuff,” Mr. Fineman wrote. But it was also true that Dole and his wife, Liddy, had “lived most of their adult lives in a place you won’t see on the biographical maps provided by the Dole campaign,” he noted. “It’s a two-mile-square area in downtown Washington.”
“Unless the Doles can convince the public there is something redeeming about their Washington world, they probably won’t be moving to the White House,” Mr. Fineman continued. “Insiders are people, too. But that’s not an easy sell in a country that basically despises its capital.”
Mr. Fineman was evenhanded in his criticism, once remarking in a speech that President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, was “at his most genuine when he’s the most phony.” (Mr. Fineman cited as evidence what he alleged to be a “phony tear” that the president shed after noticing a TV camera following a memorial service for Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, who died in a 1996 plane crash.) He contributed to Newsweek coverage of Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky that received a National Magazine Award in reporting.
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Shortly before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Newsweek featured a story by Mr. Fineman about Bush’s religious faith. The story, part of a package for which Newsweek received the National Magazine Award for general excellence, showcased Mr. Fineman’s attention to detail and the understanding he could draw from it.
“George W. Bush rises ahead of the dawn most days, when the loudest sound outside the White House is the dull, distant roar of F-16s patrolling the skies,” the article began.
“Even before he brings his wife, Laura, a morning cup of coffee, he goes off to a quiet place to read alone. His text isn’t news summaries or the overnight intelligence dispatches. Those are for later, downstairs, in the Oval Office. It’s not recreational reading (recently, a biography of Sandy Koufax). Instead, he’s told friends, it’s a book of evangelical mini-sermons, ‘My Utmost for His Highest.’ The author is Oswald Chambers, and, under the circ*mstances, the historical echoes are loud.”
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Chambers, Mr. Fineman explained, was a Baptist minister from Scotland who preached to soldiers who claimed Jerusalem for the British Empire at the end of World War I. “Now there is talk of a new war in the Near East,” Mr. Fineman wrote, “this time in a land once called Babylon.”
Mr. Fineman had previously contributed to coverage of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks for which Newsweek won another National Magazine Award for general excellence. Aboard Air Force One on Thanksgiving 2001, he sat with Bush for the president’s first major interview after the al-Qaeda strikes on New York City and Washington.
In that interview, Mr. Fineman wrote, Bush had already begun speaking of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein as “evil.”
Mr. Fineman later reflected that, like many journalists and members of what he described as the “decision-making machinery of Washington,” he had failed to sufficiently question Bush’s case for war in Iraq, in particular his claims about Hussein’s supposed caches of weapons of mass destruction and the promise of democratic revolution in Iraq.
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“Washington and New York, the centers of the American media, had been attacked on 9/11,” he wrote in 2013 in the Huffington Post (now HuffPost), where he became senior politics editor and later global editorial director after leaving Newsweek in 2010.
“We all knew, or knew of, people who had been killed. We had only one president, and as incurious and unprepared as he was, there was a natural desire to see him somehow grow in office to meet the moment.
“Of course for journalists, the most patriotic thing we can do is our jobs — which meant that we all should have doubled down on skepticism and tough questions,” he continued. “Some did. I wish I could say that I was one of them.”
Mr. Fineman wrote one of his most personal commentaries in the wake of the attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh. He had grown up in Squirrel Hill and celebrated his bar mitzvah at the congregation, where 11 worshipers died in 2018 in one of the worst episodes of antisemitic violence in U.S. history.
The massacre, Mr. Fineman wrote in an essay published in the New York Times, had shaken his “perhaps naive faith in this country, one that I began developing as a boy growing up in Pittsburgh.”
Howard David Fineman was born on Nov. 17, 1948, in Pittsburgh. His father was a manufacturer’s representative for a shoe company, and his mother was an English teacher.
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Mr. Fineman credited his view of public life, and the importance of robust debate in a democracy, to his parents. There was a “direct line” from his family dinner table to “Hardball,” he reflected years later. His father, he recalled, “was like Chris Matthews because he would both ask and answer his own questions.”
At Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., Mr. Fineman was editor in chief of the campus weekly and received a bachelor’s degree in English in 1970. Three years later, he received a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.
He began his career at the Louisville Courier-Journal in Kentucky, then regarded as one of the nation’s leading regional newspapers, where he developed a reputation as an aggressive reporter. He attended law school on the side, graduating from the University of Louisville in 1980.
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Along with a colleague from a rival newspaper, Mr. Fineman was arrested in 1974 and charged with disorderly conduct after attempting to eavesdrop on a meeting of the local Fraternal Order of Police. A judge directed a verdict of not guilty.
Their publisher denounced their activities as “morally wrong,” Time magazine reported, but praised their “vigorous enterprise and competitive spirit.”
Mr. Fineman worked in the Courier-Journal’s Washington bureau before joining Newsweek. He played a role in the collapse of the 1988 Democratic presidential campaign of Gary Hart, a former U.S. senator from Colorado who withdrew from the race amid revelations of marital infidelities.
Hart had long been trailed by rumors of womanizing, but a 1987 Newsweek profile by Mr. Fineman — which quoted a former adviser as saying that “he’s always in jeopardy of having the sex issue raised if he can’t keep his pants on” — renewed interest in the matter by other national journalists and opposing candidates. (The adviser later walked back his comment, saying it was “contrary to the actual facts as I know them.”)
The Post sold Newsweek in 2010 amid drastically declining circulation. Shortly after the sale was announced, Mr. Fineman joined what is now HuffPost, then an upstart in digital journalism, where he remained until 2018. He later wrote for the NBC and MSNBC websites as well as other outlets.
In 1984, he married Amy Nathan. Besides his wife, of Washington, survivors include two children, Meredith Fineman of Los Angeles and Nick Fineman of Manhattan; and a sister.
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Mr. Fineman was the author of the book “The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates That Define and Inspire Our Country” (2008).
Although he frustrated politicians at times when he analyzed their weaknesses or expressed doubts about their prospects, Mr. Fineman earned their respect — even, perhaps, a form of friendship.
During the 2000 campaign for the Republican nomination for president, Sen. John S. McCain of Arizona denounced Mr. Fineman on the radio program “Imus in the Morning” as one of Washington’s “gasbags” after Mr. Fineman accurately predicted that Bush, and not McCain, would be the ultimate victor.
Mr. Fineman, who was listening to the program, called in to say McCain had a “great shot.” The notoriously hot-tempered McCain was mollified and later jokingly sent Mr. Fineman a pair of red boxing gloves, proposing that they settle their differences on pay-per-view.
