Howard Fineman, the longtime Washington scribe who mastered a multitude of different mediums over the course of several distinguished decades in journalism, died Tuesday evening at 75 after a two-year-long fight with pancreatic cancer. The news was announced<\/a> by his wife, Amy Nathan.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Howard was likely a familiar figure to you all. Not only was he a ubiquitous presence on MSNBC<\/a> and a prolific writer for Newsweek magazine during its golden age, but he also played a prominent role at HuffPost, having served as the site\u2019s global editor for a time. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Global is a good way to describe Howard. He had a gravitational pull about him. He was a man in perpetual motion, reporting and writing and pundit-ing \u2014 seemingly unsatisfied unless he was contributing to the day\u2019s conversation. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI\u2019ve gone from the manual typewriter to Twitter,\u201d he told me of his career when we spoke for this piece. \u201cI\u2019ve done everything but skywriting.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Stricken with terminal cancer, he said he\u2019d try it in his remaining time. It was a joke, of course. But at that moment, it wasn\u2019t hard to envision him up in the plane. There were few stories he wouldn\u2019t chase. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n I first met Howard as a researcher for his book, \u201cThe Thirteen American Arguments.\u201d It was a lofty project, trying to distill roughly 250 years of history into an arbitrary number of neatly tailored, binary disputes. He would confide later that it was \u201cclassically overwrought.\u201d Nonetheless, it was a best-seller. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n From there, Howard played an outsized role in my professional life, helping me get into the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (where he had also gone) and Newsweek\u2019s internship program. He then joined me at HuffPost, where I served as politics editor at the time. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Despite all that overlapping history, it was in the years after we both left HuffPost that we grew closer. Bumping into him around the neighborhood or sitting over coffee, I developed an immense fondness for Howard. He was a mensch in the truest sense. He loved mentoring younger reporters, and we, in turn, grew attached to him. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n I began to recognize that this person who I had, for so long, seen as an emblem of the D.C. establishment was, in fact, discomforted by it. He wanted to witness history, not be a part of it. He had gone into journalism because it let him scratch his curiosities and (like so many in the field) channel his insecurities. He had a virtuous view of the line of work. I\u2019m not sure he could have enjoyed anything else.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI\u2019m not the world\u2019s most social person by nature,\u201d he told me. \u201cThe way I could square being an outsider and being part of the human race was by being in a newsroom.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Howard was born on Nov. 17, 1948, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His mother was an English teacher, and his father was a shoe company manufacturer\u2019s representative. From an early age, it was clear the career path he\u2019d chart.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n On election night in 1956, he, an 8-year-old, converted the den of his home into a makeshift newsroom where he broadcast the results to his parents and laid out piles of paper to look like the cards the networks fed into their rudimentary computers. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt was really one of the nerdiest things you could imagine,\u201d Howard recalled. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n He attended Colgate University, where he was the editor-in-chief of The Colgate Maroon, and graduated from the Columbia Journalism School in 1973. From there, he went to The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n A Jewish kid from Squirrel Hill may have seemed like an odd fit for bourbon country. But the paper would be the spiritual tent pole of his career. Southern politics was unnerving \u2014 he covered a Klan rally during the day because his editor forbade him from doing so at night \u2014 but it had its undeniable charms. A \u201cporchfront style,\u201d as he put it, that was ripe for \u201cstorytelling.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIn many ways, that was the best,\u201d he said of his Louisville days. \u201cThe irony is for many reporters back then who were hungry to come to Washington they didn\u2019t realize how lucky they were. It was wonderful, and I loved every minute of it.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n I always wondered why Howard didn\u2019t just stay in Louisville, given the sentimentality he felt for his time there. But he flicked away such hypotheticals like pesky gnats. D.C. was his goal. He saw the city as \u201can imperium not unlike Rome,\u201d where \u201call the vectors of power in the country intersect.\u201d And he wanted to be at that intersection. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n In 1977, he joined the Courier-Journal\u2019s Washington bureau and, within three years, was at Newsweek. His trajectory continued from there: labor reporter, political correspondent, chief political correspondent, senior editor, and then deputy Washington bureau chief.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n To chart that path required obvious skill, and Howard certainly had that. But it also required a bit of professional ferocity too. Colleagues described an intensity to Howard that I saw later in his career. He wanted to have the best Rolodex and the best assignments. He had a well-known competitive streak that fed his work ethic. He labored late into the night to practice for TV hits the next morning. And he litigated everything \u2014 a byproduct of the law degree he had earned taking night classes at the Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cHe was a force of nature,\u201d recalled Jonathan Alter, his colleague for years at Newsweek. \u201cHe knew everybody in Washington. He not only knew them but had a sophisticated take on who they were and what they were doing. He was extraordinarily politically shrewd.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But Howard also benefited from larger, tectonic changes in the media industry. News magazines were elevating their correspondents into bonafide must-reads. Broadcast news was turning to younger on-air talent. Watergate had given reporting moral virtue and real celebrity. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI went into Columbia wanting to be Teddy White and came out wanting to be Woodward and Bernstein,\u201d Howard told me. \u201cThey had saved, one might argue, the American constitutional government. And they became famous also, let\u2019s say that.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Howard continued moving with those tectonic shifts: becoming one of the most recognizable pundits on cable news and then joining the online journalism wave right as it was peaking. But he had \u2014 what seemed to me, at least \u2014 a complicated relationship with that concept of fame. I asked him once if he had been motivated by it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIf you do that to me, I\u2019m going to come back from the grave and kill you,\u201d he shot back. Minutes later, he acknowledged the appeal. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n For Howard, the discomfort was not in the fame he had rightfully achieved but in the suggestion that he had moved on from his Pittsburgh roots and Louisville molding for something facile. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n In our talks, he repeatedly described himself as an \u201coutsider.\u201d It was not lost on him that Newsweek was the scrappy underdog next to the Time and that HuffPost was the renegade among its peers. He took pride in those fits. And he was critical, too, of reporters who didn\u2019t share his conviction that the profession was not part of power but a check on it. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIn Washington,\u201d he said, \u201cwe delude ourselves as journalists into thinking we are part of the establishment. We really, ultimately, are not.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It was for this that I came to not just appreciate Howard but love him. He was righteous about the right things and dogged in the right ways. He had big thoughts and surprising depths. He had a value system in an industry and town where that can often get lost. Of all the pieces he wrote, the presidents he\u2019d interviewed, and the places he\u2019d been, it was his reflection on the shooting<\/a> at the Tree of Life synagogue \u2014 where he\u2019d been bar mitzvah-ed \u2014 that he regarded as his best work. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n He never truly left that den in his home in Pittsburgh. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"Howard](\"https:\/\/img.huffingtonpost.com\/asset\/666871542400001b00ede3f4.jpg?ops=scalefit_1280_noupscale&format=webp\"\/)
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