Gawker today, asking, “Did Newt Gingrich Out Brit Hume’s Dead Gay Son?,” called the tragic-yet-true story of a gay journalist who committed suicide by shooting himself to death in the head, “one of Washington’s oldest and juiciest political rumors.” The story itself is tragic and compelling, but to call the story of any death one of the “juiciest” truly shows Gawker’s extreme insensitivity.
The story dates back to 1997, and involves the late Sandy Hume, a journalist for The Hill and the son of Brit Hume, who is now a veteran Fox News reporter and commentator.
Out of nowhere, the Miami Herald has dusted off and expanded upon one of Washington’s oldest and juiciest political rumors: The one about a rising young beltway journalist and his gay affair with a powerful GOP congressman, and how the journalist shot himself in the head when his lover’s political rival threatened to out them. According to the Herald, that rival may have been Newt Gingrich.
The rumor, in brief, is as follows: In the summer of 1997, the Hill‘s Sandy Hume—the then-28-year-old son of Fox News’ Brit Hume—broke a blockbuster story about four GOP congressman who plotted, and failed, to overthrow Newt Gingrich as Speaker. One of those men was Bill Paxon, a New York Republican who was married to fellow Congresswoman Susan Molinari. Another of the plotters, Majority Leader Dick Armey, scuttled the coup when he learned that Paxon, and not he, would replace Gingrich. Armey later disavowed the whole attempt and claimed not to have been involved.
A few months later, in February 1998, Paxon launched an attempt to unseat Armey from his leadership position. Just days later, Sandy Hume killed himself with a gunshot to the head. Just days after that, Paxon suddenly and inexplicably resigned and never returned to public life. Almost immediately, rumors began flying that Hume and Paxon had been having an affair, and that Armey had threatened to out them. Hence the suicide and the sudden resignation. The theory was common knowledge among the D.C. press corps, but it never made it to print (as far as I can tell) beyond the dark corners of the internet and an angry passage, years later, in Joe Scarborough’s Rome Wasn’t Burnt in a Day accusing Armey of smearing Hume.
To be fair, if you make it all the way to the end of John Cook’s Gawker piece, you’ll read this, the final sentence:
The GOP field seems increasingly to be narrowing down to Mitt Romney versus the guy who may have caused one of Fox’s most beloved on-air personalities to suffer a personal tragedy beyond measure.
That’s a little different than, “one of Washington’s oldest and juiciest political rumors.”
All this aside, the story is tragic and fascinating and I do wish we knew more. Apologies, and thoughts, go out to Brit Hume and his family.