Posted by Mark Silva at 12:20 pm CDT
Tony Snow, the president’s new press secretary, a seasoned television news commentator and cancer survivor, turned speechless toward the end of his first nationally televised press briefing today.
Someone had asked him about the yellow bracelet he wears. “I had cancer last year,” Snow replied readily, then pausing and choking up.
“Just having gone through this last year… was the best thing that ever happened to me,” he added, unable to continue speaking for some time as he attempted to compose himself before an overflow crowd during his televised debut in the White House press briefing room.
“It’s my Ed Muskie moment,” Snow said, with an allusion to the presidential candidate who once shed tears outside a critical newspaper’s office in New Hampshire.
Snow, finally explaining that he lost his mother to the same disease, colon cancer, when he was 17, offered a testimonial to the medical progress that has been made in the treatment of disease since then.
The 51-year-old father of three and former longtime commentator for FOX News radio and TV also dismissed a question about any “sacrifice” that he may have made in taking a cut in pay to serve as the president’s spokesman.
“It’s an honor,” Snow declared of his new White House gig:
“I go out at the end of that lawn, I look back at the pillars and think, Man, I’m working here!”‘
