He also served as a commentator for NBC and MSNBC for many years, and became well known to television audiences through appearances on shows such as “Hardball With Chris Matthews,” PBS’s “Washington Week in Review” and CNN’s “Capital Gang Sunday.”
Feynman had in-depth knowledge of both sides of the political aisle and was admired by news junkies and newsmakers alike.
“Anyone who dealt with him throughout his career knew him to be fair but tough and well prepared,” Karl Rove, a Republican political activist and adviser to President George W. Bush, said in an interview. “He knew everything and he was always verifying and double-checking what he was hearing,” Rove added.
Feynman regularly contributed cover stories to Newsweek about the leading political figures of the day and people who, through visible or invisible forces, shifted the political winds.
During the 1996 presidential election, Republican candidate and former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole frequently touted his childhood in gritty Kansas and the fact that combat in World War II left him with a permanently disabled arm.
“It’s a valuable and moving read,” Feynman wrote, but he also noted that Dole and his wife, Liddy, “spent most of their adult lives in a place that wasn’t even on the biographical map provided by the Dole campaign. It’s a two-by-two mile area in downtown Washington.”
“The Doles probably won’t move into the White House unless they can convince people that there’s something redeeming about the world of Washington,” Feynman continued. “The people on the inside are people, too, but that’s not going to be easy to convince in a country that fundamentally despises its capital.”
Feynman is fair in his criticism, having once said in a speech that Democratic President Bill Clinton was “at his most sincere when he was at his most hypocritical.” (Feynman cited as evidence what he called the “tears of hypocrisy” shed by the president when he noticed the television cameras following a memorial for Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, who was killed in a 1996 plane crash.) He helped Newsweek magazine report on Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky, winning a National Magazine Award for his reporting.
Just before the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Newsweek magazine published an article by Feynman about President Bush’s faith. The article, which was part of a series for which Newsweek won a National Magazine Award for overall excellence, demonstrated Feynman’s attention to detail and the insight it provided.
“President George W. Bush wakes up before dawn most days, when the loudest sound outside the White House is the dull, distant rumble of F-16 fighter jets patrolling the skies overhead,” the article begins.
“Before bringing his wife Laura her morning coffee, he retreats to a quiet place to read alone. His books are not news recaps or overnight intelligence updates; they are read later, downstairs in the Oval Office. They are not recreational reading (a recent example was a biography of Sandy Koufax). He tells friends it is a collection of evangelical mini-sermons, My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers, which, in these circumstances, have strong historical resonance.”
Feynman describes Chambers as a Scottish Baptist minister who preached to soldiers who claimed Jerusalem for the British Empire at the end of World War I. “Now there are rumors of a new war in the Near East,” Feynman writes, “this time in a land once called Babylon.”
Feynman also contributed to Newsweek’s coverage of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, for which the magazine won a National Magazine Award for overall excellence. On Thanksgiving in 2001, he sat in on Air Force One with President Bush for his first major interview after the al-Qaida attacks on New York City and Washington.
According to Feynman’s account, during the interview, Bush had already begun calling Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein “evil.”
Feynman later reflected that, like many journalists and members of what he called “the Washington machine,” he had not sufficiently questioned Bush’s arguments in support of the Iraq war, particularly his assertion that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and his promise of a democratic revolution in Iraq.
“Washington and New York, the centers of American media, were attacked on 9/11,” he wrote for The Huffington Post (now The Huffington Post) in 2013. After leaving Newsweek in 2010, he became The Huffington Post’s senior political editor and later global managing director.
“We all knew, or had known, the people who were killed. We only had one president, and however disinterested and unprepared he was, there was a natural desire to see him somehow do his job and grow up to meet the moment.
“Of course, the most patriotic thing a journalist can do is do their job, which means we should all have doubled down on our skepticism and our hard questions,” he continued. “Some did, and I wish I could say I was one of them.”
Feynman penned one of his most personal commentaries following the attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood, where he grew up and celebrated his bar mitzvah in 2018, when 11 worshippers were killed in one of the deadliest incidents of anti-Semitic violence in U.S. history.
In an essay published in The New York Times, Feynman wrote that the massacre shook “the, perhaps naive, faith in this country that I had begun to develop as a boy growing up in Pittsburgh.”
Howard David Feynman was born in Pittsburgh on November 17, 1948. His father was a manufacturing agent for a shoe company and his mother was an English teacher.
Feynman credited his parents with instilling ideas about public life and the importance of vigorous debate in a democracy. Years later, Feynman recalled, there was a “direct connection” to “Hardball” from the family dinner table. His father, he recalled, was “kind of like Chris Matthews. He would ask his own questions and answer them.”
At Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, where Feynman was editor-in-chief of the campus weekly magazine, he earned a bachelor’s degree in English in 1970. Three years later, he earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.
He began his career as a reporter at the Louisville Courier Journal in Kentucky, one of the leading local newspapers in the country at the time, where he built a reputation as a proactive reporter, while attending law school and graduating from the University of Louisville in 1980.
Feynman and a colleague from a rival newspaper were arrested on disorderly conduct charges in 1974 after trying to wiretap a local Fraternal Order of Police meeting. A judge found them not guilty.
According to Time magazine, publishers condemned their activities as “morally wrong” but praised their “spirited enterprise and competitive spirit.”
Before joining Newsweek, Mr. Feynman worked in the Washington bureau of the Courier Journal, where he helped defeat the 1988 Democratic presidential race of former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart, who dropped out after an extramarital affair was revealed.
Rumors of Mr. Hart’s womanizing had long dogged him, but interest in the issue was revived among other national reporters and opponents in 1987 when a former adviser said in a Newsweek profile of Mr. Feynman that “if he took his trousers off, he was in constant danger of having his sex life revealed.” (The adviser later retracted the statement, saying it was “contrary to the facts as I know them.”)
The Washington Post sold Newsweek in 2010 amid a steep decline in circulation. Shortly after the sale was announced, Feinman joined what was then a digital journalism startup called The Huffington Post, where he stayed until 2018. He went on to write for the NBC and MSNBC websites and other outlets.
In 1984, he married Amy Nathan. In addition to his wife, who lives in Washington, he is survived by two children, Meredith Fineman of Los Angeles and Nick Fineman of Manhattan, and a sister.
Feynman is the author of Thirteen American Debates: The Enduring Debates that Define and Inspire Our Nation (2008).
Feynman sometimes annoyed politicians by analyzing their weaknesses and questioning their prospects, but he also won their respect and even a kind of friendship.
During the 2000 Republican presidential campaign, Senator John S. McCain of Arizona denounced Mr. Feynman on his radio show “Imus in the Morning” as one of Washington’s “sycophants” after Mr. Feynman accurately predicted that Mr. Bush, not Mr. McCain, would be the ultimate winner.
Feynman, who had been listening to the show, called in to say that McCain had made a “great shot.” McCain, who was famously short-tempered, was appeased and later jokingly gave Feynman a pair of red boxing gloves and suggested they settle their differences on pay-per-view.
