Howard Fineman, the witty, encyclopedic political reporter who dominated the rapidly evolving world of Washington journalism for nearly four decades and moved effortlessly from daily news reporting to Newsweek magazine, cable news pundit and later to the forefront of online journalism, died Tuesday at his Washington home. He was 75.
His son, Nick, said the cause of death was pancreatic cancer.
Feynman began his career at the Louisville Courier-Journal in Kentucky in the early 1970s and moved to Washington in the late 1970s, where he spent nearly 30 years as a reporter and editor, first at the Courier-Journal and then at Newsweek.
He was part of a post-Watergate generation of journalists that, though no longer directly inspired by the militant reformist spirit of a young Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein, Mr. Feynman and his peers brought to their work a polished professionalism combined with a dogged ambition befitting the Ronald Reagan era in Washington.
It was a time of greater cooperation between political parties and between political parties and the press, and Mr. Feynman quickly gained a reputation as one of the quickest, most productive reporters, able to get the slow, steady scoops that define a successful Washington journalist.
Feynman’s work helped Newsweek rise to prominence during what many consider to be the golden age of news magazines. Along with colleagues such as Gloria Borger, Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas, Feynman was instrumental in creating a weekly editorial that blended breaking news with careful analysis and context, setting the tone for how many Americans talked about events in the country.
“He believed in the story and was always attentive to where the political debate was heading,” historian Jon Meacham, who worked with Feynman at Newsweek, said in an email. “Howard was a master of what we call ‘the violinist’ and a leading voice at the magazine, writing articles that were the prelude to everything that followed.”
Feynman prided himself on being an early adopter of anything that could help him break the news, and he says he was one of the first Washington reporters to have a laptop computer: a TRS-80 Model 100 with enough memory for about 10 pages of text and a modem to contact his editors at Newsweek.
He was one of the first Washington journalists to recognize the impact that cable news was having on the industry, just as it was booming in the early 1980s. CNN, and later Fox and MSNBC, were clamoring for smart, televisible, knowledgeable pundits to fill talk-show slots, and Feynman was all three.
He was a regular on shows like MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews” and PBS’s “Washington Week,” and later became a frequent guest on satirical news shows like “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report.”
“He was a pioneer in transitioning from print to television,” EJ Dionne, then a reporter for The New York Times and now a columnist for The Washington Post, said in an interview.
Mr. Feynman estimates he appeared 200 times on shows about President Bill Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky affair in the late 1990s, and his deep roots in talk-show world earned him one of Washington’s most elusive accolades, the butt of a well-worn joke: “If Howard Feynman’s here, who’s on TV?”
Politicians can be similarly aggressive: In 1999, after George W. Bush declared he had all but won the Republican presidential nomination, beating his rival, Sen. John S. McCain of Arizona, Sen. McCain called Feynman a “bumbling idiot” with no understanding of American affairs outside Washington.
Feynman was unfazed. He quickly called McCain to make amends, telling him that McCain was right about Washington being insular, but that he didn’t like the East Coast bubble either, and that he had already traveled thousands of miles to cover the nascent election season.
As a gesture of reconciliation, McCain gave Feynman a pair of red boxing gloves.
Indeed, Feynman remains proud of his Kentucky work roots, where he covered politics and policy and learned to write quickly to deadlines. He spent four years at the Courier Journal covering energy and environmental issues, including the notorious toxic waste landfill discovered in 1977 on Love Canal near Niagara Falls, New York.
“It was the perfect place to see what the next half century of American politics was going to be,” he said in an interview for this obituary last year. “The rise of Reagan, the rise of conservatives, and what we now call the anti-Woke movement, all of that impacted the South.”
The Courier Journal sent him to Washington in December 1977. After moving to Newsweek in 1980 (while earning a law degree in between jobs), he served as political reporter, chief political reporter, senior editor and deputy Washington bureau chief.
By the 2000s, he had become a reliable fixture in Washington’s old journalism establishment, centered on print and cable news. Many were surprised when he left Newsweek in 2010 for The Huffington Post, which was just beginning to build its news business. Once again, he sensed a revolutionary shift in political journalism was underway, as digital media unravelled the rhythms and conventions imposed by print.
“When you really think about it, it wasn’t a difficult decision at all, because this is where the action is,” he told The New York Times in 2010. “I don’t think anybody can pass up the opportunity to dive headfirst into the future.”
In 2009, shortly before leaving Newsweek, Mr. Feynman published “Thirteen American Debates: The Enduring Debates that Define and Fuel Our Nation,” a book that offered a wide-ranging tour of some of the country’s long-standing divisions, but also served as a kind of road map to Mr. Feynman’s views on the enduring themes of his career.
“Democracy is rough and cruel,” he told The Jewish Weekly in 2009. “We are the first country founded on the idea that no one has the ultimate answers in public life. You have to debate and argue to figure out what to do. Our country was born out of debate about our society.”
Howard David Feynman was born in Pittsburgh on November 17, 1948. His father, Charles, worked for the Dexter Shoe Company, and his mother, Jean (Lederman) Feynman, was an English teacher.
He married Amy Nathan, a technology lawyer, in 1981. In addition to son Nick, a senior producer at MSNBC, he is survived by Mr. Feynman’s wife, daughter Meredith Feynman, an author and speaker, and sister Beth Feynman Schroeter.
Feynman liked to joke that his argumentative father helped prepare him for a career in journalism, particularly as a television commentator.
“There’s a direct line from my table to Hardball,” he told The Jewish Weekly. “My dad was like Chris Matthews, asking his own questions and answering his own questions.”
He studied English at Colgate University, where he edited the school’s newspaper, graduating in 1970. He won a travel scholarship and traveled to Eastern Europe and the Middle East, tracing his family’s Jewish roots.
After returning to the United States, he earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1973. He received his law degree from the University of Louisville in 1980.
Feynman left The Huffington Post in 2018 to become a political analyst for NBC and MSNBC and teach a class called “New Media Journalism and Politics in the Age of Trump” at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
He also grew increasingly skeptical of the vision of America he painted in his 2013 book: After the previous decade of polarization and bitter partisan conflict, he said in 2024, he was “naive” to think that common sense political good was still a given, or that free debate would produce progress.
And he worried that the desire for fame and fortune had weakened the political journalistic community just as technological and social changes were fragmenting traditional news organizations. But only a revitalized news industry can reverse the country’s downward trend, he added.
“I see us as in the midst of a new global war over the search for truth,” he said. “We have to rally together in the pursuit of truth in order to survive, in order for America and our democracy to survive.”
Alex Traub Contributed report.
