Watching the Election : And Who Is the Man Who Would Be Sam?

No matter which candidate moves into the White House after today’s election, one thing is certain: Sam Donaldson won’t be there to greet him.

After years of threatening to quit chasing after Presidents, the nation’s most famous network White House correspondent is finally leaving to anchor a new ABC prime-time magazine show that doesn’t even have a name yet or an official starting date. But it does have a time slot in early 1989: Thursdays at 10 p.m.

So who is the man who would be Sam? By all accounts among network insiders, he’s Brit Hume, ABC’s chief congressional correspondent and Saturday news anchor, best known as the panel member at the vice presidential debate who boldly asked Sen. Dan Quayle not once but twice to explain what he would do first if he suddenly became President.

Though ABC has made no official announcement, executives say privately that Hume, 45, who has been covering George Bush’s campaign since the Republican convention, has long held the inside track to replace Donaldson.

In November, 1984, when Donaldson almost left and didn’t (mostly because he and ABC news executives couldn’t decide what he would do after the White House), Hume was all but ready to move in at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Reportedly, Hume even has a letter from ABC attached to his contract practically guaranteeing him first crack at the job if Donaldson ever left. Though Hume and the network deny this, ABC executives have said in the not-so-distant past that Hume had “earned a chance to be right on top of the pile” when it came time to choose Donaldson’s replacement. (There apparently are no plans to replace CBS’ Bill Plante or NBC’s Chris Wallace at the White House.)

Ask Hume himself if he wants the beat, and he’s as cagey as the politicians he covers. He will not run for the job, he says. But if drafted, he will serve. Reluctantly.

“Do I want it? Not necessarily,” he says in an interview in Los Angeles after an especially grueling day with Bush. “The White House job is something that every Washington correspondent sooner or later has to face up to. Obviously, it’d be something I’d be interested in. But I have to talk to them about what the whole deal would be.”

But the problem confronting ABC News is that Hume is nowhere near as recognizable as Donaldson to TV viewers.

“You’ve got to understand this about anybody who replaces Sam,” Hume says wearily. “Sam is a megastar--in my judgment the most famous street correspondent probably in the history of the industry--and he is unique in that respect. So if I were to take that job, I’m stepping into an atmosphere in which there’s never been anybody like him before, and I don’t think there’ll ever be anybody like him again. There’s no way I’d be as famous as Sam. I’d just be another White House correspondent, and there’ve been legions of those.”

Then there’s the matter of their contrasting reporting styles. Though Hume’s voice is loud enough to be heard over the noisiest rally, it’s hard to imagine this University of Virginia gentleman shouting at the President a la Donaldson.

“I have no question that what I’d do would be nothing like what Sam has done,” Hume says candidly. “I have a much milder style than he has. It’s just a different approach. I do think there are times when the only way to get what you need is to be very aggressive about it. And Sam has always been the master at that. He is a genius at conceiving of the right question to ask on any given day that will elicit the newsworthy answer. Nobody does it better.”

But an ABC colleague, who asked not to be identified, believes Hume’s way may be just as effective. “He can elicit the same amount of information without being as abrasive.”

“Reasonably happy” covering Congress since 1977, Hume has been a regular on the annual Top 10 lists of the most visible network correspondents.

“The White House job by itself is good because you get on the air all the time. But it has terrible other problems,” he says, sighing audibly. “I mean, it’s an awful place to be cooped up. But the problem with the Hill is that it can get pretty draggy. It suffers from long droughts in which there really isn’t anything going on up there. But I have other interests I pursue.”

He finds time to write a biweekly column about personal computers for the Washington Post Writer’s Group syndicate. And he frequently pops up as the author of free-lance pieces in respected political magazines where he is freer to express his opinions.

A profile he did of Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) for the New Republic in 1986 caused quite a stir: First, Hume characterized Biden as a “windbag,” then quoted him as saying that he had on occasion threatened to leak details of covert operations of which he disapproved. The article came up during the Iran-Contra hearings, which Hume covered in 1977.

A veteran “boy on the bus,” Hume covered Bush’s primary campaign in 1980 and Walter Mondale’s presidential bid in 1984. Though known for his political acuity, Hume was caught off guard by the selection of Geraldine Ferraro as Mondale’s running mate when, just 90 minutes before the announcement, he declared on “Nightline” that Ferraro was probably out of the running.

And this year, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, not Hume, got the scoop that Bush had selected Quayle.

A product of a wealthy Washington family and an alumnus of the posh St. Albans School, Hume received his journalistic training at the Hartford Times, UPI and the Baltimore Evening Sun. In 1970, while on a fellowship at the Washington Journalism Center, he wrote a book about the United Mineworkers Union, “Death and the Mines.”

Later that year, he went to work as a reporter for the controversial Washington columnist Jack Anderson, where he became one of the targets of a 3-month, unsuccessful spying plot by the Central Intelligence Agency to determine the sources of Anderson’s news stores. Hume was known by the CIA as “eggnog.” After 3 years with Anderson, Hume became a free-lance writer and wrote a memoir, “Inside Story.”

In 1973, he went to work for ABC as a consultant to the documentary unit. Three years later he was asked to become a correspondent in the Washington Bureau.

“I had to start over from scratch in the sense that I had to learn all the skills of broadcasting. And they’re not easily learned,” Hume recalls. In 1977, he was assigned to the House of Representatives and then was switched to the more prestigious Senate when President Reagan took office.

Unlike Donaldson, who was one of Washington’s most notorious men-about-town until his recent marriage, Hume is the model of stability--married to his wife for 23 years, the father of three grown-up kids. An avid tennis player who plays in celebrity tournaments, Hume also isn’t known for keeping Donaldson’s near 24-hour work schedule.

Several of Hume’s ABC colleagues, who asked not to be named, see another major difference between Hume and Donaldson: Hume may lean politically right, while Donaldson tilts left.

Acknowledging that Donaldson has become “sort of the professional liberal,” especially as a panelist on “This Week With David Brinkley,” Hume won’t talk about his own views for public consumption. “I’m not sure that’s something I care to help them figure out. I want them to guess at it.”

Still, he admits that familiarity has bred contempt--at least as far as Capitol Hill is concerned.

“Look, having covered Congress as long as I have does not leave you with a sense of inspiration about the Democrats in Washington. On the other hand, you’re always responsible for holding accountable the people you cover. I mean, Sam is more censorious of the President, no matter who he is. I think it’s really a function of the beat you cover.”

Covering the Bush campaign this year should give Hume a head start in amassing contacts in a Bush presidency. Right? “Yeah, I’m sure that Sen. Quayle would be particularly glad to have me around,” he says sarcastically. “Actually, Quayle was very friendly (after the debate). I didn’t detect the slightest antipathy towards me as a result of all that.”

But Hume hopes that Bush won’t recall an embarrassing incident in 1980. Hume found himself trapped inside the bathroom of the press bus at a Bush rally in Wisconsin when fellow members of the press taped the door shut. “I had to climb out of the window right in the middle of Bush being greeted by everybody.

“He didn’t say anything, but there was an uproar of laughter because I disrupted the whole thing. I don’t know if he remembers it or not. But I do.”

Why? “Because I tore my pants getting out.”

Now top that , Sam Donaldson.