Sandy Hume

[1] Born and raised in the Washington, D.C. area, Hume attended Middlebury College in Vermont, lettered in varsity lacrosse for the Panthers, and graduated with honors.

[1] He embarked on a career in journalism, and broke the story of the aborted 1997 "coup" by U.S. Rep. Bill Paxon (R-NY) against Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Another of the plotters, Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX), reportedly scuttled the coup when he learned that Paxon, and not he, would replace Gingrich.

Veteran Washington reporter and commentator Robert Novak called Hume's Republican coup story "perhaps the greatest expose of behind-the-scenes Capitol Hill machinations that I had seen in half a century of Congress-watching."

When Republican spin-doctors claimed that they merely wanted to warn Gingrich about the "coup", Novak wrote that "after extensive checking of sources, I am convinced that Hume's reporting was 100 percent correct."