WASHINGTON – In an homage to Tony Snow, who had not always agreed with President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney says he too has not always agreed with the president – but that he and Snow, the late former press secretary of the president – “the best” he has known – were part of a team.

“He was a major player in the conservative movement,” Cheney said of Snow, who succumbed to a battle with cancer on Saturday at the age of 53. Cheney was interviewed by Chris Wallace for FOX News Sunday, a show that Snow had started hosting in 1996. “The way I think of Tony is he’s unique in terms of the extent to which he knew the news side of the business; then as a commentator and – but also somebody who worked as part of the White House staff as a speechwriter and of course as press secretary.

“There are very, very few people that have had as much experience on both sides of the divide, if you will,” Cheney said of Snow, who had worked as an editorial writer before becoming lead speechwriter for former President George H.W. Bush and who served as a FOX commentator before going to work for this president and had returned to the air on CNN after leaving the White House in September.

“I don’t know anybody who had as much experience on both sides,” Cheney told Wallace, in the interview airing today. “You can think of people like Rush Limbaugh, obviously, who are giants in the profession, but always on the commentary side. And there aren’t many who’ve done what Tony did.”

Asked about Snow’s “brand of conservativism,” Cheney said: “I frankly agreed with him on nearly everything, and I’m generally viewed as pretty conservative.

“I’m not sure that that’s saying something nice about Tony in some circles,” Cheney said, “but I always thought of him as a guy who understood very well the purposes of government and that they were limited, and that there were some things government shouldn’t do that we are best able to do for ourselves. And I thought Tony was an effective articulator of that,” he said. “He was a tough critic of the Bush administration. Before he came onboard as press secretary, he obviously had written some tough criticism of us.”

Wallace asked if that criticism that Snow had leveled at the administration in his columns before becoming press secretary had followed him into the White House, and if he had ever pressed people to stay true to the cause.

“Well, it wasn’t so much that,” Cheney said. “He saw his job, I suppose in some respects, the way I saw mine.

“I didn’t always agree with the president, but my job was to present my point of view when asked and then support whatever the decision was,” he said. “And Tony clearly operated very much on the basis that he was out there to represent the president of the United States. He worked for the president. It wasn’t a matter for him, given the role he played, of trying to impose his views or to shape policy by virtue of the position he occupied. He was – he had a different role as the spokesman, press spokesman than, say, the guy running the economic shop or the policy shop – very different responsibilities.”

The White House was “back on its heels” when Snow was hired in early 2006, Wallace noted. Had Snow helped the administration regain its game?

“Well, he was superb, Chris, because I’ve known or worked with a lot of press secretaries, White House press secretaries, in my 40 years in Washington, and I’d have to say that Tony’s the best,” said Cheney, who has served four presidents in his time since Richard Nixon.

“He had this rare combination of intelligence, of commitment and loyalty to the president that he was working for, but also this great love of going out behind that podium and doing battle with what in effect were his former colleagues. And it was this capacity that he had to be unfailingly polite, to maintain good humor under the most trying of circumstances, and do it, I thought, better and more effectively than anybody I’ve ever seen in that post.”

Snow’s fundraising role for the party, as a television celebrity turned press secretary, was noted as well.

“He was a big star,” Cheney said. “I mean, I – you know, our paths would occasionally cross out there because that’s what vice presidents do, is a lot of fundraisers. But Tony had this depth of commitment and understanding, and he was a real media star.

“I’ve never before seen a guy who was as good as he was at going out on the really tough issues, when you’ve got, you know, the crew in the White House press office – not the staff, but the press – actively and aggressively going after the President or me or somebody else, and Tony would stand up there and give as good as he got. And he always did it with great good humor. He was unfailingly polite. Everybody loved him. And you always had the feeling at the end of his briefings – I used to watch them on closed circuit video in the White House because they were such a performance – he’d always leave and everybody felt good about what they’d just been through, whether they were newsmen or on the White House side of the podium…

“Oftentimes – I’ve been there often enough over the years when people dreaded having to go out in front of the press and answer questions, do the daily brief, when Tony absolutely relished it. He would never miss the opportunity to go out and engage with a journalist.”

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