Messenger: From voicemail to voicemail: The short political career of Tom Schweich

In the hours following Missouri Auditor Tom Schweich’s reported suicide, St. Louis Post-Dispatch editor Tony Messenger explores why the recent governor candidate called him minutes before police were called to Schweich’s house in Clayton.

As Messenger details in the column, he and Schweich were so-called BFFs – at least that’s how editorial board colleagues joked with him at the newspaper. It just meant the two had a unique reporter-politician relationship; one of newspaper days past.

The friendship led to Schweich confiding something to Messenger: “He planned to accuse the chairman of the Missouri Republican Party, John Hancock, with leading a ‘whisper campaign’ among donors that he, Schweich, was Jewish,” Messenger writes.

Messenger doesn’t say exactly why Schweich called him the morning the 54-year-old died – “perhaps because he didn’t have anybody else” – but he has no idea why Schweich killed himself. One thing’s for sure, he writes: “Nobody in his party wanted him to hold a news conference suggesting that there were anti-Semites in the Republic Party.”

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