The TV Zone

Yeah, that was a hell of a memorial for Tim Russert yesterday. Beautiful AND moving, and whenever deeply heartfelt memorials like this roll around, you almost instinctively remember that great Yeats line, "Think where mans glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends." In Russert's case, substitute the word "friends" for "a son" (see the clip above, if you haven't aready) and it's even more poignant.

(And considering Russert's age at death, 58, another famous line from the Irish bard also comes to mind - "Life is a long preparation for something that never happens." )

In any event...All of this week I've been thinking about Russert and sifting the many many impressions of the man I've collected over the years - not all of them positive, but no need to get into that. Powerful men in television, you will be surprised to learn, are not saints. Russert was, however, entirely uniquely, and at this point I think I'll throw this blog post over to a profile of Russert that ran in the Washington Post almost exactly 20 years ago (1989) under the by-line of Lloyd Grove. It took me a while to find this piece, but thanks to Newsday's spectacular library staff, they finally located it (even Nexis, for some reason, hasn't had it for years.) To my mind, Grove's piece was a landmark profile of an already legendary guy - only 38, gunning for the presidency of NBC News, and re-making the Washington bureau, which badly needed remaking.

I can't run this whole piece because the Post would sue me, and may still sue me for running these excerpts. (Lord, I hope not. I can't even pay for gas...) But read them and laugh or learn. Grove is a wonderful writer, and this is a glimpse at the pre-"Meet the Press" Russert, as well as a fully human glimpse. I begin with the top of the piece, and other outtakes follow. Take it away, Lloyd:

"Tim Russert grows thoughtful as he considers a pressing problem of contemporary journalism -- namely, a profile of himself.

"It's a hard piece," he says in a commiserative tone. "I don't know how to make it interesting."

But that, he is reassured, is not his worry.

"I know, but I think about it," says the new Washington bureau chief of NBC News, who arrived 2 1/2 months ago determined to make a splash. "If you step back in the abstract," he muses, and then proposes a plot line.It's a story, he suggests with a clinical air, about "this guy who, having worked in politics and tried to make his mark, is now making his mark in news."

Eureka. He smiles. "I guess there's enough there."

The moment reveals Russert as a highly developed hybrid in the mediapolitical hothouse. It's a display of disarming fellowship, winsome modesty -- and, of course, naked spin control. The total effect is synergistic, and all but irresistible.

He has an ample, open, Hibernian face, which looks almost delicate in the throes of cogitation, and a beefy six-foot frame. He was an altar boy back in South Buffalo, where he was a favorite of Jesuit fathers and Democratic ward bosses before leaving to work for New York's senior senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and its governor, Mario Cuomo. Now, at 38, a favorite of corporate brass, he slouches before the secular altar of four glowing screens.

"I actually took a standardized test one time in college," he says. "It came out that -- it was ironic -- I was qualified to be an archbishop, a governor or a media mogul."

During one of three audiences in his Nebraska Avenue office -- but only on quiet Saturdays, he insists, because "I won't use my people as props" -- his son Luke, 3 1/2, plays at his feet, doodling on a pad.

"Who do you watch on the news at night?" Russert asks.

"Bryant and Jane," Luke replies.

"Who do you watch at night?"

"Tom," the boy ventures, giggling.

"What's his full name? Tom Russert? Noooo!"

Luke laughs, and the visitor suggests that NBC News is doing badly among 3- to 5-year-olds.

"No, he's got it," Russert snaps, and turns to plead with his son. "Who do you watch at night? Tom who? Come on."

But Luke only smiles.

* * *

"In an age of shrinking network viewership, exploding star salaries and bitter competition, Russert is the state-of-the-art television news executive. Like CBS News President David Burke, who also served a Democratic senator (Ted Kennedy) and a New York governor (Hugh Carey), he's a shrewd political operator. Like ABC News President Roone Arledge, the wizard of "Wide World of Sports," he's a natural showman. Unlike them, he is not head honcho -- a circumstance he's hoping to change.

After 4 1/2 years at the network, he's here from New York -- with the title of senior vice president, a base salary around $250,000 and a company-leased house cum swimming pool on Foxhall Road -- to prove his mettle as a manager and TV journalist, while keeping his hand in other issues confronting the news division, such as the chronic third-place showing of "NBC Nightly News With Tom Brokaw." His three-year mission: to shake some life into the Washington bureau and to position himself for the presidency of NBC News.

"People say, 'Would you like someday to be president of NBC News?' " Russert says unshyly. "The answer is yes."

* * *

"He is a molder of reputations, not least his own -- "the immortal part of myself," as the Bard said, "and what remains is bestial." What remained for Russert, in the weeks before his arrival, was to remove a seemingly small annoyance caused by a Dec. 14 story in Variety about executive changes at NBC. "The shift sidetracks Timothy J. Russert," Variety asserted, contrary to reports in a host of other publications that he was being "groomed."

Russert was outraged...

In a meeting with NBC's corporate communications department, he charged news division publicist Mary Lou O'Callahan with disloyalty, claiming she'd told the wrathful Variety reporter that Russert had "leaked" the details of his new job.O'Callahan denied it, but agreed to resign, capping a 12-year career at NBC.

Russert bridles at the suggestion that the affair betrays a vindictive streak. "Vindictive?" he says meekly, composing his features into a wounded smile. "That's not me. I've heard 'charming.' I've heard 'affable' ...'Vindictive' is new."

* * *

"Politics is really a very large part of their lives down there," [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan says. "And Tim was a young man with more education than he let on. You don't tell people in South Buffalo that you've been to college and gone to law school."

"He wasn't no bookworm," says Russert's father "Big" Tim, who provided for his family by working two jobs -- as a truck driver for The Buffalo News and as a sanitation foreman for the city streets department -- and encouraged the same industriousness in his son and three daughters. Russert, at various times, lifted garbage on a sanitation crew, made pizza to go, painted the yellow lines on a parking lot and still found the energy to lead the local Catholic Youth Organization.

"The buttons on my vest were always popping," his father says. "He was never no trouble to me ... I think I taught him about being sincere and honest in what you do. And don't look down on anybody when you're going up, because it's awful hard to come back down when you're passing those guys that you hurt on the way up."