One sweaty night in the summer of 1984, I saw Tim Russert at a bar on Dove Street in Albany, where he sat at a table with some of the other younger members of Gov. Mario Cuomo's crew. They were to leave in the next couple of days for San Francisco, where Cuomo would make what turned out to be his famous "Tale of Two Cities" speech before the Democratic National Convention.
Russert was beaming.
"Ohhh, it's a GREAT SPEECH!" he told a couple of us reporters. He was chuckling, as if his side were about to win the World Series.
He lived and breathed this stuff. Later, I learned that he remembered every single name and face. When he was Cuomo's press secretary, the word was that Russert was an able mastermind in Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's political operation, that he had a lot to do with making Moynihan a household name...
Dan Janison