r.i.p. Tim Russert

June 17th, 2008 · No Comments

I’ve been trying to figure out why I cried at the news of Tim Russert’s death.

After the weekend’s wall-to-wall coverage, I’ve inevitably grown tired of hearing about him. But when I first heard the news, it had a surprisingly strong impact.

I’ve never been a die-hard fanboy of Meet the Press. I watch it when I remember to, or find video of it when I hear a given interview was particularly worthwhile. For more than half of my life, and for all of my politically aware life, Russert was the moderator, someone I never gave a lot of thought to, to be honest, but a constant, consistent presence on MTP and on MSNBC and NBC News.

I have occasionally been annoyed by him: his questions at Presidential debates, for example, demonstrated his trademark focus on specific comments and facts and dates, but often seemed to miss the larger context and the bigger questions. As impressive as he was at remembering the changes in individual trees, he sometimes failed to see the pattern in the forest as a whole.

Russert is responsible, in part, for the odd tone of political coverage in the U.S. today: the obsession with the horse-race as opposed to the issues, the electoral impact of policy positions as opposed to the impact of those decisions on the nation and the world. Chilled by the notion that Saddam Hussein might acquire nuclear weapons, he went too easy on the Bush administration as they geared-up for war. These complaints, and others, are familiar to those who watch and criticize our mainstream media.

Other Russert moments, many of which have been played repeatedly on MSNBC this past weekend, are more impressive. As his praises have been so often sung in recent days, I will refrain from repeating them here but, clearly, the guy was good at his job.

The many references to his committment to his son and his family more generally have been touching, but I didn’t know about all that before, and I had paid little attention when his Big Russ and Me spent forever-and-a-day on the bestseller lists.

I suppose it might have struck me that my father, who died last September, had also been 58. Or it might just been an almost random moment that brought to the surface various emotions I’d been tamping down for a while.

Certainly it was powerful to watch Tom Brokaw and Keith Olbermann struggle through those first hours of Russert-tribute with tears in their eyes and lumps in their voices.

I think mostly what got me, though, was just that Tim Russert obviously loved his life. He loved his job. He loved the company he kept. He believed his work was important but rarely exuded an arrogance that might suggest that he thought he himself was important.

He believed in, excelled at, and enjoyed, what he was doing with his life. We should all be so lucky.