The Winning Team

Fittingly, I met Tim Russert during one of the pivotal moments of the 1984 presidential election.

Mario Cuomo, who was then the governor of New York and widely seen as a possible future presidential candidate, had delivered an over-the-top speech to the convention. With the national press corps and a gaggle of delegates in pursuit, he made his way across the convention floor to his first postspeech interview—with Larry King, on the radio program I produced.

Through the glass of the cramped radio booth, I caught the eye of a guy at Cuomo's side—an aide who flashed me a smile and then gave me a broad wink, as if I were a co-conspirator in his boss's political triumph.

That staffer was Tim Russert, giving a vintage performance. He always made other people feel part of the winning team.

Over the last five years, I was fortunate to share many big political moments and a lot of smiles with Tim at NBC. His decency and his devotion to news and politics created winning coverage and a great team of producers and reporters.

On the eve of the 2008 Iowa caucus, I rode with Tim, Andrea Mitchell and Tim's longtime executive producer Betsy Fischer to campaign events. Tim was a rock star, bigger than many of the candidates in attendance. When he walked into a rally for John McCain, people crowded around Russert, greeting him like a long-lost friend. Though it was below freezing outside, the hall was downright steamy. Tim worked the crowd, bending over to talk to some seniors, his smile fixed on his face as he was learning the details of their lives and the stories they needed to share with him.

At the next stop, a Barack Obama rally, Tim plunged into the crowd again. This time it was young people who pushed forward to shake his hand.

He was available to everyone. The next day, despite his punishing on-air schedule, he made a special trip back to the convention hall to be the premier guest for my new radio show, on POTUS08, XM Radio's election channel.

In my interview, I asked him if he missed the retired Tom Brokaw. Most Washington bureau chiefs would have answered about the loss of an on-air star in terms of audience share or a profession assessment. Not Tim.

His voice caught as he answered. "Yeah, he's my buddy. And I was his wingman, you know? We did great things together on conventions and election nights, and, yeah, I miss him. He's a great guy—the best." Tim looked at everything through the prism of friendship and loyalty. I know: he was my friend and he was there for me.

Tim changed politics by showing the power of direct, relentless questioning. He changed television's coverage of politics by proving the power of serious inquiry. His practice of using a guest's own words against him—often in the form of long, excerpted statements—is now widely imitated through the broadcast industry.

"I don't want to argue about whether people have said something or not in the past," Tim told me. "And it is not an attempt to play 'gotcha.' What I am trying to do is say, 'this is what you believed your position to be on immigration two years ago, or on the war on Iraq three years ago. Your position today is much different. Tell us—take us on your intellectual journey. Why did you change your mind?' There's nothing wrong with changing your mind, as long as you're willing to say, 'This is what I learned that is different that forced me to reconsider a particular position.' And I think voters/viewers would salute that."

When I asked him how he made the decision whether to ask a question a second or third time, he said the clock ticked but viewers could see it all and understood what he was doing. He got a big kick out of the Japanese version of "Meet the Press," which featured a live audience with meters; along the bottom of the screen, the needle would say, "He's lying. He's lying."

Tim told me that he didn't think that you could make tough decisions unless you could answer tough questions. "I really believe that. And I think history has shown us, particularly if you talk to presidential aides, that the only way they could get closure on an issue was by preparing the president for a news conference or for an interview. You have to make a decision about these tax cuts or Social Security, or a particular spending bill, and I think that's what 'Meet the Press' does."

Tim never cheated his audience. When Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia's U.S. ambassador, didn't show up as scheduled, Tim asked the substitute guest, Adel al-Jubeir: "Where's Prince Bandar?"

In a town where sentiment is viewed as a weakness, Tim made caring about families cool. He told me he gave Bill Cosby an hour (during this election year) because families were so important to him, too.

Tim saw "Meet the Press" as a national treasure: "I'm a temporary custodian, and I'm going to take care of it." His eyes glistened when he told me about John Kennedy Jr.'s appearance on the show. "We ran a clip of his dad, John Kennedy, who was then a congressman, his first appearance—and he was about 33 or 34 years old, exactly John Jr.'s age. And after the show was over, John Jr. asked to see it again. He literally wanted to touch the screen and see the contours of his dad's face, because he had never seen the videotape before. He remembers pictures of him in the White House as a little boy saluting his father's coffin and so forth, but he had never seen his dad at his age in his mid-30s, and that's when the power of a program--of the 60-year tradition of 'Meet the Press'—really hit me."

"The best exercise for the human heart was to bend down and pick someone else up." That's what Betsy Fischer said Tim once told her. Thank you, dear brother, for leading the way.