A Viewer’s Salute to Tim Russert

“If it’s Sunday, it’s Meet the Press”. As a faithful viewer, I kind of took Tim’s familiar promo for granted, but I always looked forward to his broadcast. Tim Russert’s warm and easy-going persona invited you in and his intensity and command of the political landscape kept you there. Tim Russert truly set a high benchmark. His sudden passing was breathtaking. It seems so poignant and ironic that he would depart this life as we prepare to celebrate fathers, given his book that honors his own father, “Big Russ and Me: Father and Son: Lessons of Life” and his reported devotion to his family.

Tim Russert was big. He was not only an accomplished writer, interviewer, researcher, legal mind and broadcast journalist; he seemed to be a man’s man and I can appreciate his working class beginnings. He seemed to have basic “old school” values. He had a paradoxical combination of unrelenting toughness, wide-eyed candor, wholesomeness, humor and he managed to stay positive and to inspire. He was light-years above the so-called “talking heads that shall remain nameless. Those who exude arrogance, divisiveness, cynicism and down right mean-spiritedness in order to make their points and to set them selves apart, for the all-consuming ratings race.

In contrast, Tim Russert was tough, rigorous, yet disarming and always fair. He showed that basic decency will more than suffice every time. What a legacy for aspiring journalists. What a template for fathers everywhere.

Thomas J. Watson, Founder of IBM said it best, “Really big people are, above everything else, courteous, considerate and generous, not just to some people in some circumstances, but to everyone all the time.”

On this Father’s Day Sunday, “Meet the Press” will never be the same.