I knew Tim Russert for over three decades. I liked and admired him very much.
I first met Tim when Pat Moynihan was running for the Senate in 1976, in New York’s Democratic primary. I was 23 years old, working for the campaign as deputy issues director. (This sounds more important than it was. Pat didn’t need much help on issues, and there were only two of us in the issues shop.) Tim, as I recall, was working in some capacity, formal or informal, for the Democratic boss in Buffalo, Joe Crangle, on the upstate campaign, and he came to the headquarters in Manhattan to coordinate with us. We hit it off in a casual way–and then, after Pat won the primary in September (by a little less than 10,000 votes out of close to a million cast), I went back to grad school to get my Ph.D., while Tim came to Washington with Pat after he won in November as a top aide.
He served Pat very well–while developing a fantastic ability to mimic Pat’s distinctive manner of speaking. Then he moved over to work for Mario Cuomo when he became governor of New York, served him equally well–and then went to NBC, where he of course became a star in his own right.
Tim gave the commencement address at the 2007 Washington University graduation in St. Louis. My wife and I were there because one of our daughters was in the graduating class. I called to congratulate him on the speech–it was a good one, especially given the difficulties and limitations of the genre–and we had lunch. I remember thinking afterwards that he was remarkably unchanged from the guy I’d met thirty years before. He was intellectually curious and personally kind, a patriot and a family man, with a lively personality and a great and communicable interest in politics and life.
Tim Russert was an impressive and admirable man, and while Washington can be an insincere town, the almost universal expressions of grief at his passing are genuine and, if I can put it this way, completely deserved.
William Kristol is editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
