Ken Auletta, one of the nation's leading chroniclers of the media world, remembered Tim Russert on Friday for the characteristics he said set Russert apart: preparation and humor.
Contrasting Russert with previous hosts of "
Meet the Press" -- and with many other journalists -- Auletta said: "They didn't do two things that Tim did."
He said Russert prepped for the show "like a lawyer preparing for a Supreme Court argument ... not just the questions but the film clips he would show, many of them very embarrassing."
Auletta, who has written the "Annals of Communication" column for
The New Yorker since 1992, said Russert's commitment to serious preparation kept him home on Saturday nights. But he said his intensity did not squeeze the fun out of the work.
"He would show humor and wit that a lot of people just can't," Auletta recalled in a telephone interview. "He would share a laugh with his guests. He was a human being, not a gladiator."
"He could bite you in the rear and then go have a drink with you," he said.
Auletta said he spent a lot of time with Russert in the course of reporting his book about the three broadcast networks, "Three Blind Mice." He recalled what he described as a "really smart" move Russert made when named Washington bureau chief for NBC News: he created an on-air role for himself as part of the bureau chief job.
"That made him impregnable to whomever would become NBC News president," Auletta said.
Like Russert, Auletta said he spent time in politics before taking up journalism. And he said he admired the way Russert managed the shift.
"He and I would talk," Auletta said. "It's not an easy transition. You have to say that former friends can't be friends any longer. They may be upset at me, but I have a different constituency. My loyalty can't be to them any more. My loyalty is to the story, or to what we think of as the truth. I thought Tim made that transition very well."
Auletta made the switch to news first, and recalled Russert telling him that "I was the first person ever to write his name in the newspaper."
As a political columnist for the
New York Daily News, Auletta wrote a Good Guys column at holiday time every year. He said he included Russert, then an aide to the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, because of the extraordinary preparation he was putting into his research about poverty.
"He read everything," Auletta said, "the academic stuff, everything."
Many years later, interviewing press aides in the Bush White House, he said he asked them which of the Sunday morning shows mattered most.
" 'What's the prime real estate?' I asked the guy in the press office in charge of booking the Sunday shows," Auletta recalled. "The answer I got was -- 'No comparison. Tim Russert and 'Meet the Press.' "
He said: "If you do well on 'Meet the Press,' you know you've done well."
Said Auletta: "This was a real tribute to Tim. Tim was not lobbing softballs."
Auletta pointed out that some critics blasted Russert for failing to display sufficient outrage with government officials they might regard as "war criminals." But that kind of confrontational style, he said, "was not who Tim Russert was."
