This Town (3 page)

Anyway, so I called the mayor to give him a heads-up about how I would not be honoring the flack’s off-the-record outfit request. He laughed so hard I had to move the phone away from my ear. “Just do me one favor,” he said. “Say they were rubber-soled shoes, will you?”

He laughed again, and we talked briefly on the topic of how so many people in This Town are obsessed with where they rank in the great pecking order. Concern over one’s place is hardly original to these times in Washington. But the orgy of new media, news-about-news, and the rolling carnival of political moneymaking and celebrity has only exacerbated This Town’s default vanity.

“You can drive yourself crazy if you worry too much about that stuff,” the mayor said, with the self-assurance of a man solidly atop the pig pile and comfortable in his shoes.

Then, three months later: “Did you hear about Tim Russert?”

1

Heaven’s Green Room

A
pparently cholesterol plaque ruptured one of Russert’s arteries. It caused a sudden coronary thrombosis. He was in an audio-tracking booth at NBC’s Washington bureau recording voice-overs for that Sunday’s show when he collapsed. The EMTs defibrillated but could not resuscitate. He was pronounced dead at Sibley Memorial Hospital.

Russert had just returned from Italy. He had been celebrating his son Luke’s college graduation and had recently placed his eighty-four-year-old father into an assisted-living home in Buffalo. Tim had struggled with his weight and was looking tired, and his many pals had been worrying about the stress he was under. He had suffered from asymptomatic coronary artery disease, which he treated with medication and exercise. He did well on a stress test seven weeks earlier, on April 29. Tom Brokaw promised him a Chuck Berry album if he lost ten pounds by that summer’s political conventions. “What’s happening?” were Russert’s last words, a greeting to the person on the other end of the audio feed. The autopsy showed an enlarged heart. Flags were ordered at half-staff by the mayor of Buffalo.

“He will be missed as he was loved, greatly,” said Brokaw, announcing the death live on NBC.

Russert—“Tim”—reached the top of the pecking order while shrouding a cutthroat ambition in his slovenly nonchalance. While a focused and surgical ambition is vital to success in D.C., the ability to be appropriately sheepish about it is more so. Russert had a nice, easy populism about him—just a guy out of Buffalo who cherished his country, loved his dad and his son and his Bills and his T-shirts and all that. “Rumpled” is always good for the brand here, and Tim had that nailed.

He was also acutely status-conscious. Known primarily as a TV star, he preferred to identify himself by his more hierarchical title, “Washington bureau chief.” (Russert told a
Washington Post
reporter in 1991 that he wanted to be president of NBC News.) Brokaw once asked if he ever considered entering the priesthood. Yes, he said.

“Cardinal?” Brokaw asked.

No, Russert said. “Pope.”

That was a joke but Tim had just seen the pope a few days earlier, when in Rome. He sat up front for the weekly prayer service, and then His Holiness (the pope, that is) had to leave.

Tim liked his seat in the corporate boardroom and his large home in Nantucket, “The House That Jack Built,” as the sign outside identified the Nantucket house—Jack being Jack Welch, the longtime CEO of NBC’s corporate parent, General Electric. Russert and Brokaw attended Ronald Reagan’s funeral as guests, and then walked outside the Washington National Cathedral to anchor the news coverage for NBC.

Tim lived in the sweet spot of the big, lucrative revolving door between money, media, and politics. He also died there. Every wannabe, is, and has-been in Washington was issuing statements. “We will never see his likes again,” “He touched so many lives,” etc. Big distinctions were bestowed—“the preeminent political journalist of his generation,” John McCain said. “One of the finest men I knew,” Obama said. Small kindnesses were recalled. “When my mom died, he sent two dozen roses,” said Ann Klenk, a producer at MSNBC. “I adored him.”

He was indeed adored—in that unmistakable vintage of Washington “adored” that incorporated fear and need and sucking up. You needed to be on
Meet the Press
to be bestowed with a top-line standing in what Joan Didion called “
that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.” You needed to be friends with Tim, the closer the better, as so many people advertised with deft turns of posthumous networking. People on TV jockeyed to outgrieve one another. Network and cable channels paid tribute with their favorite homage: overkill. This was particularly true on NBC, and doubly particularly true on its little cable sister, MSNBC, which Russert—in life—was always wary of spending too much time on, for fear of slumming away his mayoral status in the high-numbered channels.

“He called me ‘Mitch,’” NBC’s Andrea Mitchell said on MSNBC. Same thing her father called her. “Go get ’em, K.O.,” Tim used to say to MSNBC’s Kelly O’Donnell. Keith Olbermann said Tim had said the exact same thing to him (“Go get ’em, K.O.”).

“‘Pal, go get ’em,’” Matt Lauer said, choking up as he relayed what Tim used to tell him before he conducted big interviews. Lauer went on to assure viewers that Russert was now sitting up in “heaven’s green room.” And really, who would doubt for a second that God’s place of eternal reward did not precisely mimic the layout of a network television studio?

•   •   •

N
o one was bigger than Tim within the celebrity-industrial complex that had exploded at the nexus of politics and media in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Russert was a product of both: a star aide to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late senator from New York, and later to former New York governor Mario Cuomo. He went into television and quickly shot to the top there too. There have always been Famous for Washington types, a term that captures both the distinction of being a big deal in the capital and the provincialism that makes Famous for Washington such a lame compliment. Russert was not so much Famous for Washington or even a “talent.” He was a full-on “principal,” the D.C. usage for elected behemoths and cabinet secretaries—the Main Bitch. The Mother Eagle.

No one was better attuned than Russert to the cultural erogenous zones of powerful men. He spoke endlessly and nostalgically about dads and sons and sports and Springsteen. He gave on-air shout-outs to Joe DiMaggio, who never missed a
Meet the Press
. He was expert at the male bonding rituals that lubricate so many chummy capital relations. George W. Bush quizzed him in the Oval Office on the starting lineup of the ’61 Yankees, while Al Gore won a dinner of Buffalo wings from him in a football bet. Like Dubya, Tim addressed people with thrown-off locker room nicknames (“Tommy B” Brokaw, “Matty” Lauer). He brought a contagious enthusiasm for the politics-as-football sensibility that defined the modern boy’s game. The ethos conveyed to and evolved with the next generation of boys. It has been embodied by Politico, the testosteroned website that aims to gorge political junkies like ESPN does sports fans.

Tim had become so entrenched in the electronic political scenery that it was slightly jarring to actually see his face in front of you, in person. Ted Kennedy had the same effect. When you saw him around town, it was like seeing a guy wearing a Ted Kennedy mask. Or maybe a Ted Kennedy float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, the pageant that D.C. can resemble in certain settings. Everyone is their own float, their own inflated balloon, some bigger than others, some leading the parade, others trailing.

Chris Matthews, whose verbal filtering deficiency makes him a refreshing oddity in this overfiltered environment, was particularly fragile about his place in the parade, especially in relation to Russert.
In an interview with
Playboy
years earlier, Matthews volunteered that he had made the list of the top fifty journalists in D.C. in
Washingtonian
magazine. “I’m like 36th, and Tim Russert is No. 1,” Matthews said. “I would argue for a higher position for myself.” That spring, Matthews had received his twenty-second honorary degree from an institution of higher learning—that’s compared with forty-eight for Tim at the time of his death, in case someone (like Chris) was keeping track.

But today in Washington is for Tim, the leading balloon lost, leaving everyone so ostentatiously deflated. He is given great due: Barack Obama and John McCain sitting together at the request of the Russert family, who want the event to provide a spectacle of unity. It is a time to pause and tolerate one last bipartisan moment, or pose, before the presumptive nominees embark on their big general election adventures, each vowing to shake things up, like they always do. It is a moment to honor a great man and a great country, to stand jointly and upright and to partake of a comforting tribal event for permanent Washington. Obama and McCain share a hug at the end.

David Axelrod met Mark Salter, his counterpart on the McCain campaign, for the first time at the service. “The two of us are going to have our moments,” Axelrod said to Salter, McCain’s longtime chief of staff and most passionate defender. “But I love my guy and you love your guy and I respect that.” Salter proffered an earnest wish that the upcoming campaign would be worthy of the country, and of Tim.

Russert would have loved the outpouring from the power mourners. And he also would have understood better than everyone that all of the speeches and tributes and telegenic choke-ups were never, not for a second, about him. They were about people left behind to scrape their way up the pecking order in his absence.

•   •   •

T
he morning begins at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Georgetown in a procession of Town Cars and shapely haircuts and somber airs. One after another, the holy trinity of pols, People on TV, and permanent Washington types arrives. Obama is missing a meeting with the national intelligence director.
Sally Quinn, an avowed atheist for much of her life, takes Communion, which “made me feel closer to him,” she will later blog. Liz Moynihan, Daniel Patrick’s widow, declines Communion, on the other hand, saying she is “angry at God.”

“
Senator Kennedy on the left!” the excited soundman calls out. “Oh . . . no,” he corrects himself, “it’s Al Hunt.” The actual Vicki Kennedy is here. The wife of Ted, who is battling cancer. She is amazing and courageous. People wish her the best, tell her they’ve been thinking of her and assure Vicki that “Teddy is a fighter and will beat this thing.” The Kennedys loved Tim and vice versa. After Teddy was diagnosed, Russert sent Vicki a set of rosary beads, blessed specially by the pope. “These have gotten me through some very tough times,” Tim wrote, and after Tim died, the Kennedys sent the beads back to the Russert family, who placed them in Tim’s casket.

“John McCain, pulling up,” the soundman says. The soon-to-be GOP nominee pops out of a limo. He is in a period of transition from disruptive figure (beloved within This Town as a balm to the everyday bullshit) to a more cautious and smartly saluting standard-bearer of the party he once tormented. I last saw McCain on his campaign plane a few months earlier, just before he was fitted with his nominee’s straitjacket. He volunteered to me that Brooke Buchanan, his spokeswoman seated nearby, “has a lot of her money hidden in the Cayman Islands” and that she earned it by “dealing drugs.” She was also “Pat Buchanan’s illegitimate daughter,” “bipolar,” “a drunk,” “someone with a lot of boyfriends” and who was “just out of Betty Ford.” Everyone misses this man.

For the likes of McCain, the ritual of watching
Meet the Press
on Sunday was like attending Mass—and actually going on the show was like a First Communion. But now the high priest was gone and there was no heir apparent.

McCain greets a few well-barbered and golf-tanned colleagues and makes his way to his seat next to Obama. He waves in the general direction of Mitchell and Greenspan; McCain proposed the latter as an overseer of a panel that would simplify the tax code. “
If he’s dead or alive, it doesn’t matter,” McCain said of the then eighty-one-year-old Greenspan. “Prop him up and put some dark glasses on him, like
Weekend at Bernie’s
.” Senator Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat, walks slowly into the church and adheres to the distinctive code of posture at the fancy-pants funeral: head bowed, conspicuously biting his lips, squinting extra hard for the full telegenic grief effect. People carry themselves in a certain way when they know they are being watched, or think they are being watched, or sure hope they are being watched. But funerals, in Washington, offer a particular theater for projection. “Legacies” are a preoccupation here with people of a certain stature. “We’re all obituaries waiting to happen,” Henry Allen, my former
Post
colleague, once wrote. “At the same time, the city of Washington feels like a conspiracy we’re all in together, and nobody else in America quite understands, even though they pay for it.”

Schumer nods over at a bank of cameras outside Holy Trinity. He is so lens-happy, even by senatorial standards, that Jon Corzine, a former senator and governor of New Jersey, once compared the futility of sharing a media market with Schumer to sharing a banana with a monkey. “Take a little bite of it and he will throw his own feces at you,” Corzine lamented in a speech at the National Press Club—thankfully not a dinner speech.

Schumer is joined in an extended cluster at the entrance by his senate colleagues, Christopher Dodd and Joe Biden, both of whom ran unsuccessfully for president earlier in the year and are carrying rosary beads into the church. Biden, who was scheduled to be a guest on
Meet the Press
on the Sunday after Russert died, will eventually win the lottery and be picked by Obama as his running mate. As he enters Holy Trinity, Biden offers a thumbs-ups to the celebrity-watchers who have assembled to watch This Town bid their humble host a premium farewell.

•   •   •

Y
ou couldn’t miss the Italian shoes and tailored suits in the audience, the glitter handbags, antique cuff-links, and three-figure haircuts on the men in makeup. Luke Russert looks around the church from the podium as he reads his father’s favorite biblical passage: “
To whom much is given, much is expected,” Luke says, then flashes a wry smile and continues. “And after seeing the make of some of the suits and dresses in the room, a lot is expected from this crowd.”

Saadalla Mohamed Aly, the longtime green room “attendant” at
Meet the Press
, is devastated by Tim’s death. He could not make the funeral because he is traveling in Egypt at the time, but of course he sends his respects.

For many years, “Mr. Aly” served up a gourmet smorgasbord of eggs, salmon, fresh fruits, juices, and breakfast meats to the elite class that passed through the
Meet
green room. He is “family” at the show, the “perennially tuxedoed butler,” as the
Washington Post
later describes him. Tom Friedman speaks Arabic to him.