Houston, We've Had a Problem

Houston, we've had a problem.”
Astronaut James Lovell
Apollo 13
April 13, 1971

June 10, 2998

Dear Friends,

It's triskaidekaphobia all over again -- superstitious fear of the number 13, some say dating from the Last Supper when Judas was the 13th disciple to be seated at the table, others say it dates from the time of the Vikings.

But in Buffalo, New York, triskaidekaphobia has been part of the civic culture for decades -- their City Hall does not have a 13th floor -- just “P” on the elevator control panel.

And on Friday the 13th, 2008 -- their favorite son, Tim Russert dropped dead at his desk in Washington, DC, age 58.

And two towns came to a standstill -- the one he made famous and the other where fame found him.

It's snow that usually brings Buffalo to a standstill; whereas in Washington, it's national tragedy -- September 11, 2001, November 22, 1963, and for a few moments on March 30, 1981.

So why does the death of a journalist bring the nation's capital to a moment of shock, then silence, and then the outpouring of grief?

It didn't happen when Edward R. Murrow or Walter Lippman died. Nor the passing of I. F. Stone or Drew Pearson. Not even the deaths of Kay Graham, Meg Greenfield or Mary McGrory.

And I dare say it won't be that way when Walter Cronkite or David Broder take their earthly leave.

So, what was it about “Russert”?

If you listened to Meet the Press this morning, you heard and saw scores of explanations -- an always-on-the-verge-of tears session led by Tom Brokaw who was joined by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, journalists Mike Barnicle and Gwen Ifill, political consultants James Carville and Mary Matalin, former journalist and California First Lady Maria Shriver, and Tim's executive producer, Betsy Fischer.

They had been preceded for a day-and-a-half by the full lineup of NBC and MSNBC colleagues, friends and colleagues from other networks, cable stations, broadcast and print journalism organizations.

What struck me most in all of this remembering was the need for each raconteur and storyteller to get at the core of the meaning of Tim Russert -- and the narratives were not so much about his greatness as about his ordinariness.

With Russert, the private was as important as the public, they were inseparable.

The latter is how most Americans came to know him, but the former is what made him sui generis -- a term you'd never hear him use, by the way.

We knew why he was famous; what we wanted to learn was what made him like us, and at the same time, unlike almost anyone else in a town that Harry Truman characterized nicely:

“If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”

Seven years ago, in anticipation of making the move from the San Francisco Bay area to Washington, DC, I read Meg Greenfield's “Washington,” the only book this Washington Post Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and editor, and Newsweek columnist, ever wrote, which was published two years after her death in 1999.

In its Foreword, her dear friend and boss, Kay Graham, recounted a story that Greenfield once told a reporter about making friends in Washington, DC:

“It takes a long time to create friendships that have some life apart from mutual, professional need. I mean a friend you can call up or who can call you up and say, 'God, I feel lousy today” and not have to talk about what Kissinger is supposed to have told Sadat. Or someone you can go to the movies with on Sunday night. That's the hard part. Finding friendship and being good at it. Washington is a company town and what you do all day is what you talk about when you're out to dinner in the evening. Practically all human relationships are affected by this . . . You become so consumed with politics and with secrets behind the official business that you stop seeing or responding to anything else. You think of yourself as some kind of a register. You don't see the flowers, and, more important, you don't see the people. You see only in terms of how they're doing, are they in or out . . . or just sideways. So people become less than people and it's terribly destructive to one's self.”

And that's why so many of us -- friends, acquaintances, colleagues, viewers, fans, and political junkies -- are searching for something to say or write or think about a man most of us never met, but were sure we knew.

I'm among those who never had the pleasure of his company, but my early thoughts about his death are that it came about thirty Father's Days, eight presidential elections cycles, and, perhaps, at least one Buffalo Bills Super Bowl victory too soon.

And that calls to mind A. E. Housman's poem “To An Athlete Dying Young:”

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.