This Town Read online

  “‘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?

  • • •

  No 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.

  • • •

  The 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.

  • • •

  You 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.

  “In a Washington way,” James Carville will say in the Post after Aly’s death in early 2011, “he was kind of a friend.”

  In a Washington way. Kind of a friend. Everyone party-chatting in the same feedback loop and telling the same green room stories and reading the same morning e-mail tip sheet in Politico, Mike Allen’s Playbook.

  Russert had a favorite joke about growing up in South Buffalo, where everyone knew one another and one another’s relatives. “How many South Buffalonians does it take to change a lightbulb?” the joke went. “I don’t know exactly, but my neighbor’s cousin’s girlfriend’s priest knows a guy who will help you out.”

  He could have been talking about his own invitation-only “public” memorial service: the Kennedy Center concert hall becomes a palatial ant colony. At first glance, it might seem a random mass of busy critters, but a closer gaze reveals distinct patterns, people jitterbugging toward strategic destinations, working.

  I watch Duberstein move through the Kennedy Center waving, shaking hands with everyone. He then greets the attractive blonde seated next to me: Susanna Quinn, the third and much younger wife of Democratic lobbyist Jack Quinn. Jack Quinn, who in 2000 founded the bipartisan lobbying powerhouse Quinn Gillespie & Associates with Republican Ed Gillespie, was the general counsel to President Clinton in the pre-Monica years. Russert had always been a sweetheart to Jack, especially after Quinn spent serious time “in the barrel,” as Quinn says, referring to a period of disgrace he endured after successfully petitioning his former boss President Clinton to issue a last-minute pardon for his client, the fugitive financier Marc Rich. Jack was ostracized in the press and shunned by his former Clinton friends and hauled before Congress; as a result, he retreated into “a very dark place personally,” he says. Quinn battled depression and alcoholism. His lobbying partner, Gillespie, stood by him. He reassured him that after a few months all anyone would remember about Jack Quinn’s little scandal was that he “got something big done.” And it would be good for business. He would always have lunch in This Town again.

  Sure enough, Quinn Gillespie boomed with the rest of the lobbying sector and Jack and Ed cashed out in 2004 for a sum that eventually reached $40 million. Few people remember Marc Rich, let alone who his attorney was, or what Jack Quinn was even in the barrel for. Only that he’s a rich lobbyist who has nice fund-raisers at his house in Northwest D.C. and sweet parties and a decent golf game that merited a Politico video feature. And that he is married to the lovely Susanna, an emerging socialite, granddaughter of a Democratic senator from Oklahoma, and an old family friend of Duberstein’s, who helped get her into his alma mater, Franklin & Marshall. And she looks phenomenal in a bikini, by the way, as everyone knows from her Facebook page.

  As Duberstein greeted Jack at the Kennedy Center, in bounded Terry McAuliffe, the former Democratic National Committee chairman, known as “the Macker.” McAuliffe loved the back-and-forth with Tim on camera and off. He would invoke Tim’s expertly branded dad, “Big Russ,” a retired sanitation worker in Buffalo and the hero of Tim’s bestselling book, Big Russ and Me, one of two sentimental volumes Tim devoted to the glories of uncomplicated fifties-era dads. McAuliffe made several appearances on Meet the Press. Like many guests, he tried to ingratiate himself to the host by mentioning Big Russ on the air. Once, he imagined Big Russ to be “up in heaven” and “probably having a Scotch, looking down.” Russert gently pointed out to him that Big Russ was in fact still alive, up in Buffalo, probably watching the show at that very moment from his Barcalounger.

  McAuliffe made his mark as one of the most irrepressible money men in American political history, or better. “The greatest fund-raiser in the history of the universe,” Al Gore dubbed him. You can be the most detestable person in the world—and the Macker is not, for the record—but you would still be assured of having thousands of elegant friends by being a good fund-raiser. So committed is the Macker to his art that he even stopped off at a fund-raiser on the way home from the hospital with his wife, Dorothy, after she gave birth to their newborn son, Peter. Dorothy stayed in the car, crying, while the baby slept and the Macker did his thing. “I felt bad for Dorothy,” he would later write. “But it was a million bucks for the Democratic Party.”

  If McAuliffe’s signature is fund-raising, his principal identity is as a professional best friend to Bill Clinton. The title of McAuliffe’s memoir What a Party! might as well be Let Me Tell You Another Story About Me and Bill Clinton. (One such story involved South Korean intelligence agents thinking McAuliffe and Clinton were more than just friends.) To deprive McAuliffe of the words “Bill Clinton” would be like depriving a mathematician of numbers. If he is not dropping the name of the forty-second president, he is telling you that he just got off the phone with him, or that President Clinton is actually calling now, and can you please excuse him just for a second? (“Hello, Mr. President!”) And if Mr. President is not on the phone, there is a good chance he is somewhere close by.

  Sure enough, as McAuliffe makes his way down the left-hand aisle, Bill and Hillary are a few yards away. Russert was a longtime Clinton nemesis dating to Russert’s former patron, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had been chairman of the Senate Finance Committee during the Clinton years. Moynihan felt slighted that the Clintons did not seek his collaboration on their ill-fated health-care bill in 1993. The Clintons always believed Russert was much tougher on Hillary than on her opponents. They are convinced Russert disliked them and were not wrong. He thought the Clintons were “phonies,” he told many people privately. And the Monica thing—in the OVAL OFFICE!!! Jesus, don’t get him started.

  Tim’s crowning smack against them, the Clintons believed, occurred on the May evening that Obama defeated Hillary in the North Carolina primary and came close in Indiana. “We now know who the Democratic nominee will be,” declared Russert of Obama on the air, definitively, with the kind of live-TV authority that few possessed. The Macker paid Tim a visit at the office soon after. They went back and forth, agreed to disagree, and laughed quite a bit, like they always did.

  • • •

  The Kennedy Center memorial service is broadcast live on MSNBC, complete with pregame and postgame. Luminary speakers, polished remarks, Brokaw hoisting a Rolling Rock at the lectern, and Bruce Springsteen materializing via satellite from Germany. Brian Williams, the NBC News anchor, is given a prime place in the M
urderers’ Row of celebrity eulogists. The Russert family is, uh, surprised about this, since Williams was never really one of Tim’s guys. Nor is the family happy about the presence at the funeral of former NBC president Andrew Lack, whom Tim despised, or the degree to which NBC has hijacked the Kennedy Center time as a network branding opp. But such a dance is part of living and dying as public property. They understand that, as Tim must have understood it, and the Russert family will benefit, none more than Luke, who already has his own sports talk show on XM satellite radio with his and Tim’s buddy James Carville. Luke’s amazing eulogy will effectively launch his television career. He will be hired by NBC soon after—just like McCain’s kid, and W’s kid, and, eventually, Bill and Hillary’s kid. At some point NBC became a full-employment agency for famous political offspring.

  But Luke is a special prince, and will eventually be assigned the Capitol Hill beat for MSNBC, where he will become our congressional sage before his twenty-sixth birthday and be auctioned off for charity (“tour of the Capitol and lunch with Luke: current bid $1,050”). He will grow nicely into the family business. But today’s service is a star turn for Luke: funny, sentimental, and poised to a point where you could almost hear all of Bethesda and Chevy Chase hissing at their inert teenage/college-age sons, “WHY CAN’T YOU BE MORE LIKE LUKE RUSSERT?”

  Tim spoke with bottomless pride about Luke, his only child. They talked every day. For pioneering the joys of fatherhood, Tim was rightly recognized: among other accolades, the National Father’s Day Council named him “Father of the Year” in 1995 and Parents magazine honored him as “Dream Dad” for 1998.

  Washington eats up the dad conceit. Unusually high proportions of ambitious men—and potential male book buyers—love to self-mythologize through their fathers. John Edwards was “the son of a mill worker,” John Boehner “the son of a barkeeper,” etc. The prevailing social dynamic in Washington—a city of patrons—mimics the quest for paternal love. “Who do you work for?” is typically the first thing people ask here.