Newsman

The one television show which is watched avidly in Washington – and all around the country on Sunday mornings is NBC’s Meet the Press, a controversial political forum in which it is de rigueur for politicians of all strips to participate. The man behind the political grillings is Tim Russert, and Irish American from Buffalo, New York, who moderates the show. 

From George Bush to Ross Perot and numerous Democrats, he has quizzed them all. Russert’s plain-taking and incisive analyses have what it takes to get the answers, and he is not afraid to put politicians on the hot seat. 

The son of a truck-driver, Russert became the youngest Chief of Staff in the Senate when he was 29 and working for Senate Daniel Moynihan. He moved into Mario Cuomo’s inner circle, and then on to NBC News as a senior vice president, where he worked on Nightly News and the Today Show. “In South Buffalo,” he said, “you’re born a Democrat and baptized a Catholic.” His Democratic ideals manifested themselves when Russert was a schoolboy delivering papers and surreptitiously inserting leaflets for John Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1960. 

He graduated from John Carroll University in Cleveland after majoring in political science, the first member of his family to earn a college degree. He later went to law school. Tim Russert is married to writer Maureen Orth.