God, Politics and the Making of a Joyful Warrior

A nun introduced him to journalism. At St. Bonaventure, he had been a class cutup—boisterous would be the kind description—until one day Sister Mary Lucille, a Sister of Mercy, crooked her finger at him and summoned him to the front of the classroom. "We have to channel that energy, Timothy," she said, and soon she appointed him editor of the school newspaper. At the time there was no school newspaper, so it would take all the more energy to start one up, which he did. (He would still manage to spend a lot of time in detention, which the Catholics called "the jug," from the Latin for "yoke.")

For him, faith and journalism and politics were bound up with one another. Russert's first experience of foreign policy came at the end of Sunday masses during the cold war, when the priest would raise his arms before the congregation and say, "Savior of the world—" to the response from all: "Save Russia." In south Buffalo in 1960, Russert used a paper route to campaign for John F. Kennedy. "I remember him putting Kennedy leaflets in the paper as he delivered them," his older sister Betty said. Part of JFK's appeal was tribal: Russert idolized him, Betty recalled, because "he was young and full of energy and … Catholic." In October 1962, when Kennedy traveled to Buffalo for Pulaski Day, Russert's dad took his son to a strategic spot along the motorcade route and—Russert remembered the time, 3:05 p.m.—Tim, then 12, brushed the president's hand. "I touched him! I touched him!" Russert cried with joy.

The making of the Tim Russert we knew from television began in a brutal ending: Dallas, 1963. When the news came, Russert remembered, the press referred to it as an assassination. In the world he inhabited, they used a different term: martyrdom. The school newspaper produced a special edition and sent copies to President Johnson, Mrs. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. "Some months later we received personal responses from all of them, which changed our lives," he recalled. The thrill of recognition was transformative. On the paper, he had learned "how to report, how to communicate, how to write; and then, on top of all that, people we watched on television, people who were so far removed from our ordinary lives, suddenly acknowledged not only our existence, but our work. From that day forward I was determined that I would have a career in journalism/public service." There, in a distant autumn of tragedy, was everything that would dominate Russert's life: the church, great events, storytelling, a love of life in the arena.

Sister Lucille helped him go to the more competitive Canisius High School, where he worked afternoons manning the St. Michael's rectory switchboard. He answered the phone, emptied the poor box, greeted visitors. In class he learned two things: how to argue and how to be tough. The Jesuits, said Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, "do their best to teach their students to think on their feet and defend the truth." A Jesuit ethos was perfect, too, for a Catholic who was to live and try to thrive in a secular world. "Every Catholic order has its own spirit, and the Jesuits have long been known for a restlessness of mind that tends to make them less dogmatic than other groups," Russert wrote.

There was an element of steeliness, too, in the Jesuit world. Father John Sturm, who held the title of prefect of discipline at Canisius, once told him: "Russert, mercy is for God. I deliver justice." He also encountered another perennial element of life for an Irish Catholic of his generation at Canisius: class anxiety. The son of a garbageman who fought in World War II and worked two jobs to provide for his family, Russert was nervous about going to the high school, which he described as "a fancy-pants boys' school on the other side of town." But he won his way in. Early on, he wore clip-on ties to fulfill the dress code, only to be humiliated by a history teacher who ripped the tie from his collar and "held it at arm's length like a dead skunk." Clip-ons, Russert learned in that horrible, sinking moment—a moment he could vividly recall four decades later—did not cut it. He slunk home, and Big Russ taught him how to tie a real Windsor knot, which he used for the rest of his life.

Many people in Washington and New York spend a lot of time, and even more psychic effort, trying to escape their origins, firmly closing the door on where they came from. (A bishop I knew used to say that such insecurity was horribly debilitating, and had a simple commandment for survival: "Remember who you are." When I told Russert that story once, he pumped his fist and shouted, "Amen!") Rather than try to reinvent himself as he grew up and went from worldly triumph to worldly triumph, Russert never lost his sense of place, or his love of tribe.

At John Carroll University in Cleveland, Russert "stayed with the faith, and the rest of us kind of drifted away," said Patrick Griffin. "Even in college he still went to church—and the rest of us were still sleeping." He moved on to work for two of the great Catholic American politicians of the age: New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, before going to NBC News in 1984. His first big get: John Paul II said a private mass that NBC filmed for Holy Week.