A Conversation with Tim Russert

Moderated by Linda Wertheimer

February 15, 2005

JOHN SHATTUCK: Good evening and welcome to the John F. Kennedy Library. I’m John Shattuck, the CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation, and on behalf of myself, Paul Kirk, who chairs our Board of Directors and many of our board members are here tonight, and Deborah Leff who directs the Library and Museum who is here in the front row.

And we’re so delighted to present to you and to our listening audience throughout New England, compliments of WBUR, this evening’s forum A Conversation with Tim Russert moderated by Linda Wertheimer of National Public Radio. Before introducing our speakers, I’d like to offer special thanks to the institutions that make all these forums possible starting with Bank of America, which has assumed the lead sponsorship of the Kennedy Library Forums from Fleet Boston. Our other forum sponsors include Boston Capital, and we’re very pleased to have with us today Jack Manning, its President and a member of our Board of Directors, and our thanks to you Jack and to the Lowell Institute, and to our newest forum sponsor, Corcoran Jennison, as well as our media sponsors, the Boston Globe, Boston.com and 90.9 WBUR, which broadcasts all our forums on Sunday evenings at eight.

Last Sunday morning, many of you may have tuned in when we were all eagerly awaiting the Super Bowl kickoff, Tim Russert was interviewing the senior senator from Massachusetts on Meet the Press. And Tim asked Senator Kennedy how he thought the Eagles would do that day. And, of course, the Senator predicted that within hours they’d be vanquished by the Patriots. But then Tim, who comes from Buffalo, showed his true Boston colors by saying emphatically to Senator Kennedy, "I was talking about the Boston College Eagles 20-0, undefeated—undefeated," he said. Of course, they were defeated that day, I think. (laughter) Tim owes his passionate BC loyalties in part to his son, Luke, who’s now a freshman at BC, and we’re very grateful to Luke for giving his dad a special reason for visiting Boston today.

Tim Russert, as we all know, is one of America’s most respected journalists and we’re deeply honored to have him here today. Thank you, Tim. We all know him from his weekly appearance in our living rooms on Sunday mornings when he brings us his special brand of fairness and intelligence to his weekly interviews with the movers and shakers of the world. At a time when there never seems to be enough reliable information and real conversation in the media, Tim serves up both of these scarce commodities week after week with great insight, wit and humor. And I have no doubt that Tim is the kind of journalist for whom President Kennedy would have had the highest respect.

Sander Vanocur, who’s one of Tim’s NBC predecessors, once asked President Kennedy soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis when tensions between the press and the White House were running high, "Is it true that you're reading more and enjoying it less?" JFK famously replied, "Even though we wish they sometimes didn't write what they write, there isn’t any doubt that we could not have a free society without a very, very active press."

I got to know Tim as his next door neighbor in Washington and as a government official, I was always amazed at how much he knew that I didn't know, and I was always curious to find out just what was in that mysterious big packet that was delivered to his house every Saturday afternoon by an NBC courier. Of course, like everyone else, I had to wait until Meet the Press on Sunday morning to find out. And since Tim took over the helm of Meet the Press in December 1991, it has become the most-watched Sunday program in America, the most quoted news program in the world. Now in its 57^th year, Meet the Press is the longest-running program in the history of television.

Tim joined NBC News in 1984 after serving as chief counsel to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, whom he had helped elect in 1976. And I think one of the many examples of the respect Tim has achieved in covering politics and public affairs over the years is that he has moderated more debates among candidates for governor, of the Senate and of the Presidency than I think anyone else. He’s been showered with awards bearing the names of great journalists with whom he can be justly compared, including the Edward R. Murrow Award for overall excellence in television journalism, the Annenberg Center’s Walter Cronkite Award, the Allen Neuharth Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the David Brinkley Award for Excellence in Communications. And last year, Reader’s Digest named him America’s best interviewer; and in 2001, the Washingtonian Magazine called him the most influential journalist in Washington and Meet the Press the most interesting and important hour on television.

But Tim has never forgotten his roots in the working class Irish neighborhoods of Buffalo, and he has written movingly about what he learned from his father in his recent book, Big Russ and Me: Father and Son, Lessons of Life. I recommend it to all.

To moderate our conversation with Tim this evening, we’re very fortunate to have with us another leader in Washington journalism, Linda Wertheimer, National Public Radio’s senior national correspondent. For more than three decades, Linda has given us her clear-eyed analysis and thoughtful reporting of all the major issues of our time. For 13 years, she served as host of NPR’s All Things Considered, during which the show grew to more than 10 million listeners and one of the top five radio news programs in America. In 1976, she became the first woman to anchor network coverage of a presidential convention and since then, she’s anchored 10 conventions and 12 elections.

Linda has received numerous awards for her reporting, including the Silver Baton Award for her coverage of the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Award for her programs on the Iran Contra Congressional Hearings, the American Women in Radio and Television Award for a series entitled, Illegal Abortion, and the American Legion Award for her coverage of the Panama Canal treaties. Please join me then in welcoming Tim Russert and Linda Wertheimer to the stage of the Kennedy Library. (applause)

LINDA WERTHEIMER: Thank you all very much. I’m so impressed. I wanted to say that it really is an honor to be here, to be in Boston and to be at the Kennedy Library and to be here with Tim. I first met Tim when he was working for Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and he was famous—I’m sure he’d want me to tell you—for his absolutely dead on imitation for Senator Moynihan. (laughter) To the extent that a number of times—I mean, there are all kinds of stories about the Senator calling someone up and having this person say, "Can it, Russert, I don’t have time for this." and hanging up. (laughter) I'm not going to ask him to do it today, unless maybe we feel that we need him to—(laughter and applause) -- but we might wait and see if he can sort of channel the Senator on social security or something.

But I’d like to begin with one of the things that Tim is much more famous for, I think, particularly among journalists and certainly at least indirectly among all his listeners and viewers, and that is that he comes to his encounters with America’s leaders so very well prepared. You are famous for your homework. You very rarely ever are caught out, and I'm wondering how you prepare for a program? What you read, who you call, what do you do?

TIM RUSSERT: It really does flow back to the way I grew up in terms of the way I approach life and approach Meet the Press. John mentioned my dad, Big Russ. Quit school in the tenth grade to go fight World War II and sixty years ago last month was in this terrible plane crash and survived and spent six months in the hospital, then came home and started a second mission, to raise and educate his four kids. And there was an expectation that he had of us, and it was reinforced so much by my mother who insisted … we literally would sit around the kitchen table, the four of us, and we couldn’t trade our pencil for a fork until all of our homework was done. (laughter) There were no play dates. We went up the street and played and came back in, and that was it.

And then what happened was that school was all reinforced. Sister Mary Lucille, whose nickname ironically was sister Mary Kennedy because of her devotion to President Kennedy, summoned me to the front of the room by saying, "Timothy, we need an alternative vehicle to channel your excessive energy." (laughter) So she started a school newspaper and made me the editor, and one of the first things we did was wrote a special edition about the tragic assassination of President Kennedy.

But because of my work on that paper, I was admitted to Canisius Jesuit High School, far on the other side of the city, where I encountered Father John Sturm, the prefect of discipline, who put me against the lockers for some perceived indiscretion, and I said, "Father, please, don’t you believe in mercy?" He said, "Russert, mercy’s for God; I deliver justice." (laughter) So by then, I had a pretty good sense about discipline, preparation, accountability and I went through Canisius High School, four years of Latin, college, three years of law school, I take those lessons and apply them to what I do every day.

I get up at 5:30; I read six or seven newspapers. Either I’m on the Today Show or watch the first half hour of the Today Show. Go to work, call my correspondents to various beats and then start calling people I know and respect. I will call people at conservative think tanks, liberal think tanks, people who are smarter than I am in particular areas and say, "Explain this to me." Because what I want to be able to do is understand it in a way that I can explain it in a meaningful and understandable way to the viewers, people who work hard all week long, who don’t have the benefit or access to these very smart, intelligent people.

When I took over Meet the Press, Linda, Lawrence Spivak had been retired from it, and he founded Meet the Press. And I went to have lunch with him, and I said, "Larry, when you founded the program 57 years ago now, what was the mission? And how did you prepare yourself?" He said, "Learn as much as you can about your guest and his or her position on the issues and take the other side. And do that persistently, aggressively, but always in a civil way. Do it to Democrats and Republicans, liberals, conservatives, and people will watch every week and respect you for what you do." And I just tried to apply all those lessons of life from Mom, Dad, Sister Lucille, Father Sturm, Lawrence Spivak, and it’s on display every Sunday morning.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Do you think of it as pinning your guests down in a non-adversarial way, of course, but trying to pin them down?

MR. RUSSERT: I don’t think you can make tough decisions unless you answer tough questions. If you go back and read presidential histories, which I love to do, and presidential biographies, the staff will say, "As much as we didn't like it, we welcomed news conferences because we finally got the President to focus and come to closure." You're going to be asked about social security, you're going to be asked about Iraq, you're going to be asked about X subject. You need an answer. And so what has happened is that the politicians have adopted a lot of media training and spin control and things like this. And so it takes three or four questions in order to elicit information.

This past Sunday, I had Charles Grassley, the Republican Senator from Iowa who’s Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. The social security bill will go through his committee, and he was talking about Professor Bush going around and educating the American people. And I said, "Look Senator, the President has said he’s for private or personal accounts. But you know that they will not solve the financial problems confronting social security. In fact, they may add to it." He said, "Right," and I knew then that he was willing to be a little more candid. So I said, "So you know, Senator," flattering him somewhat, "that if a bill is to pass it will have to include for the remainder of the century, not current recipients but out years, benefit reductions or tax increases." He said, "Yes." I said, "Would the President sign such a bill? It would have private accounts but benefit reductions and tax increases?" He said, "Yes, he’d sign it." Well, I knew then the White House was breaking china.

MS. WERTHEIMER: I was going to say ballistic.

MR. RUSSERT: Yeah. But it was an honest, truthful answer and it’s important now in terms of debate that we have that benchmark. So it’s not gotcha, it’s not trying to get people. What it’s trying to do is draw them out with an honest answer so the American people will say, "Now, that's interesting. The Republican Chairman saying, ‘That's where it’s going to go."

MS. WERTHEIMER: He almost went beyond that. He basically said that the President was behaving—I mean, he didn't use this example, but like John the Baptist. He’s out there crying in the wilderness about how social security needs help, "But I," Senator Grassley said, "will figure out how to help this."

MR. RUSSERT: Yeah, he said, "Mr. President, you don’t have to send a specific legislation, we’ll take care of that." But he went on, "We cannot do it unless it’s bipartisan." And I haven’t heard that word, bipartisan, consensus, common ground, in a very long time.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Now, obviously we all watched last Sunday as part of our homework for this event, right? Social security, the President’s plan, is a departure for the President in that he has always tried, I think, to go for things that can be explained in a short, declarative sentence. (laughter) This program, whatever it is because he hasn’t quite laid it out for us yet, cannot be explained very easily. Now, both you and he have that problem because you're supposed to say something about it on television, which like radio, cannot be re-read. How do you do that?

MR. RUSSERT: You work at it. And the reason that I started using graphics on the show when I took over 13 years ago, was people said -- one of the executives at NBC said, "Why are you showing graphics on the screen? That's 1950s TV." I said, "What was wrong with ‘50s TV? It was black and white and understandable." At the 2000 election when I pulled out my little board and wrote "Florida, Florida, Florida," I was trying to explain to people that the electoral college was in play and that Florida was in play and this is how it was to be decided. And Tom Brokaw kept saying, "Well, we got six states … " I said, "Tom, Florida, this is it. No matter what happens in Florida, that's the winner."

So with social security, what the President is saying is first there was a crisis, now he said it’s a problem. But he’s suggesting the way to fix it is private or personal accounts because he understands, I believe, that to the next generation, they're much more comfortable with that prospect than is the Roosevelt generation, my dad’s generation. I also think there's a political motivation in this. Roosevelt, where I grew up, is still sainted because of social security. He made that program available for my grandma and grandpa, for my dad and my mom, and I believe that there are a lot of Republicans who believe that if George Bush is the one who can be responsible, the father of private or personal accounts, the next generation will be watching the market every day and be much more inclined to be Republican than they would be Democrat in terms of the social security system that they’re going to inherit.

Our job is to peel it away and say, "This is the situation. There are 40 million people on social security now. When the baby boomers retire … " We’re getting old. It’s hard to admit, but we're getting old.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Yeah, we’re getting there.

MR. RUSSERT: There's going to be 80 million. And people used to be on social security for … Roosevelt was a genius. He said the eligibility age of social security is 65. Why? That was life expectancy. If you made it to 65, you're on the program a few months and that was it, see you later. (laughter) Now the expectancy is 78, 79, 80. So there are going to be 40 million to 80 million people and they’re going to be on the system for 15 years. Something has to give. If you do nothing, you’d have to reduce benefits or increase the payroll tax unless there's a dramatic immigration boom with a lot more workers into the workforce paying the payroll tax. You can also have reductions in total increases or make them more accurate, depending on who you want to believe, there's lots of ways to tweak this. But the bottom line is Democrats or Republicans will privately acknowledge something must be done. The resistance to the President is going to be on the private accounts because they don’t want to have private accounts drawing money that would go to the payroll tax into the social security fund into the private accounts.

And the Democrats will say, I think justifiably, what if the private accounts tank? Then what's left for this person? You tell them to live on two-thirds of what they were going to expect as they turn 65, 70, 75 or 80? On the other hand Democrats, I think, will have a responsibility to say, "We’re against private or personal accounts, but we believe something must be done." And I think if I explained it in that way, and I’ll use some charts and graphs, I can make a dent in it.

I remember Ross Perot -- where is he?—1992, he came on Meet the Press, he says, "I can balance the budget," it was $400 billion. "I can balance the budget without breaking a sweat." I said, "Mr. Perot, you identified the problem, you’ve defined the problem, but now it’s Meet the Press, you're running for President, you're ahead of George Bush and Bill Clinton in the polls, let’s find the solution. Let’s go under that hood that you're so proud of and tell me, what are you going to do? What programs are you going to cut, what taxes are you going to increase?" "Now then, if you had told me you were going to ask me these kinds of questions—I mean, you're—you're supposed to tell me." I said, "This is Meet the Press. I’m not going to warn you what's coming up." (laughter) And it went back and forth, back and forth. He said, "I hope you think you proved your manhood." I said, "This had nothing to do with manhood."

So after the show was over, I had to get on a shuttle flight from Washington to New York, and the flight attendant ran down the aisle and she said, "My God, that interview with Ross Perot, what do you think of Ross Perot?" I said, "Ma’am, I never comment about my guests or their performance on the show, but I’m endlessly curious as a viewer, as a voter, as a flight attendant, what do you think of Ross Perot?" And she paused and said, "He strikes me as the kind of guy who would never return his tray table to the upright position." (laughter)

MS. WERTHEIMER: Now, this is a bond between us because something very similar happened to me when I interviewed Ross Perot. It was before we really began to think that perhaps … He was a very interesting candidate, but please God, don’t let him anywhere near the White House. (laughter) It was an interview in which he … I asked him an uncomfortable question about something he had done when he was in business to attempt to influence the Congress to give him an astronomic tax refund. You will remember this because it was Albert who broke the story in the Wall Street Journal and the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee was forced to resign, it was a big brouhaha.

MR. RUSSERT: Albert Hunt.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Right. And so I brought this up to him, and he started screaming at me. "Is this really a radio program? What is this radio program? This could be anything." And he just went on and on and on. He just completely lost it, and I’m sitting there sputtering. Your staff, by the way, says that’s as close to being discombobulated as you’ve ever been.

MR. RUSSERT: Well, I was just watching him and he kept saying, "Go ahead, go ahead, keep going." And I said, "Mr. Perot, I just asked you the question." He said, "Are you finished?" I said, "Yes, I’m finished. Go ahead," I said, "I’m finished." (laughter) It was a remarkable morning.

MS. WERTHEIMER: And that piece of tape obviously survives. They get it out and play it at every …

MR. RUSSERT: Oh, it’s there.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Mine, too. One of the things that I thought was interesting about …

MR. RUSSERT: My real favorite’s Yogi Berra.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Yeah?

MR. RUSSERT: Oh, this is the best. You got time for this?

MS. WERTHEIMER: Sure.

MR. RUSSERT: All right. All my life, I wanted … My boyhood, everybody liked Willy Mays and Mickey Mantle. I loved Yogi Berra, this little Italian kid from St. Louis. And I dreamt of getting his autograph; I never did because we were sitting in the nosebleed sections. And finally, I’ve gotten to meet him now and I’ve been to his museum, library in New Jersey. And I always wanted to ask him did he really say all the things they say he said. So I was there last month doing this thing with Roger Clemens and Whitey Ford and everybody. I said, "Yogi, did you …?" He said, "Like what?" I said, "Okay, it is said that you walked into a pizzeria and the waiter said, ‘Yogi, you want a pizza?’ And you said, yes. And he said, ‘Do you want it cut in six or eight slices?’ You said, ‘Six, I can’t eat eight.’" (laughter) And Yogi said, "Yeah?" So Whitey Ford says, "Tim, hold on. Let me tell you a true story about Yogi Berra. We’re playing the Chicago White Sox, I’m pitching, I had been out the night before with Mickey Mantle and I probably shouldn’t have been pitching. But first pitch, Nellie Fox singled to the right field. Second pitch, Louie Effericio (?) singled left field. Two pitches, runners to first and second. Third pitch, I hit Minnie Minoso. Bases loaded with three pitches. Pitched Ted Kluszewski, big power hitter, grand slam. Four pitches, four-nothing White Sox.

Casey Stengel, the Yankee manager, came from the dugout. Yogi came from behind home plate and took his mask off and Casey said, ‘Hey Yogi, does Whitey have his stuff tonight?’ Yogi said, ‘How the hell do I know? I haven't caught a ball yet.’" (laughter) Can’t make it up. So politicians are easy, let me tell you.

MS. WERTHEIMER: I think that is right, I think that's right. One of the ways in which you go after politicians in the nicest possible way, of course, is you quote. Either you often quote them, things they’ve said. You quote things that other people have said, you hold up these quotes and then you ask them to react to them. It seems to me that that's a relatively gentle way of not being the bad guy.

MR. RUSSERT: Yes. I don't want to be the person saying, you know, "I believe this and this agrees with you." And what I also found, Linda, it really does define the debate and limit the scope. When I first started, I had Dick Armey who was one of the Republican leaders in the House. And I said, "Mr. Armey, you said such and such." He said, "No, I didn't." And I didn't have … wasn’t using graphics. I said, "Yes, you did." He said, "Where?" I said, "Right here, in a press release." He said, "It’s in writing?" I said, "Yeah." He goes, "Okay." (laughter) I realized then why don’t I short circuit that and just put the quote on the board immediately and not have to keep extracting teeth like a root canal?

To this day, when I put something on the board and say, "Senator, you said three years ago that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, or whatever it was," to this day I’m amazed that more of them don’t say, "You know Tim, you're right. I absolutely did say that. And you know what? I’ve changed my mind. I’ve talked to people, I've studied the issue, I’ve been on the ground, and I really have changed my mind." What do you say? "No, you haven't." (laughter) There's no follow-up. And as opposed to, "Well, you know, what I really said there is that I had no intention of voting for … you know, having no intention is different than actually …" And they start splicing it and you think, "Oh, my God." And the viewer’s saying, "Please, fess up, tell the truth." And I think there's such a yearning for authenticity and for straight shooting that people would sit back and applaud saying, "Good for him. Yeah, he changed his mind, we all do."

MS. WERTHEIMER: At one point, you accused Senator Kerry, this was in, I think the … accuse is a strong word … But you suggested to Senator Kerry in the kind of exit interview after the … Just this year, you asked him if he was still arguing with himself about whatever it was. But the notion that he would be arguing with himself, I think, was a …

MR. RUSSERT: I think it was his response to the swift boat veterans, perhaps?

MS. WERTHEIMER: Uh-huh.

MR. RUSSERT: He was very candid about that, and that was a kind of nice moment. He said, "You know, I regret not being more aggressive and forceful about that." That was something … so many of these things I talk to my … my dad is so good. My dad is 81 years old, Big Russ now, and my mom, dad and three sisters all live in Buffalo, and they're not involved in the media or politics or anything. They all have real jobs. (laughter) You know, truck drivers and cab drivers and bankers. And they are the cheapest, most accurate focus group you could ever have, and they just tell you the unvarnished truth. And my dad said, "I don't get this. This guy went to one of those fancy schools, and he volunteered and went to Vietnam, and he got shot at, he got these medals and the other guy … Why is he the one being criticized?" This is my dad’s instinct. And I always marveled at … and this is early on, as soon as he heard it. And I figured, okay, here comes the Kerry campaign, they’re going to whack back really aggressively saying, "Just a second here. There's only one decorated veteran in this race, and if you want to take us on, let’s go." And it didn't happen. I think there was a sense, a hope that the issue would fade away. And I think it was used as a metaphor for a lot of other things that they tried to define Senator Kerry. In any event, it was kind of a nice moment when he said it’s one of the regrets he had.

MS. WERTHEIMER: All right. You quoted George Bush on the social security show. President Bush, in saying that … talking about private accounts, privatizing social security, and it was from the ‘70s, from his …

MR. RUSSERT: Yes, congressional campaign, which he lost. And when I interviewed him in 1999 when he was thinking of running for President, same thing, he repeated it. It’s something that’s been in his head a long time -- social security, transforming it into some form of private accounts. You know, it’s interesting, a lot of Democrats, including Bill Clinton and Al Gore, have had this idea of social security plus where you have designated accounts but they wouldn’t come out of the payroll tax. So you’d never interrupt that revenue stream, which I think would probably have a pretty good chance of passing right now. But clearly, 30 years ago President Bush had this idea of private or personal accounts regarding social security very much as part of his political portfolio.

MS. WERTHEIMER: And that was one of the things that I loved about that show -- that moment in which we realized when George Bush gets his teeth into an idea, you know, he gets his teeth into an idea. And I didn't remember that, and I was fascinated to hear it. At one point …

MR. RUSSERT: That's such an important point. If you watched this last campaign, and people see it through their own prism. The Democrats would say, "Oh, there goes Bush again," and Republicans would say, "Go get ‘em, Mr. President and Vice President." But the one thing Bush as a candidate was every single day was consistent. Now, as a journalist, it’s repetitive because he’ll say, "I was right about Iraq then and I’m right now. And the world’s better off because Saddam Hussein is gone, and it’s your money, not the government’s, and we’re going to cut your taxes." And he’d say it every day, and people would cheer and whoop it up.

The Democrats seem to have a difficult time reducing the message to that form. It's much more nuanced, much more complex, if you will. And it’s quite interesting to me to see, as we cover politics, are we able to give each of those candidates an opportunity to put forward their views in an ever-changing and quicker media environment? When John Kerry had a chance to lay out his views in presidential debates 90 minutes long, by all accounts, even Republicans said he did extremely well. And I think it was a valuable lesson for the Democrats to realize that when they're attacked or criticized, they have to respond, lesson one. But lesson two is get their views to a point where they can be articulated in a way that people understand them, nod their head and say, "Yes, now I know who you are." And it will be fascinating to see how that plays out in 2008, particularly on issues like moral values or cultural values, talk about values. I was really waiting for a Democrat to say, "Okay, you say these are traditional family values and I respect that. Now let me tell you what I as a Democrat believe are traditional family values -- the gospel of Christ, the Sermon on the Mount, taking care of the poor." Then people say, "Now, that's interesting. There's one view that is one view of religion and one role in life and … But there's another view of religion and the way it affects a person’s life." And I don't think we had that balance or kind of competing view. It was, okay, values -- that's the Republican side and the Democrats, well they're good on social security and some other issues.

MS. WERTHEIMER: We’re listening to the Democrats begin to take that kind of thing on. We’re listening to Hillary Clinton, for example, talking about abortion in a way that, you know, she’s not calling for Roe v. Wade to be overturned or anything, but she is suggesting that those people who hate the idea of abortion are not wrong.

MR. RUSSERT: I’ve heard her say that very clearly, and Howard Dean on Meet the Press said the same thing. John Kerry met with a group of supporters after the election and said, "We have to find a way to talk to people that we’re not just driving them away." It doesn’t mean you can’t have your views and adhere to them in a very fixed way, and yet open up the dialogue and debate.

It’s interesting that every Republican candidate for President said they support a constitutional amendment to ban all abortion. Or at least, if not a constitutional amendment, that is the ultimate goal. But what they’ve decided to do in terms of strategy is work on so-called partial birth abortion or third-term pregnancies, parental consent, do things more on the edges which are favored by 60 to 70 percent of the American people. And it kind of left the Democrats in a difficult situation where they're defending "abortion on demand" as opposed to trying to articulate a view which is probably not better, in some cases may be.

In politics, word are important and the way that you are able to communicate with people is central, I think, to your ability to not only be elected but to govern. And there's been a deficit in terms of the Democrats’ ability on those issues.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Now, one of the things that has been very difficult in covering big issues like social security on George Bush’s watch is that President Bush has said a number of things, repeatedly said a number of things, in which he lays out social security in a way that a lot of people don’t think is accurate. Now, we as reporters, our responsibility is to call him on it, but then when he says it six times a day every day for three weeks, what is the responsibility of reporters to do? How do you deal with that? How do you deal with things like weapons of mass destruction, the connection between the war in Iraq and the war on terror?

MR. RUSSERT: Well, I had an opportunity to sit down with the President in February. I expected to spend probably about 15 minutes on weapons of mass destruction. We wound up spending the first half of the show. And he finally acknowledged that yes, there were no weapons of mass destruction and I …

MS. WERTHEIMER: But there might have been?

MR. RUSSERT: Yeah, and they would have been ferreted out. But he said it didn't make any difference, he would still make the same decision. And I was very curious about that because it was, it was Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz who said there were many reasons to go to war with Iraq -- that he was providing aid to terrorists, that he violated the human rights of his people, but the one we settled on was weapons of mass destruction because we realized we could not convince the American people to send men and women to go die without that. And it was a quote in Vanity Fair which was very striking to me. And I almost asked the President that day, and this was to me a very important moment because I said, "Mr. President, now that you’ve said that there are no weapons of mass destruction, in hindsight do you believe the war in Iraq was a war of choice or necessity?" And the said, "That's an interesting question." (laughter) And it was, to me, really did crystallize what the debate had been all about. But to him, he said, "I believe it was a war of necessity even with the absence of weapons of mass destruction."

And I knew that moment, I said, "This is really something." Because he now is acknowledging that he wanted to go into Iraq and he would do so even if there had been no weapons of mass destruction, which was the primary rationale given to the country and the world.

MS. WERTHEIMER: And it took you, as you said, just about half an hour to work your way?

MR. RUSSERT: So how do you cover it on a daily basis? It’s hard because, you know, when the President says something you have to try to … You have to allow him the opportunity to say it, but you also have to say in your copy, if you're on the nightly news, "The President said this, but …" And you have to feel free to say it. Often, we will find somebody on the other side who will say, "That's just plain wrong." So you have a Republican view or a Democratic view.

For example, I asked Vice President Cheney whether there was any connection between Saddam Hussein and September 11^th. He said, "No." He said absolutely no. And yet, if you ask the American people today a majority still believes that the connection exists.

MS. WERTHEIMER: And I actually think … that was very soon after 9/11.

MR. RUSSERT: It was five days after, yeah.

MS. WERTHEIMER: And I think if you asked him a year later, he might have said that there was a connection.

MR. RUSSERT: I did, and he said it’s unclear. And he talked about the Czech agent meeting with the Iraqi agent in Prague. So it’s an issue that you just have to keep reporting on. It’s very hard because people … If you're a Democrat, people will say, "Oh, see Bush is not telling the truth, you should be putting him up hard on that." And vice versa. The Democrat says something, the Republicans are, "You should …" Our job is to say, "This is what the President said," or, "This is what the candidate said." And if it is something that just doesn’t compute with the truth or it’s unclear or uncertain, we have to offer that as well.

MS. WERTHEIMER: When you were sitting in the Oval Office talking to the President of the United States, his turf, no charts, no screen where you could put the quotes up, the most powerful man in the world and he says … He said to you in that interview, "I’m a war President, I make decisions here in the Oval Office, and then foreign policy with war on my mind," sitting behind his great big desk and as the President of the United States. I would think that would be a bit of a daunting experience to try to keep your mind on what you're trying to do?

MR. RUSSERT: You have to stay focused. I had the opportunity to interview President Bush and President Clinton in the Oval Office, and it is different than a lot of interviews. It’s not someone who’s candidate for President, it is the President, leader of the free world, whether it’s a Democrat or Republican. And you realize anything they say is going to have a profound effect on what happens in the country and the world. So I work on those questions very, very carefully, try to be as precise as I can.

I remember with President Clinton, I said, "Will you allow North Korea to become a nuclear power?" He said, "We have to be very clear about it. We cannot allow North Korea to acquire a nuclear bomb." And as soon as he said that, back then there were little bells on the computers, this was like in 1992, ‘93, bing, bing, it was worldwide. "Clinton says no to nukes in North Korea." It’s kind of ironic now in 2005 that the North Koreans are boasting about it.

So it's challenging, and you cannot allow the trappings or the circumstances or the location to any way inhibit your focus and questions. But you also have to walk a fine line and be mindful and respectful of the office. And I hope that with both Presidents I did that.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Now, the 9/11 interviews, the interviews in the aftermath of 9/11 are some of the most interesting that you did that I looked back at. You talked to Vice President Cheney the very next week and as you pointed out, he did say on that occasion that there was no connection between what happened on 9/11 and Saddam Hussein. I thought he was astoundingly candid. I mean, it was almost as if he was still in shock.

MR. RUSSERT: Yeah. It was at Camp David and again as I was driving up there, I called my dad. I said, "Dad, I’m on my way to Camp David to interview the Vice President." He said, "We haven’t heard from the Vice President in any long form." And I said, "What do you think?" He said, "Let him talk. I want to know what happened on that day. What was it like being in the White House." And boy, the instincts of my dad. As soon as I asked the Vice President one question, he said, "Well, let me tell you where I was, Tim. I was in my office and the Secret Service came in. They picked me up by my belt, my feet were off the floor. We went down one flight of stairs, two flights of stairs, three flights of stairs. There's a bunker under …" And as soon as he says there's a bunker, the Secret Service in the room are going like … you know? And I almost said, "What was the code you pushed on the wall?" (laughter) And I said, "What was the most important decision you made that day, Mr. Vice President?" And he said, "Well, it wasn’t a decision, it was a recommendation, but I recommended to the President and he accepted my recommendation and ordered that if any American civilian aircraft did not turn back from the Capitol or White House, they should be shot down." I almost fell out of the chair. It was the first time I had heard that, and I later learned that when the plane crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, there were many people in the White House bunker who thought it had been shot down by the U.S. military.

You know, just as an aside on that, I don’t know how much you’ve read of the September 11 Commission report, but those pilots …

MS. WERTHEIMER: If you haven’t, you should read it.

MR. RUSSERT: Oh, those pilots and those crew members and those passengers -- talk about American heroes. They just literally fought to death to get that plane into the ground in Pennsylvania. They were aware that a plane had hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, they knew they were headed for the Capitol or the White House, and they saved us all that anguish and agony. It's really remarkable, the people that … It really is. (applause) And it’s one of the great unknown challenges in life, how would you react in a situation like that? And we’ll never know until we’re there.

But in that interview, you're exactly right. The Vice President talks so candidly about his emotions, what he was going through, the scarcity of information. It was unlike any interview I had ever done, much different than the one that we did five days before the war in Iraq when I said … And I go back now, and I read it, and I still don't know why I said it the way I did, but it was there. I said, "Mr. Vice President, you said that we’ll be greeted as liberators. What if we’re not? What if there's a long, protracted, bloody resistance insurrection?" And he said, "Tim, you're wrong. We’ll be greeted as liberators." And it still haunts me when I think about how that played out.

MS. WERTHEIMER: The thing that I was amazed by that interview, and I must say that if you all have not looked at the 9/11 Report which is, as you know, one of the few Government Printing Office best sellers in this country, it is a wonderful thing to read in terms of getting a good, clear picture of what happened on that day. And one of the things it says in the report was that the air traffic controllers would not have been able to imagine that they would have been able to do what they did, considering the information they had. And that is to get every airliner down as fast as they did. They got them out of the area, they got them down on the ground. I mean, when they looked at it afterwards, none of them could believe that they had actually managed to do it. And, of course, they had no idea that if they had not managed to do it, one of those planes might have been shot down.

MR. RUSSERT: Shot down, yes.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Let me ask you how you think we’re doing in Iraq?

MR. RUSSERT: Well, I don't offer my own opinions, but I can tell you what people who I trust and talk to on the ground say. It is still a very uncertain country in terms of what's going to happen. Clearly, the turnout in the vote, over eight million Iraqis holding up their fingers with their purple stains, obviously, a very important symbol. And a demonstration that certainly in the south and the north, there was a real hunger to express a yearning for democracy, much less so in the Sunni areas.

It is one of those things in terms of policy and politics that the way I’ve tried to cut through it with Democrats and Republicans, rather than have them argue about time tables and exit strategy, is to just be honest by saying there is only one exit strategy. The only exit strategy we have is to train enough Iraqis in the military and police forces so that we can leave. And the question is how long will that take? But I think the deeper question is is it doable? Is it possible? Are there 200,000 Iraqis who are willing to spill their blood for their new government? And we do not know that yet. And there are now 40,000 we know of, but it’s got to be five times that. And until that question … and you can’t train will, you can’t train love of country. It is people who have to come to it and say, "This is who we are. I’m an Iraqi, and I’m going to die for my country, sign me up." And as the force becomes capable of defending the borders and putting off the insurgency, America will begin to get out.

And that's the honest truth and the honest analysis that I get from the Pentagon people, people on the ground, reporters and politicians. And I don’t know what's going to happen. And you know what? They don’t, either.

MS. WERTHEIMER: According to Andy Kohut in the Pew Center for the People in the Press, that is the view of the American people as well -- that we have to give them their shot. We have to stay as long as we can, train as many people as we can and so forth.

MR. RUSSERT: There was a lot of concern before the election that the American patience was being …

MS. WERTHEIMER: That we’d run out, right?

MR. RUSSERT: Was being strained, certainly, and was lessening. And the White House, I know people very close to the President’s thinking who said no one believed that the election would turn out as well as it did; they didn’t know what to expect. And now they're trying to take advantage of that. You know, I love this idea -- just as someone who loves to cover politics -- that to see the Shiites and the Sunnis and the Kurds trying to put it together. Some good, old-fashioned sit around the table brokering. I mean, I wish Tip O’Neill was alive right now. (laughter) We could send Tip to Iraq, put together a government. My guess is he’d be the Speaker, but that's okay, yeah. "Hey, Ayatollah, baby, how you doin’?" (laughter)

MS. WERTHEIMER: When you look back at the 2004 campaign, how do you think we did, we the press did? Did it show you anything new about how we ought to be covering politics?

MR. RUSSERT: Yes. The most important thing we did, I think we learned a lot from previous presidential cycles. After the ’88 race, I wrote a piece for the New York Times because I said never again should we simply become slaves or hostages to photo ops. Here’s George Bush at the Boston Harbor. It has to be George Bush came to the Boston Harbor today and said it was not as clean as it should be and criticized Mike Dukakis. But here's an analysis of the Reagan-Bush Administration’s record on the environment. You can’t do one without the other. And we’ve gotten much better at that, particularly in this last cycle.

The second thing we did was do a lot more ad watching, truth watching, taking the political ads or the internet ads and dissecting them and trying to put them out there in a form that was understandable to the American people. The difficulty was the politicians would take it and say, "NBC says this charge was wrong." Well, yeah we did, but we said the other three charges were true. And so it’s constantly … It’s like mercury, it just keeps going across the table and you're trying to put it all back in the tube.

I think the one thing that we also learned this cycle was that there are a lot more ads that the campaigns would say they were going to put on the air, but the only purpose in having them was having a news conference. They wanted us to put it on the newscast without having to pay for it in terms of the networks. And so we were quite good at that, saying "They have an ad that has no buy associated with it."

MS. WERTHEIMER: Show me the buy.

MR. RUSSERT: Show me the buy, show me the money. And I think the last thing we learned is that the information spectrum has exploded. There are the three major networks, there's 24 hour cable, there's the talk radio, the internet, the bloggers, everybody. But I think we have to be very careful that we don’t become afraid of that. It’s nothing to be afraid of. It is what it is, it’s real, and it’s part of our life, and the American people understand that. They know when they see someone on Meet the Press it’s different than watching someone on O’Reilly or on Larry King. They really have a very good radar detector, and they know that Rush Limbaugh has a point of view and Al Franken has a point of view. They know that bloggers do not have the same vetting processes that we have in the more traditional news shows. They know that drudge is a repository for looking at things and seeing whether or not they get legs. That’s the biggest difference. There was a screening process where something would come out, like a book like the swift boat veterans where it would be read and analyzed and dissected, and before it made the media there would be a vetting process done by the media. Now it’s just out there, and it took several weeks after the book for the major media organizations to do an analysis of it and found some shortcomings in the book and some unanswered questions. No longer do you have that luxury of waiting. I think we in the mainstream media will wait, but the American public will no longer have to wait for the mainstream media. They will see these charges and accusations made immediately, and what they have to do, and I think have done, is say, "You know what? Okay, I read that on drudge or I heard it on talk radio, but let me spend some more time trying to figure this out."

MS. WERTHEIMER: One of the things that I’ve always thought was so difficult in trying to do truth squading on ads and in other ways try to hold candidates to the mark in terms of what they're saying -- one of the things I’ve always thought was difficult is that you can say it on nightly news or Meet the Press one time, but the ad is going to go on and on and on. It’ll be a drum beat and we will all talk about it once, but it will go on with its own life.

MR. RUSSERT: Yeah, there's no doubt about it. If people want to keep putting out a paid ad and repeating it, repeating it, repeating it, we can say it’s inaccurate or wrong, and will more people see the ad? Probably. That's why candidates have now taken it upon themselves to respond. They have to go ad for ad. We can only do what we can do. We can cover both sides the best we can, but if a candidate wants to do something that is dishonest, they're going to do it. And his opponent will try to make an issue of it. Sometimes there are consequences and other times there are not.

You know, when I took over Sunday morning I went to see David Brinkley who I count in my profession and for 20 years on ABC Sunday morning as one of the best, and I said, "David, these kinds of questions." And I said, "Also, how do you take everything you learn during the course of a week and distill it into one hour on a Sunday morning?" He said, "You don’t. Understand the limits of your profession, limits of your medium, television. But you still have an oasis, it’s an hour, more than most other programs have. But television seems to gravitate to conflict rather than nuance and complexity, and you got to be aware of that. But above all else, accept your limitations." He said, "For example, if Moses came down from the mountain top with the Ten Commandments in 2005, how would television news report that? Moses came down from the mountain top today with the Ten Commandments. Here’s Sam Donaldson with the three most important." (laughter) So I understand the limits of my profession, but it won’t in any way deter or dissuade me from trying to make sense of it.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Well, I was going to say on that program that we were talking about earlier on social security, you backed that program up with … The back half of that program, was a discussion between Pat Buchanan and …

MR. RUSSERT: Natan Sharansky.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Natan Sharansky, basically, was sort of an enormously philosophical and serious intellectual discussion?

MR. RUSSERT: Yeah. You know, President Bush has said that if you want to understand his foreign policy, you should read Sharansky’s book The Case for Democracy. So I went out and got it and read it. And it has a very idealistic view that if you can go around the world and eliminate tyranny and dictatorships and replace it with democracies, you will have a terrorist-free world.

MS. WERTHEIMER: This is the Johnny Appleseed effect that the President talked about in his inaugural address?

MR. RUSSERT: Yes. No, but I mean it’s a very … It’s his view, and Sharansky went to the Oval Office and gave him the book; they really embraced and the President believes it deeply. I was quite interested in the application of the doctrine, and I was reading about Sharansky when he was a refusenik. He spent eight years in a prison in the Soviet Union, terrible place for those eight years, awful. And his wife held the flame and Ronald Reagan engineered a deal in which he was released, he was then Anatoly Sharansky, his Russian name. And he went to the Oval Office where he was greeted by Ronald Reagan and one Pat Buchanan who was working for Ronald Reagan.

I had read enough of Buchanan’s writings where his view is very much diametrically opposed to this. He does not believe you can go around and replace tyranny with democracies. In fact, Richard Nixon had détente with the Soviet Union and reached out to the Communist Chinese and right now we’re using Musharraf in Pakistan to help us on the war on terror, we’re using Mubarak in Egypt to help us broker a Middle East peace, the King of Jordan the same, and there are many times where you want to have a single view about human rights policies; Jimmy Carter did, single standard on human rights. But many times in terms of geopolitics chess, it surrenders -- that's the Buchanan view.

And I said, "I wonder if they’d sit down with each other and talk about this?" And they did, and they were respectful of each other and it was one of the best discussions. And Buchanan …

MR. RUSSERT: [inaudible] … out on the West Bank. And Sharansky said, "As long as they can protect and respect our right to exist." We were deluged with emails and letters and phone calls asking for the transcript, asking for the video tape, and it really gave me a sense that this is what television can do if you just have two people who have very strong opinions and different views who are willing to stop and let the other person respond as opposed to screaming and yelling and personalizing every discussion. I can’t tell you how many times I turn off the TV. Just stop screaming at each other, what are you doing? And it was really kind of a … Something I want to do more of, yeah.

MS. WERTHEIMER: You might want to get in line if you have a question that you want to ask because right after I ask this question, you guys get to take a turn.

MR. RUSSERT: We’re going to play Beat the Press; here we go. (laughter)

MS. WERTHEIMER: Let me ask you -- I suppose the conversation with Mr. Cheney would come very close -- was that the biggest news made on Meet the Press? What was the biggest news on Meet the Press on your watch?

MR. RUSSERT: The interview with Vice President Cheney five days after September 11^th. And the interview with President Clinton and President Bush in the Oval Office. Huge audiences, front page coverage of interviews. And one other interesting interview was Newt Gingrich. He had just become Speaker, and he really did … (laughter) … I knew it was going to be an interesting interview when we were ready to go on camera and he said, "Do you know they’re reading The Contract of America in Mongolia?" I said, "Whoa, man, this guy’s a believer." (laughter) And he gave the interview, and the next day there were five front page stories on five different subjects. I mean, the quotations from Chairman Newt, he was letting it rip and that was a very memorable one.

Another show that I did after September 11^th at Christmas time was with Rudy Giuliani, Laura Bush and Cardinal McCarrick. And then the following year, Laura Bush and Caroline Kennedy. They were totally different shows. They were not in any … no graphics or political questions. It was more trying to take the tone of our country and talk about what had happened in cultural terms, spiritual terms, and both of those in my mind are ones that I will save forever.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Okay, let’s start here.

AUDIENCE: Thank you. Mr. Russert, you mentioned that you do a fair bit of research for the questions that you pose to the guests on your show. And I’m wondering if from your experience, you've ever seen anyone accurately project a federal deficit three or four years out? And if not, why does the press give time to folks who suggest that they can actually do it?

MR. RUSSERT: Well, it’s interesting. The projections are not exactly on target, but the trends clearly are, they clearly are. I mean, very few people would say that if President Clinton had not reduced spending and raised taxes there would not have been the surplus ultimately generated. So you do the best you can as benchmarks. You know, it does open up the whole issue of whether deficits matter or not. But you use the best information available. And if you have the OMB, the Office of Management Budget of the White House, the Congressional Budget Office, and the leading firms on Wall Street all making very similar projections. I think we have an obligation to say this is the best information available. There are some people, and you can cite them, who say they don’t matter, and this is meaningless, and it’s a wasted exercise, and that view is one that we’ve obviously put on the air.

AUDIENCE: Mr. Russert, the insurrection in Iraq has been going on for almost two years now. In order to do this, it would require the insurgents to have a huge amount of supplies of arms and ammunition and perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars in financing. But I’ve never heard a discussion of what the source of all of that support is. And the press seems to be reluctant to attack that question. Can you perhaps shed some light on that?

MR. RUSSERT: I actually asked Secretary Rumsfeld about the insurrection -- how large it was and how was it being funded. And I cited to him a quote from the National Security Advisor of the interim Iraqi government who said that the insurrection is 200,000 larger than the American military presence. And Rumsfeld said, "I’ve never heard that, I don’t believe that." But in our experience in wars, an insurrection cannot exist on its own energy’ it needs to be protected and supplied. And, clearly, there is … Some can be traced back to extremists, terrorists crossing over the borders into Iraq. But clearly there are a lot of people in Iraq, particularly in the Sunni areas, Baathists, Saddam supporters, who are holding on and who are very much part of the insurrections. We’ve been quite good in the north and the Kurdish areas and the Shiite areas down south limiting it to sporadic attacks. But make no mistake about it, the road from the airport in Baghdad to the green zone where all the American officers and the interim government is housed can still not be traveled by automobile. And you could not do that with just a handful of people.

I was asking Secretary Rumsfeld about his comment a year ago that this was 10 or 20 dead-enders in small pockets. It’s clearly much deeper and broader than that. And the election, I think, demonstrated that when there's only a 5 percent turnout in some precincts in the Sunni areas as opposed to a 70 percent turnout.

AUDIENCE: Any hint that the support may be coming from outside Iraq?

MR. RUSSERT: Some is, sure, yeah. And there's no doubt … and we have talked about the al-Qaeda presence in terms of financing and support. Obviously, Syria – as has been suggested by this administration -- continues to provide monies and resources. But there's also clearly internal support for people who do not want to see the Shiites or the Kurds running the country.

MS. WERTHEIMER: And on this side?

AUDIENCE: Welcome, Mr. Russert.

MR. RUSSERT: Thank you.

MS. WERTHEIMER: I hope that's not a two page question.

AUDIENCE: Sorry?

MS. WERTHEIMER: I hope that's not a two page question you're holding, looking at your notes. (laughter)

AUDIENCE: It’s just a two part question. The first is about your surprise, I believe, that none of the moderators or questioners in the last election, presidential election, asked a question about energy or environment. I thought that that was pretty … If it was asked, it was rather fleeting. The City of Boston has just established a department called the Environment and Energy Department and part of it is because of the worry and concern about LNG tankers in a highly populated major city.

This is the second part. On values, I'm very intrigued with the idea that we can bring democracy and write a constitution for people, Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis and so forth, in a diverse culture of seven thousand years old, and yet the past over quarter century right in the western society’s back yard in Ireland can’t get things straight or get an established government, even though there have been no bombings in over seven years.

Finally, your point about Mr. Cheney being lifted off his feet after 9/11. I wonder how he wasn't lifted to take action since it was delegated to him by the President of the United States in May of 2001 following the Hart-Rudman warnings saying that the attack was going to happen in the United States and this 14 member commission included Andrew Young on the left to Newt Gingrich, whom you mentioned earlier on the right, unanimously. Yet, the recent 9/11 report says, "Hey, we all believed it was going to be overseas. Blame it on Clinton. They had eight years, we only had eight months." Now, I went to school and I understand the eight months follows eight years.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Thanks.

MR. RUSSERT: Actually, Hart-Rudman I had on Meet the Press to introduce that report to the American public. And your point is well taken. Vice President Cheney had created a task force, but it had not met before September 11, 2001.

In terms of energy and questions, I had a long interview with Tom Friedman on CNBC two weeks ago. Friedman has written a very provocative column about energy independence, that if we’re truly serious about reshaping and remaking the world and weaning ourselves off of oil, he put forward … he suggested a Manhattan Project in terms of fuel cells and other issues. The press has to make tough decisions in a 90 minute debate, particularly in the middle of a war, as to what issues are real and not real or important or not important at that particular time. I point to the 2000 presidential elections when the word al-Qaeda never came up, the word terrorism was only mentioned twice in all three debates, and how quickly that changed after September 11^th.

So we’re not perfect and the candidates really do set the agenda in terms of what issues are relevant to that particular campaign. I wish we had a lot more debates, a lot more time because I think energy and energy independence is a very legitimate issue for Democrats and Republicans to show their views.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Ireland?

MR. RUSSERT: Ireland is a … I mean, I’ve been there so many times myself. I’m of Irish/Irish background. President Clinton clearly invested a lot of time in that particular issue and George Mitchell, former Secretary of State. It now seems to be at an impasse; whether it’s because Prime Minister Blair and President Bush have been more distracted by Iraq and focusing on that, I don't know. My sense is it really does take the American President and the British Prime Minister to really get hold and say, "This is going to be the top priority." And again, after September 11^th, other areas sort of surfaced.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Over here?

AUDIENCE: Hi, Mr. Russert. I’m Lea Takko (?), senior staff writer and reporter for the Boston Teens in Print. And it’s a newspaper distributed widely to all the Boston public schools. And my question for you is what political issues do you think our paper should be covering?

MR. RUSSERT: What political issues?

AUDIENCE: Uh-huh?

MR. RUSSERT: Obviously, the war in Iraq, the social security debate, the tax reform debate. I also think the whole issue -- and I touched upon this lightly -- about bipartisanship and the acrimony that exists in Washington. Right now we have in the House of Representatives 435 seats, about 400 of those members really don’t have to worry about reelection. They are safe seats. There are only 35 truly competitive seats. So you have a situation where those 400 members are much more worried about a possible primary in their own party. So the Republicans ... you're Republican, you're watching your right flank. If you're a Democrat, you're watching your left flank, and there's really no incentive for you to go out and do something risky by compromise or consensus, something that would help you in a general election by appealing to swing independent voters because you don’t have to worry about a general election.

And I don't know what to do about that, but I do think it’s a serious and legitimate issue. I remember a time when I watched Barry Goldwater and Hubert Humphrey have very vigorous and robust debates on the floor and then retreat into the cloakrooms and work things out. I’ve watched first hand Barry Goldwater, the Chairman of the Intelligence Committee, and Pat Moynihan, the Vice Chairman, unify together, challenge William Casey, the Director of the CIA about the bombing of the harbors in Managua, Nicaragua. Those are the kinds of things that are so necessary. You cannot have a government that is responsive to what is now almost 300 million people without finding common ground in consensus and respect for one another’s views. And I really, really wish we’d spend more time talking about that, reporting on that, as to what has happened and why. And people will say, "Well, the media’s part of the problem." I agree with that, yes I do, but that's part of your reporting.

AUDIENCE: Thank you.

AUDIENCE: Good evening, Mr. Russert. My name is Billy Glucroth (?), I’m a freshman journalism major at Emerson College. First of all, thanks for coming to Boston on my birthday. That was nice of you.

MR. RUSSERT: Happy birthday! (singing)

AUDIENCE: Oh God, no. (laughter) Where do I go from there? I believe it was either the Sunday or two Sundays before the Iraqi election -- and for me if it’s Sunday, it’s Meet the Press. And for whatever reason, Meet the Press wasn’t on locally. Either the Patriots or the blizzard or something had trumped Meet the Press. So I turned on Face the Nation and on Face the Nation was John Negroponte, and at a commercial I put on whatever was on Fox and they had on John Negroponte. And I caught the repeat of Meet the Press that night and you had on John Negroponte. (laughter) And I was wondering, your reaction to the impact on the public and on the media seems to becoming just more news disseminators instead of news gatherers and we’re all just kind of reporting the same things and we’re not really expanding our views and what's that doing to sort of society as a whole?

MR. RUSSERT: Yeah, it’s frustrating because you’d obviously like to have a guest exclusively. Sometimes in a situation where Negroponte, the American Ambassador to Iraq, is made available -- they want to make him available to all the networks because he doesn’t do it very often and you have to make a decision as to whether or not you want to do it or not. You hope you do it differently and better. He’s no doubt trying to get a point of view out, a message out, and you try to knock him off the spin track, if you will, and draw him out by asking fair but instructive and revealing questions.

In our profession, we refer to it as a full Ginsburg. William Ginsburg, Monica Lewinsky’s attorney, was the first guy to drive around to all five Sunday morning shows. So from hence day, it’s been called a full Ginsburg. (laughter) And I would prefer never to be part of a full Ginsburg.

MS. WERTHEIMER: This is a derivation of something called the full Cleveland.

MR. RUSSERT: (laughter) That's right.

MS. WERTHEIMER: The full Cleveland is, say, a hack politician in a pale blue, polyester suit with white patent leather shoes and a white patent leather belt. That's a full Cleveland.

MR. RUSSERT: I’m from Buffalo, it sounds pretty good. (laughter) Go Bills.

AUDIENCE: My name is Theresa Toohey (?), and I got to hear you speak at Boston College about a year ago on reform of the church. My question is I was frustrated with the lack of coverage during the presidential campaign of … I heard you speak recently on morning radio about this … Specifically, Mrs. Heinz was a really strong participant in the rebuilding of the city of Pittsburgh with her help of the Catholic charities and the Catholic bishops back in the 1980s. I know that because I grew up in Pennsylvania, in the other part of the state in Philadelphia and moved up here to attend Boston College 15 years ago.

I’m particularly concerned as an active Democrat on how we as a party can start talking about our faith and how it informs our policy decisions, the type of politicians we support, and the type of life that we lead. And I think that Karl Rove deserves a lot of credit for getting George Bush elected because he mobilized the Christian right and I think the Democrats are really in trouble because we’re not doing that type of work. I would like your suggestions on what people in the Democratic Party … what steps you think we should take in starting to talk about these issues?

MR. RUSSERT: Well, I’m not in the business of providing advice.

AUDIENCE: No, I realize that, but you're really clear about your own faith is what I'm saying.

MR. RUSSERT: But I believe very strongly that what you just said and defined is a political problem confronting the Democrats and we started off, I think, our conversation with that. When John Kerry said that this is the most important election in our lifetime, Republicans heard him say that as well. The view was that if there were 116 million voters, John Kerry would win. People at the White House told me if there were 118 million voters, we’re not going to win. There were over 120. The Republicans turned out, huge, vast numbers.

AUDIENCE: Yes, they did.

MR. RUSSERT: And the President’s talking about a good heart and about finding Christ; that resonated with a whole lot of people. Now, in my own life, I wrote this book that John mentioned Big Russ and Me.

AUDIENCE: I gave it to my dad for Father’s Day.

MR. RUSSERT: Thank you. And I talked very openly about the way I grew up and the role of being a Catholic had in my upbringing and has in my life now today. And I didn't know how people would react to it. I really didn't care, to be honest with you, because I wanted to write this about my dad and affirm his life and I couldn’t do it in a way without talking about that.

I have been astounded the way the book has resonated. As I went around the country, people would be lined up and say, "Would you make this out to Big Mike, he’s my dad." And then it was Big Fred, then Big Mario, then Big Jose, then Big Irv. And I said, "I’m on to something here." (laughter) But the point was that we all have this amazing common heritage and upbringing. And whether you happen to be Catholic or non-Catholic or Jewish, it doesn’t matter. People really had a sense of right and wrong in their families -- accountability, responsibility, discipline, perseverance, and it's nothing to shy away from.

And so as I began to write the book, I began to talk about it very openly, about … and I wrote a letter to my son at the end of it because after I reread the book, I realized the book was as much for him as it was for my dad. And I said to Luke, "In my mind I will be judged ultimately by what kind of father I was to you, and the same lessons that I learned in the Catholic schools and my parents I’m trying to pass on to you. And that you have had a life of so much more opportunity and access and privilege that I ever dreamt of. And that while you're always, always loved, you're never, never entitled." And it was the central thesis of that book and it talked openly about the fact there's a world beyond yourself. And I quoted St. Luke, that to whom much is given, much is expected. And I said if I could give you any advice when you go off to school, study hard, laugh often, and keep your honor. And are those values? Of course they are, and there's nothing to be ashamed of. And if people say, "Well, it’s too religious and we shouldn’t have it in the public square." People can say I’m an atheist. I know atheists, I know agnostics; I respect them for their views. But they respect me, too.

And I think the most important thing that any political person can do, whether you're Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative, is speak with conviction and passion and authenticity. "This is who I am and why I believe this." (applause)

AUDIENCE: Thank you so much.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Over here?

AUDIENCE: My question, Mr. Russert, is about if I was listening to you carefully about our justification, when you were talking to the President about going to war, you mentioned when you were speaking to him about the absence of the presence of weapons of mass destruction. There were other good reasons for going to war, according to him or people who he was speaking to, with support for terrorism as well as humanitarian, gassing of the Kurds, things of that nature. Now, last week I went out and saw a disturbing movie that perhaps you've seen, or many people in the audience have seen, called "The Hotel Rwanda." President Clinton mentioned that one of the worst mistakes he made in his administration was doing nothing about the Rwandan genocide of 1994. And my question is if another Rwanda breaks out tomorrow and nearly a million people lose their lives in a matter of months, do you think that the Bush Administration would go out and declare war on the offending party? That’s my question.

MR. RUSSERT: I understand. It is a debate I have watched unfold over Bosnia, same discussion. In fact, President Clinton went to the United Nations and said we are seeing, in effect, cleansing and it must be stopped. The U.N. said no. The United States went in to Bosnia without U.N. approval. If you go to the Sudan now, you can find this in so many places around the world only when it rises to an area of crisis. Do I believe Iraq was treated differently because of where it is in the Middle East? The answer is yes, absolutely. That's the political reality which I cover. And yet, I also know when I first started at NBC in 1984, I was sitting with Tom Brokaw in New York and this picture came in, a BCC report about Ethiopia, the famine. It was a seven minute report by Michael … I can’t remember, a wonderful reporter … And we sat there and looked and said, "Oh, my God." And we’re 12 days out, I think, from the presidential race. And Tom said, "We got to put this on." I said, "Let’s just do it. We don’t have time to get our reporters over there, these people are dying, let’s just put it up."

And we put it on and within three days, Americans contributed $65 million. That's the power you can have when you put the spotlight on that kind of crisis. So I'm not going to make a political judgment as to who would declare war or not, but the one thing I will say is that if you have a passion, an interest, a concern, about any place in the world or any issue, yell. Yell from the mountaintop. Let people hear it because it’s the only way that any attention will be paid. So many things get caught underground and it only will surface when there's someone there who’s saying, "I’m willing to take this on." And it’s tough work. You go back -- and I was doing a lot of research on Martin Luther King the other day and how many years he spent driving around from town to town with civil disobedience trying to get attention paid to the plight of African-Americans. We all remember the great speech in Washington on the steps of the monument, but it’s not the way it is. It takes a long time, lot of years in the vineyards. But it should not in any way discourage you, because people now with the internet and with cable, you can explode on the scene much more quickly than you could in the past.

AUDIENCE: Thank you.

MR. RUSSERT: Thank you.

AUDIENCE: My name is Laura Sabrew (?), and I’m also a Teens In Print Boston newspaper writer for the … It’s like for high school newspaper. And my question would be how can young people get more involved in political issues that concern them?

MR. RUSSERT: By doing exactly what you're doing. You know, I could not be the moderator of Meet the Press if I had not been the editor of my seventh grade newspaper. It would not have happened, believe me. When I wrote that special edition about President Kennedy and sent it to Washington, you have no idea how far it was from St. Bonaventure School in South Buffalo, New York, to Washington, D.C. I had never been to Washington in my life. I didn't know anybody who had been except the Congressman, Congressman Dulsky (?). And suddenly we got letters back from Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General, Jacqueline Kennedy, the First Lady, President Johnson saying, "Thank you for your school newspaper." It opened my mind in a way I never dreamt of. My God, people pay attention to us? This is the way it is?

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who grew up in New York and then later became a Harvard professor, lived in two worlds in much of his life and understood them very, very well. I was sitting in his office one time and there was a big debate going on with some people who had graduated from Harvard and were now on his staff. And they were going on and on about discussions of political theory and philosophy, all of which were quite interesting. But I was working on legislation which was going to get the tolls off the New York State Throughway, which is a big deal in upstate New York. And I was getting a little bit irritated.

Finally, I was so exasperated, I said, "Senator, I don't think I’m cut out for this. I'm trying to be a realist in this world and get some things done and these guys got their heads up in the clouds," or some place. (laughter) He said, "Walk with me." And he put his arm around me and we walked down the hall. He said, "Let me tell you something. You grew up the way you did. Your dad was a truck driver and a garbage man. You did the same jobs working your way through college, driving taxis, making pizzas. But you did it because you wanted to get an education, you wanted to grow and be engaged in public life in some way as a journalist in the public office. Always remember this," he said. "What they know, you can always learn. But what you know and learn on the streets, they’ll never learn." It changed my life. (applause)

AUDIENCE: Thank you.

MS. WERTHEIMER: I think we're getting very close to the end here, so I think we’ll have just two more questions, and my apologies to people who are left in line. Go ahead.

AUDIENCE: Yes, my name is David Smith. I’m a professor at a college south of Boston. And one of the things I’d like to say is I appreciate you, Mr. Russet, for the hard questions that you ask and your candor. And one of the things I would like to ask you is why is it that someone … I hear you talk about Vice President Cheney, and the aftermath of 9/11, and the turmoil that was going on at that time, and that all commercial flights and private flights were grounded around the United States. But yet I read these side stories about the Saudis leaving the country, every one of them was ushered out with the auspices of the United States and all of the Osama bin Laden family was taken out before we could question them. And I have never heard a question being put to our President or Cheney about this and why did they allow this to happen? And why do we tiptoe around Saudi Arabia like they are the sacred cow, and we don’t put them to the task and answer these questions about their involvement?

MR. RUSSERT: I would ask you to read two things: one is the September 11^th Commission Report, which talks about this issue in great detail because Michael Moore talked about it in his movie. The Commission Report really does a timeline as to when the flights were grounded, when they were allowed to enter private air space. The FBI insists there were questions asked of the bin Laden family.

Secondly, I had the Ambassador from Saudi Arabia on Meet the Press. I implore you to read that because I went through chapter and verse on this subject. He went to the White House the day after September 11^th, smoked a cigar on the Truman balcony with the President. I asked if he ever raised the subject, he insisted no. It’s really there in the public domain, it really is. I promise you that. Thank you.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Okay, this is going to be the last question.

AUDIENCE: My name is Joshua Lowen (?) and I’m also a staff writer for Boston Teens in Print. This is a two part question. All right …

MR. RUSSERT: You guys are ganging up. What is this, huh? Two against one?

MS. WERTHEIMER: Ganging up. Make it fast.

AUDIENCE: All right. What advice do you have for young reporters on being professional when interviewing people?

MR. RUSSERT: What advice do I have for young reporters?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

AUDIENCE: And my question is—(laughter) What was the worst interview you ever had? The worst interview you ever had?

MR. RUSSERT: The worst? Where do I begin? (laughter) I’ll tell you the most embarrassing moment. I had Senator Bob Kerry, who was a Vietnam veteran, who had lost his leg in Vietnam. And he was there and there was a big debate as to whether or not he would vote for President Clinton’s budget plan. And he was concerned that he would vote for it and then the House would not vote for it and he’d be left exposed politically. And as my mind was racing, trying to do all these questions, and I began to mix metaphors. And I said, "What if President Clinton puts you out on a limb and saws your leg off?" (laughter) And without missing a beat he says, "I’ve already had one sawn off." Well, I turned about as red as this tie. I said, "Oh, I am so sorry." And he said, "I own you." (laughter) But, you know, you make mistakes and I apologized to him, I apologized to the viewers, and you just pick yourself up and dust yourself off and avoid metaphors.

MS. WERTHEIMER: Which is also pretty much the answer to the other question, you do the work.

MR. RUSSERT: Yeah. Being a reporter, it’s the greatest work you can possibly imagine. It’s a vocation, but you can’t phone it in. You got to go there. You got to come to events like this and all around the city. Don’t take someone’s word for it. Don’t have someone say, "Hey, this is what happened." "Really? That's your view, who else was there?" Get two sources, three sources, four sources. Get both sides of the debate, both sides of the argument. Then you sit down and say, "She said this, he said this, these are the facts as we see them. The police offered this particular view." It’s so important that you go to the facts, and you have to take your own opinions away if you want to be real journalists. You have your own instincts, you have your own values, you know the way you grew up. But you set those aside and really try to get an honest explanation as to what happened.

There is nothing more satisfying in the world than being in a country, one of the very few countries in the world where your right as a journalist is protected by the Constitution. I’m on a crew called the Newseum. And it’s a museum for journalists, and we have the last open spot on Pennsylvania Avenue, it’s 6^th and Pennsylvania. And I had an idea. I said, "You know what? Why don’t we put the first lines of the Constitution right there on the wall, so when congressmen look out their windows they see the side of a wall that says, ‘Congress shall make no law.’" Because that's who we are. People have a right in our country to freedom of speech. They also have a right not to speak. And you also have to respect that as a journalist. If someone says, "I don’t want to talk to you, I’m too sad right now, leave me alone." You know what? Leave them alone. That's what we are. We have everything available to us, and we just can’t in any way abuse it by not respecting everyone’s right to talk or not talk. Be fair, be objective, have fun, and keep your honor. (applause)

MR. SHATTUCK: I think the standing ovation speaks for itself. Tim Russert, your passion, your authenticity, your intelligence you have given us tonight and every week, and Linda Wertheimer, we are deeply indebted to you. And all of you, what terrific questions and if you want to actually hear it all over again, you’ll be able to do so later on on WBUR. Thank you so much.

MR. RUSSERT: See you Sunday.