NY Times, June 14, 2008
Tim Russert, 58, NBC's Face of Politics, Dies
By JACQUES STEINBERG
Tim Russert, a fixture in American homes on Sunday mornings and
election nights since becoming moderator of "Meet the Press" nearly
17 years ago, died Friday after collapsing at the Washington bureau
of NBC News. He was 58 and lived in Northwest Washington.
His death was announced by Tom Brokaw, former anchor of "NBC Nightly
News," who broke into the network's programming just after 3:30 p.m.
An NBC spokeswoman, Allison Gollust, said in an e-mail message Friday
night that Mr. Russert had died of a "sudden heart attack." His
internist, Dr. Michael A. Newman, said on MSNBC that an autopsy had
found that Mr. Russert had an enlarged heart and significant coronary
artery disease.
---
From a May 24, 2004 New Yorker Magazine profile on Tim Russert:
"Hardly a day goes by when I don't remember or rely on something that
Big Russ [a nickname that Russert gave his father] taught me,"
Russert writes. Big Russ's credo entails simplicity, thrift, hard
work, and moral clarity. He taught Russert how to shake hands firmly
and how to tie a necktie, and conferred on him the ideal-typical
nineteen-fifties American boyhood. Tim watched "Howdy Doody" and
"Gunsmoke" and "I Love Lucy," trudged to school in the snow,
worshipped baseball, minded the priests and nuns, and ate hearty: the
butcher, he fondly recalls, had a display case that perfectly evoked
Buffalo's version of multiculturalism and good health, full of "pork
neck bone, smoked pork neck bone, jellied tongue, Polish bacon, slab
bacon, double smoked hunter bacon, German-style wieners, Italian
sausage, pork roll sausage, hot or mild beef sausage, barley sausage,
beer sausage, double smoked hunter bacon . . . chopped ham, smoked
hocks, turkey gizzards, smoked turkey parts, chicken feet, chicken
liver, chicken fat, fresh ox tails, and ribs of every type." Buffalo
itself had "a powerful, simple strength."
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