The tributes to Timothy J. Russert, the host of NBC’s Meet the Press who died Friday, have been heartfelt, moving and bipartisan.
Often, too, they have contained surprises.
Readers of The New York Times may not have known, for example, of the link between Russert and William Kristol, the neoconservative editor and political advocate.
Kristol wrote about this connection in his Monday column for the Times.
He looked back to 1976 when both he and Russert found themselves working to get Daniel Patrick Moynihan elected for the first time to the U.S. Senate from New York state.
Though Russert and Kristol went on to establish their reputations in different ways, it’s understandable that both of these men could have found themselves in the Moynihan camp.
Like Russert, Moynihan was Irish Catholic and Democratic, the son of working class parents.
Like Kristol, Moynihan was an academic.
And even though he was a Democrat, Moynihan had worked for two Republican presidents, Kristol having served under him in the Nixon administration in the summer of 1970.
As recalled by Kristol, Russert’s street smarts and ebullient personality made him well suited for the rough-and-tumble world of New York politics.
The pair met in the summer of 1976 when Russert came down from Buffalo to check up on Moynihan’s New York City operation for what would be a tough Democratic primary.
“Tim showed up one day, looked around, and took a few of us out for a beer,” Kristol writes. “He was polite and pretended to listen to our observations. In fact, as Tim told me later, he quickly concluded that most of us had no idea what we were doing - which was certainly the case.”
Russert helped guide Moynihan to a primary win and then a victory over Sen. James L. Buckley. He then became Moynihan’s chief of staff.
Later, he would work for Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York, a Democrat. In 1984, he left politics, becoming the head of NBC’s Washington bureau. He took over as host of Meet the Press in 1991.
Kristol did not stay on to work for Moynihan. Rather, he went back to Harvard to get his Ph.D, and then taught in college.
After that he was chief of staff to education secretary Bill Bennett during the Reagan administration. Later he was chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle in the first Bush administration.
In 1995, Kristol co-founded The Weekly Standard, which became an influential voice for neoconservative viewpoints.
Over time, Kristol became controversial - especially for his support of the Iraq war. As a journalist, Russert went the opposite way, keeping his opinions to himself.
The pair remained friends, in part, it would seem, because they had Moynihan in common. It could be, too, that Kristol saw similar qualities in Russert and Moynihan.
In his 2003 obituary of the former senator, Kristol describes Moynihan much as he would later describe Russert.
He writes that Moynihan was “a kind benefactor and a gentle instructor, who put friendship ahead of partisanship, generosity ahead of ideology. I will think about him a lot, always with admiration, gratitude, and indeed love.”
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