Tim's Man of the Year

By By John F. Dickerson Sunday, May 16, 2004
    • Journalists can go funny when they become famous. They can get windy and theatrical or display their regular-guy credentials with the subtlety of a gold tooth. Anyone who has watched Tim Russert, host of NBC's Meet the Press, could probably guess there's a Big Russ back in a working-class hometown whispering, "Don't let your head get too big for the doorway." Good son that he is, Russert has followed that advice, asking politicians and world leaders tough questions and then getting out of the way of their answers — and checking with his dad in South Buffalo, N.Y., after each show to make sure that he's still doing it right.

    Some grown men have trouble embracing their fathers in public. Russert hugs his for 21 chapters in Big Russ & Me (Miramax Books; 336 pages), a memoir that is part tribute to his dad and part guidebook for the author's college-age son Luke. The elder Tim Russert nearly died in World War II, but his namesake celebrates — more than the moments of high drama — the grace with which his father fulfilled his daily obligations. His principles are as simple as the book's chapter titles: "Work," "Faith" and "Discipline." Big Russ worked for the sanitation department in the morning, crashed diagonally on his bed for a spell and then drove a newspaper truck at night. When he was eligible to retire at age 55, he had accumulated 200 unused sick days.

    Strict but colorful nuns and life-changing Jesuit priests also populate the former altar boy's fond rendering of the tight-knit Irish Catholic world of his childhood, where John F. Kennedy was king. It was good preparation for an early job working for New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan — Russert's intellectual father — who assured him that having hauled garbage during the summer, Russert would always have the advantage in a roomful of eggheads.

    Russert's writing stays right on the ground where his pop would like it. He's reluctant to pump in too much psychological analysis, although he gives in to occasional bouts of didacticism. The book, like the show, is best when the writer gets out of the way of the story. When young Timmy breaks a neighbor's window, what's poignant is not so much that his father makes him fess up as that Big Russ wraps the broken glass neatly in a shoe box so that "the guys" hauling it away won't cut themselves.