Current Affairs – Page 26 – Don't Gel Too Soon

AT TIM RUSSERT’S WAKE: A LITTLE BIT OF HOW IT SEEMED

So many people here and on Twitter have been talking about this; I thought I’d just tell you what it was like.

I got there at around four. The line went from the door to a large room at St. Alban’s School just next to the National Cathedral, where the wake was, up the stairs and a long walk to the driveway, around to the Cathedral front lawn. The last little bit was lined with wreaths – some of them very large – of flowers from friends and colleagues. There were several TV trucks and groups of reporters and camera people on folding chairs under the trees.

This had begun at 2PM and would last until 9 — sad, but not dismal. It was a beautiful day, sunny, breezy, not at all humid – just gorgeous. And we were all grateful to be there. It was a generous thing for the Russerts to do in the midst of their own grief — allowing friends, as well as admirers who’d never met Tim but felt that they knew him anyway — to act on their own sadness.

I talked to some random people in line with me: a woman who’d not known Tim at all but just wanted to be there and, happily, an old friend and pollster with whom I waited most of the way down the hill. I hadn’t seen him in a long time, so we caught up on our lives and our kids and our sadness. I started to tell him about all of Tim’s kindnesses to my boys when they were little; he started to tell me about his son’s internship at Meet the Press. Any one of Tim’s friends would have had a dozen stories just like those.

All along the way, very kind staff and parents from the school, where Tim’s son Luke had gone, were there with name tags that said “volunteer” under their names and offers of help, directions, a place to leave a note for the family, ice water – just gracious and kind. I saw, as we arrived in the room itself, that the casket, covered with white flowers with a note that said “Love, Coco and Luke” was being guarded by what looked like young soldiers out of uniform. I’ve since learned that they are high school classmates of Luke’s who will stand guard throughout the night.

We made our way past the casket in two lines, one on each side. Tim’s wife Maureen Orth was there, thanking people for coming. Then we were out, in a hallway, where another volunteer offered us the opportunity to leave a note on paper that would be bound into a book. The line was long, and each person spent considerable time – the comments were anything but brief.

Just at the end, as we made our way out, stood this photo, the one I used yesterday, up on an easel. I was so glad to see it there – not because I’d used it too but because it was a declaration, which I’d felt and clearly his family felt, that the joy and mischief of this man was what we should take with us back into the world.

Tomorrow there is a small funeral and a memorial service at the Kennedy Center which I’m sure will be amazing. And all of it will help those who loved and admired this larger-than-life presence deal with the reality of his absence.

I want to say that, because of all the posts on Twitter and here on in the blogorama, I felt I was representing many of us and left a note that said as much. It was a privilege to be there.

SO LONG TIM. ALL THE NICE THINGS WE’VE BEEN SAYING ABOUT YOU WERE TRUE – AND IT’S NOT FAIR – NOT AT ALL

I worked at NBC News, at the TODAY SHOW for nine years, and for much of that time, I was lucky enough to work with Tim Russert. The picture on the left was one of the few I could find that showed that great, mischievous expression that meant we were going to have fun so even if it’s not a DC kind of photo, it’s the one I like best.

I first met Tim when he still worked with Mario Cuomo., on the Democratic Convention floor in 1984 when Cuomo electrified the crowd and I chased Tim, whom I’d never met, half way out to the parking lot to get a promise that the Governor would be on the show the next day. He was psyched, hyped and way too busy but he was also adorable and very sweet as we worked to get things organized.

So when he came to NBC and went to work on getting the Vatican to let us come and do a week of shows in Rome, including time with the Pope, I watched Tim play it out. He worked with Cardinal Kroll in Philadelphia and with one of his colleagues who worked in the Vatican and somehow we got our on-the-air mass with Pope John Paul II and a Philadelphia Catholic school boys choir sang on the TODAY SHOW. Who but Tim would have made that happen?

There’s not much I can say that hasn’t been said; I couldn’t write sooner because my kids were visiting for the weekend and I wasn’t being very bloggy. But as the news broke, my younger son called from the airport. He was really sad. I’d forgotten how lovely Tim was to Dan, who was around 6 when they met. Treated him like a cool guy, gave him an NBC baseball cap that I think he still has, teased him guy to guy. When I went over to deliver our bassinet after Luke arrived Dan came along and this new daddy still had time for a bit of a conversation with a six year old. AND to show us a tape of Willard Scott announcing Luke’s birth on the show.

All week people have been talking about Tim’s love of politics. That was true; and he mined every subtle message and decision for meaning and impact. But he had another quality that was even more valuable in a journalist: a contagious enthusiasm for living that made each story part of a grand adventure. He brought everyone in his orbit along with him — sharing energy and laughter, competition that was fierce but never mean and a real belief in both the fun and the importance of journalism in a democracy.

I moved to LA and we mostly lost touch – although he did send a Meet the Press baseball cap in response to a note I sent him. It made me feel remembered – as it was meant to. It was the kind of gesture that’s been in the stories people have been telling all week — it’s just that this one’s mine. And since I’m not one of the rock stars who have been telling these stories all week, just someone he worked with, I’m hoping it will demonstrate the genuine niceness of this guy. Really.

There’s a wake tomorrow and I’m going to try to go. I’m betting that there will be a mob scene there but I’d just like to show respect for a moment or two. I’ve seen so many of us writing about this very sad thing; I’ll say a bit of a goodbye for all of us.

BLOGGING BOOMERS CARNIVAL, WEEK 73, WITH ITS USUAL INTERESTING MIX OF IDEAS

Blogging boomers are back, this week at our new friend at Dina at This Marriage Thing, a little late this week due to some technical stuff but here nonetheless. Take a look for posts on workforce aging, Karen Allen, attorney advertising and more.

FORTY YEARS AGO IN 1968: BOBBY KENNEDY AND WHAT CAME AFTER

By the time Robert Kennedy decided to run for President, in March of 1968, just days after Eugene McCarthy’s great New Hampshire primary showing demonstrated President Lyndon Johnson’s weakness and the real unpopularity of the Vietnam war, I was already neck-deep in McCarthy’s campaign. I’d been involved since the summer before, in what, before McCarthy agreed to run, we called Dump Johnson. When Allard Lowenstein (himself assassinated in 2000), recruited us for it at the 1967 National Student Association (NSA) meeting, he’d say "You can’t beat somebody (LBJ) with nobody." So he had worked very hard to get Bobby to run, but he refused.

It was Gene McCarthy who agreed to stand for all of us against the Johnson administration and the war. After NSA I organized the Smith campus. We were among the first students to go each weekend to New Hampshire to work for McCarthy and against the war. So when Kennedy announced, just days after our great New Hampshire triumph, that he would also run, we were devastated, and angry.

Over the months of campaigning though, I came to have enormous respect for Senator Kennedy and his campaign. There was no way to watch him without feeling the power of his connection with all kinds of Americans and his compassion, poetry and sense of justice. This moment, just as an inner city Indianapolis neighborhood learned of the death of Martin Luther King, is typical of him at his best:

By June the campaign was tense; such an important issue and the two Senators were running against one another as well as (and sometimes, it seemed, instead of) the war. Kennedy won Indiana. McCarthy won Oregon. We moved south to Los Angeles(one of many places I saw for the first time from a campaign bus) criss-crossing the state from Chico to San Francisco and back to LA. Just before the midnight after the primary, as June 4, 1968, election day, became June 5, we knew we’d lost, so we went to Senator’s concession in the ballroom of the Beverly Hilton and then back upstairs to mourn. We weren’t even watching the rest of coverage. Suddenly, running through the halls of the staff floor of the hotel, one of McCarthy’s closest advisors shouted "Turn on the TV! They’ve done it again!"

Continue reading FORTY YEARS AGO IN 1968: BOBBY KENNEDY AND WHAT CAME AFTER

BLOGGING BOOMERS BLOG CARNIVAL – JUNE 2: VACATIONS, GAS PRICES, MOMS AND HEALTH

Blogging Boomers are back at I Remember JFK this week. You can read about everything from saving gas by figuring out the "walkability" of your next apartment, to child-free vacations to prostate cancer. All it smart, unique and useful. Stop on by.

SUMMER DRESSES, 60S TV, MARRIAGE, CRUMBLING BRIDGES AND OBAMA: ALL PART OF BLOGGING BOOMERS CARNIVAL #71!

This week the Carnival stops at John Agno’s So Baby Boomer. If you want to read about "green" cars, summer dresses, good marriages, TV for all us 40+ folks, our crumbling infrastructure or Barack Obama, you can get there from this inventory of our latests efforts. Take a look.

HOPING FOR A DIFFERENT ENDING: “RECOUNT” ON HBO

I can remember reading Doris Kearns Goodwin‘s wonderful No Ordinary Time, about the World War II years in the White House: FDR, Churchill, Eleanor – it’s a wonderful, inspiring story and forever changed my understanding of leadership. I read the book on tape, mostly in my car. As I came to the book’s end, and the death of President Roosevelt, I drove around so that I could finish it. All the while, I kept hoping — "maybe this time he won’t die." Totally irrational but still – that was what I felt And I didn’t feel it again until tonight, as I watched Kevin Spacey, Tom Wilkinson, Laura Dern and Denis Leary in HBO‘s Recount, the story of the 2000 presidential election battle in Florida.

Reviews have reminded us that the story has been "altered" for dramatic reasons even though it’s presented as a docudrama. There may be more drama and less docu than historians would wish, — but the basic reality is there – and from the perspective of 8 years and the traumas of the Bush Administration, very painful to watch. In some ways it’s like watching a car accident about to happen – in slow motion — and not being able to do a thing to stop it. Here’s a little bit of it:

Continue reading HOPING FOR A DIFFERENT ENDING: “RECOUNT” ON HBO

THE OBAMA LANDMARK: RACIAL ATTITUDES ON MY BIRTHDAY

Today is my 62nd birthday. It’s pretty amazing. Not only am I, while still healthy and not rickety, able to witness a Democratic primary where a white woman (for the first time) and an African-American man (for the first time) are the major Democratic Presidential candidates. Not only am I, while still healthy and not rickety, able to witness the probable nomination of the 46 year old product of an interracial marriage, who has lived outside the U.S. in the developing world, and who is running on a platform of unity and commitment to helping our country have a better future. AND who is the first candidate to sit for a video interview with BlogHer, thus demonstrating a comprehension of women who blog — and those women who read them.

Not only that. This morning, half-awake, watching C-Span footage of the Obama Iowa rally last night, I saw a nice white Iowa lady of a certain age, like the one in this photo, put one hand on either site of Obama’s face and kiss him on the forehead. And it wasn’t even a big deal.

You need to realize that in my lifetime as someone old enough to notice – probably the past 40 years — that would have been unthinkable. That a highly regarded TV drama was canceled after one season because it featured a white male and black female social worker working together and stations across the south refused to carry it. Slowly, as the Civil Rights movement brought us forward, things changed. And here, I’m really only talking about symbols – not all those individual life moments that remain so difficult for so many. I believe that when symbols change, real change will follow. And some of that appears to be true.

In September of 1967 Peggy Rusk, daughter of then Secretary of State Dean Rusk, married Guy Smith – and it was so unusual it made the cover of TIME Magazine. Which wrote this:

Resignation Offer. As recently as 1948, California law would have made the union a criminal offense in the state. Until last June, when the U.S.
Supreme Court killed Virginia’s miscegenation law, 16 states still banned interracial marriage. More to the
point, and more poignant, in a year when black-white animosity has reached a
violent crescendo in the land, two young people and their parents showed that
separateness is far from the sum total of race relations in the U.S.—that to
the marriage of true minds, color should be no impediment. Indrawn as usual,
Rusk pronounced himself “very pleased.” Clarence Smith, Guy’s father,
said simply: “Two people in love.”

That’s right – Rusk offered to resign because of the wedding – that was
how unusual it was. In the early 90s I visited a high school
near Cincinnati, OH, which was once KKK country. I was producing a “space
bridge” — a satellite conversation between high schools in Ohio and Moscow. The night
before the show I gave a reception for the families of the kids featured
in the program. As they wandered in, there in the middle of Ohio, I noticed that one couple was comprised of a white man and an African American woman. Apparently I was the only one who did though. One of the boys’ parents had divorced and his dad had married this woman who was now the kids’ stepmom. And in the middle of semi-rural Ohio, close to the Kentucky border, nobody cared. I guess you’d need to have been around for canceled TV shows and Secretaries of State offers to resign, to be so struck by what happened.

Fast forward to the Grammys, 1990, this winning song and video, with this kiss.

I guess it’s just that we forget how bad things used to be; a kiss like Neville and Ronstadt’s once could ruin both careers.

There’s lots more. But what does all this have to do with a presidential candidate? In Iowa? I don’t know why but as I watched this morning I was so struck by the changes I’ve seen in my lifetime. Probably it’s just the birthday. Whatever happens in the campaign, and I am worried about the race stuff that came out of Kentucky and West Virginia, it was a reminder that at least things are better than they were before. OH and last week I read that there has not been a white male Secretary of State in the US for 11 years! Nobody’s been yelling about that, either.

SAD NEWS; SENATOR TED KENNEDY

Catherine Morgan, star of stage, screen, (well not really, but she should be) and (yes this is true) blogs including Political Voices of Women, has sought posts on the news that Senator Edward Kennedy, seen here with Senator Barack Obama, whom he endorsed, is suffering from a malignant brain tumor. It really is a sad thing. People make jokes about the Senator, some of them really cruel, as I discovered while searching for images for this post. And he’s made mistakes, including those surrounding the tragic events at Chappaquiddick.

But as a great speaker and legislator, he’s used his talents to be a champion of the “downtrodden” and many of the rest of us, for over 40 years. Coal miners, civil rights advocates, children who need better schools, American who need access to health care, soldiers in Iraq and veterans of every war and dozens of other causes; he’s been a mainstay of support for them all, often when not too many people were willing to be.

Since he lost his two brothers, President John Kennedy and Senator Robert Kennedy, to assassins, he’s also been the protector of their children: JFK’s two, John and Caroline, and Bobby’s eleven. He’s buried John’s son and two of Bobby’s. His own son Edward contracted bone cancer and had a leg amputated at the age of 12. Kennedy himself nearly died in a plane crash in 1964. And there’s plenty more; take a look at this Wikipedia entry on the “Kennedy curse” which left him with burdens of care for so many. Weddings, illnesses, even funerals, it was he who was there for them all.

When I first came to Washington, I was a very young researcher in the CBS News Washington Bureau. Because I was so young, I was assigned to call the Kennedy “boiler room girls” – campaign workers who knew the young woman who had died in that car in Chappaquiddick, Mary Jo Kopechne, to see if they would talk to us. I called. All of them. Every day for a year.

Every day for a year they took my call. Every day for a year they were polite, gentle and silent on the subject of the crash. And so they have remained. Since I know many other people who have worked for Teddy and shown a devotion and loyalty seldom seen in public life, I am not surprised; that’s how people are in the Kennedy universe. It says a lot about the Senator and his family and the sort of commitment they inspire.

When I think of the Senator though, it’s not any of that I think about. Or of the fact that he can be hilarious, self-effacing and very kind to those around him. My strongest, and most unambiguous memory, is of his eulogy at the funeral of his brother Bobby* in the summer of 1968. You’ll see why.

*This is audio accompanied by cover footage; I couldn’t locate any video of the speech although I remember it vividly and can see it in my head. Can’t get that up on the Web though, at least not yet.

BLOGHER COMES OF AGE WITH ITS OWN INTERVIEW WITH BARACK OBAMA

As you know, I am a very loyal supporter of BlogHer and a great admirer of its three founders, who have built a community of respect and honesty, humor and warmth that is a treasure to many of my sister bloggers and to me. At last year’s BlogHer conference much was made of the absence of presidential candidates, even though they’d all been invited AND even though we were in Chicago, where Yearly Kos (now called Netroots Nation) was happening in literally one or two days, and all the Democrats came there. It was if the "little ladies" were just not worth the trouble.

So it’s very exciting to see Barack Obama sit down with BlogHer’s Erin Kotecki Vest and answer questions submitted by the BlogHer community. No headlines, but a broad survey of topics with sound, thoughtful and well-expressed responses. This is a landmark moment and I’m so proud to be a BlogHer and a small part of its universe. Watch it for yourself.