News Loses an Icon, and Viewers Lose a Friend: Tim Russert (1950-2008)

Friday's tragic death of Tim Russert, renowned newsman and host of "Meet the Press," left me unhappy and quietly sad throughout the weekend.

Not just because I'd always liked Russert, and felt that he let us see the 'him' behind the news anchor mask. But because we as viewers lost a friend.

He always had a twinkle in his eye. Like Peter Jennings, another newsman gone too soon, Russert always gave you a sense of a real person sitting behind that desk. He spoke easily and personably about his love for his work, and with humor and warmth about his father, son, wife, and those close to him in his life. His big blue eyes were tempered by pointed dark brows so that he could seem wide-eyed and genial one moment, then sharp as a laser the next. And the pudgy softness finished the package and made him seem like, no matter how formidable and daunting his intellect might be, deep down there was always a teddy bear lurking in there as well. (This combination also meant that I had a little bit of a crush lurking -- humor, intelligence, confidence and approachability are a wonderful mix.)

For me as a TV viewer, losing Russert means I'm losing the guy who made politics accessible to me. So often, the world of Washington is not brought closer by the media, but pushed away from us, not raised on pedestals but placed behind unbreakable glass walls. So many newspeople seem to delight in portraying politics as something untouchable, unreachable, a rarified fishbowl-world in which people jibber-jabber in unintelligible twenty-syllable words about things we couldn't possibly understand, and budgets we can't possibly imagine, and stuff we're probably just better off not knowing.

Not Russert. He used his fierce intelligence to make the news interesting, and more than that, his sheer joy in the process of politics was patently visible in everything he did. At the beginning of the last political debate I saw him moderate, between Obama and Clinton, Russert looked positively gleeful.

So I appreciated Russert's humanizing presence on the political scene. I'm a political coward -- one of those people who wants to know, even if they dread the answers. Russert provided a human face to politics, and a reassuring conduit to those in power. As a political moderator, Russert asked questions in plain English, and the glint in his eye seemed to discourage the usual canned responses. He made people dig a little deeper.

But while I enjoyed Russert's longstanding work as a TV journalist, moderator and pundit, my all-time favorite appearance by him took place on the show "Homicide: Life on the Streets" (a damn near perfect show).

As sly inside joke, Russert was depicted as the cousin of Captain Megan Russert (played by Isabella Hofman), and best part of all, Russert actually showed up in Season 3 of the show, striding into the squadroom, and trading barbs good-naturedly with Russert about family and Christmas presents. At the end, fed up, he stomps off onto the elevator. In the scene, Russert is not only doing a pretty fine job of acting out one of those ridiculous and slightly embarrassing ongoing family squabbles that pop up, he also exudes his usual warmth and effortless humor. As the scene ends and the elevator doors close, there's still that little twinkle in his eye that shows, as always that Russert is having the time of his life.

It's not gonna seem like much of much of an election without him. You already know that in far too many moments to come, journalists and TV watchers alike will turn to one another and wonder, "What would Russert think?"

He'll be missed.