Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Patent Law Blogs -> IPBiz

Patent Law

: IPBiz

Tim Russert

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

The June 15 "Meet the Press" was a tribute to Tim Russert, who died on June 13. Panelists led by Tom Brokaw discussed the life of Russert in the foreground, while Russert's empty chair from the set was in the background.

In an article in the New York times on June 16 titled --Recalling Russert as Political Operative in New York--, one has the text

Mr. Russert worked in the early 1980s as a counselor to Mario M. Cuomo, the Queens Democrat who had just been elected governor of New York; I was covering the new administration for The Daily News. Albany was a political roughhouse, and all the more so with a hard-driving new administration with big goals for Mr. Cuomo, working in what was a fiercely competitive media atmosphere.

(...)

Mr. Russert, who had previously worked [for] Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York ? where a well-timed leak of damaging information by Mr. Russert about a potential Moynihan foe knocked the opponent out of the race ? at first seemed taken aback by the ferocity of this battlefield. One of his earliest lessons came when one of Albany?s toughest reporters walked into his refuge of an office ? with its 20-foot ceiling and view down State Street toward the Hudson River ? and accused Mr. Russert of leaking a story to a competitor as a way of currying favor with a rival newspaper. (Mr. Russert denied doing any such thing, for what that?s worth).

?If you want to play hardball, Russert, we can play hardball,? this reporter said, proceeding to promise, should he do this again, to ? well, let us just say to perform a bit of surgery on Mr. Russert that he no doubt would have found unpleasant. In all the years since, I have never seen him look quite so terrified.

IPBiz notes that Tim Russert was a law school grad (Cleveland State).

See also

Russert lapses on "Meet the Press" on 24 Feb 08

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2008/02/timothy-noah-too-little-too-late-on.html [Note that Doris Kearns Goodwin was a panelist on June 15, and that there was a clip of Goodwin popping out of a cake during Russert's 50th birthday party.]

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2008/02/do-academics-deal-with-plagiarism-white.html

**
Mike Barnicle was also on the June 15 tribute. Barnicle, who had been a speechwriter for Robert Kennedy, John Tunney, Edmund Muskie, and Sargent Shriver , was forced to resign in 1998 from the Boston Globe amid questions about the sources of two of his columns.

As noted in the June 15 tribute, Russert was loyal to his friends, and a continuing cheerleader for Buffalo, New York.

**
See also Tribute in Russert's studio

Full post as published by IPBiz on June 15, 2008 (boomark / email).