Photo: Courtesy Luke Russert
It stands to reason that Luke Russert has met some of the biggest political newsmakers of the century. After all, he grew up watching his father, the lateMeet the PresshostTim Russert, interview everyone fromDonald TrumptoJoe Biden. (Meanwhile, his mother, journalist Maureen Orth, has reported on everything from allegations againstMichael Jacksonto the political rise ofAngela Merkel.)
Although he tells PEOPLE that he’s not sure whether he’ll resume the life of a journalist, Russert says that he’s learned a lot from — and about — the politicians he and his father covered, some of which might surprise voters.
For instance, he says, “Nancy Pelosiis actually a truly knowledgeable diehard sports fan. She follows the San Francisco teams religiously. If you go to her office, she has ESPN on.”
Courtesy
Why would the (now former) speaker of the House spend time thinking about baseball or football?
“I asked her once about that,” Russert says, “and she said, ‘Well, when you work in Washington, you work in politics, there’s all this sort of nuance and everyone’s sort of constantly positioning themselves, and there’s all this sort of hot air, and the pendulum swings back and forth. But in sports, at the end of the game, there’s a winner and there’s a loser. And I like that. I like to be able to see that happen in a two-hour period instead of a two-year period, which happens in politics.'”
It was a previous House speaker, former CongressmanJohn Boehner, who helped nudge Russert into his eventual departure from Washington in 2016.
As Russert describes in the book, Boehner invited him to come to the speaker’s office for a private conversation in 2015. Russert arrived to see Boehner “in a perfectly ironed white shirt and well-shined black shoes, [sitting] in a high-back leather chair, alone, smoking a Camel and reading a golf magazine.”
Boehner told him to think about what he was doing in D.C., in the job he’d followed his father into, before offering this advice: “Junior, it’s time for you to go do something. Build something. You don’t want to be a lifer here.”
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And that’s just what Russert did — he left Washington and the job he felt fortunate to have, setting off on a long voyage that would take him to more than 60 countries, a journey he describes in his memoir.
“The overarching thing,” Russert says of the famous politicians he’s met, is that “most of them are relatively normal when you pull back what they have to do for that night, or that day, or what the performance is.”
source: people.com
