Yahoo Finance Luke Russert Describes Growing Up Around D.C. Bigwigs — and Learning a Little-Known Fact About Nancy Pelosi
In his new memoir, the son of Meet the Press host Tim Russert recalls the political powerhouses he met growing up, and the person whose advice nudged him to leave D.C. behind
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 late Meet the Press host Tim Russert, interview everyone from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. (Meanwhile, his mother, journalist Maureen Orth, has reported on everything from allegations against Michael Jackson to the political rise of Angela Merkel.)
Soon after Tim died in 2008, Russert was hired by NBC to cover politics. He attended both the Democratic and Republican conventions that year, reported on Barack Obama's groundbreaking victory, and stayed at the network for another eight years, leaving in 2016 to undertake a series of world travels, which he documents in his new memoir, Look For Me There.
Related:Tim Russert's Son Luke on Cherishing Every Moment He Spent with the Meet the Press Host
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 Pelosi is actually a truly knowledgeable diehard sports fan. She follows the San Francisco teams religiously. If you go to her office, she has ESPN on."
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.'"
Related:Former NBC Broadcaster Luke Russert Reveals the Cover of Memoir: 'It Forced Out Some Hard Truths'
It was a previous House speaker, former Congressman John 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."
Related:The Consummate D.C. Insider, John Boehner, Isn't Holding Back Anymore: 'I Was Living in Crazytown'
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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."
Look For Me There: Grieving My Father, Finding Myself, will be published on May 2 by Harper Horizon.
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