Transcript: Look for Me There Luke Russert, Author

August 05, 2024

MS. CALDWELL: Hello. Welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Leigh Ann Caldwell, anchor at Washington Post Live and co-author of The Early 202 newsletter.

Today we are joined by who you just saw, Luke Russert, former NBC News correspondent and now author of the book, "Look for Me There: Grieving My Father, Finding Myself."

Luke, thanks so much for joining us on Washington Post Live.

MR. RUSSERT: Oh, good morning. Thank you so much for having me. That was an incredible introduction, and you got the super serious, blue steel pose there that The Washington Post photographer took, so that was a nice moment of levity there.

[Laughter]

MS. CALDWELL: Totally amazing.

So, you know, it's a pleasure for me to talk to you. We worked, you know, side by side on Capitol Hill. You were at NBC at the time. I was not at the time. And then we overlapped a little bit when I was at NBC, and so it's just really great to be able to talk to you about your journey and what you've been through.

I want to start with just the title of your book, "Look for Me There." Can you tell me how you came up with that title?

MR. RUSSERT: Yeah. So as I write in the prologue is I was about nine years old, and I was at Oriole Park at Camden Yards with my dad, and it was a very hot, mid-Atlantic, humid summer day. And we were walking on the concourse, and there was this big rush of people that came through. And I was holding his hand, and we got separated. And with the rush people, I kind of fell back about 10 or 15 yards, and he looked back, concerned. And he came running towards me, and I was a little upset because it was a little traumatizing as a young kid. And he put his arm around me and he said, "Hey, if we're ever separated, just look for me there," and he pointed at an old--a hotdog stand with an Oriole bird logo on it. And then he held me close, and he said, "But we'll never be separated."

And he used to say that to me all the time, "Look for me there," whether it was picking me up after a concert or picking me up at the airport, you know, look for me there at a certain landmark or a location. And when I was trying to come up with a title for the book, I realized after I was reading the manuscript the 1,000th time that I was really looking for something and looking for some acceptance of being my own person. And it just clicked.

And it's funny. I had a legal pad out, and I kept on writing out different title ideas and "Look for Me There" just came out. I go, "That's it." So I was very fortunate to find it.

MS. CALDWELL: Your dad gave you the title of your book. I will admit that tears rolled down my face when I read that in your prologue.

I want you to take me back a little bit to your relationship with your dad. It's very clear in this book, but he was just such a giant, not only in his work life but also in your life as well. So can you talk about your childhood and how close you were with him?

MR. RUSSERT: He was very much my best friend, and one of the things that I didn't really realize until I worked at NBC News and I worked in a high-stress media environment myself was how generous he was with his time.

I think back to how, after long hard days at work, he would come home and quiz me on different tests that I was going to--I had to prepare for and help me study and taught me the art of how to highlight and find the right things when you're doing reading comprehension or math problems, et cetera, or then taking me to baseball, little league baseball games or soccer games and always being present, always being around.

And when I worked at NBC, I saw just how long the hours were, how grueling the work was, and I would come home and I didn't--I mean, the thoughts in my head were just, "Oh, I just want to close my eyes and put my head on the pillow. This has been so stressful," and I think about how giving he was at that time. It's just it really does warm my heart.

You know, I really knew him as "dad," and I didn't sort of see him as the forward-facing moderator of "Meet the Press" until I think I was around 10 or 11. I realized it's weird we go to restaurants and people whisper his name, and then I started become more conscientious as I got older of the role that he played.

But for me, he was always "dad," and I think that was what was so hard about my own grief journey was that it was balancing keeping the flame alive for the legacy of the moderator of "Meet the Press," Tim Russert that everybody knew, but then also trying to comprehend that your best friend is gone, your guiding light is gone. And that's really what kind of the crux of the book is about.

MS. CALDWELL: Yeah. So I never met your dad. We didn't overlap. I didn't know him. But my seven years at NBC News, his--he was still legendary. People still talked about him all the time, about not only what a great journalist he was but also just such a phenomenal person as well. And I actually remember where I was when I heard the news that he had passed. So it was really striking for a lot of people.

But for you, you were immediately thrust into this really high-profile, high-pressure situation after his death, in part, in large part, because how you handled it publicly. So can you talk a little bit about that process and what you were thinking at that time when you had all these people offering you jobs of a lifetime at 22 years old after a major tragedy?

MR. RUSSERT: Yeah. I go back and think about that period, and so much of it was just being in this zone. And when I say--when I talk about the zone, it was, all right, I have to dig down and find all the strength that I have because I want to make people feel a little less sad. And that started out in my father's wake when thousands of people came from all around the country, and I just sort of sat there shaking hands and hugging people for a long time because it made me feel good, but I also felt that I was making people feel a little less sad.

And I tried to do that for a long time, but over the course of that, I ended up not really paying attention to what was going on in my own mind. And I gave the eulogy for my father about three weeks after he passed--or sorry--excuse me--three weeks after I graduated from college, a few days after he passed. And I think about that now, about the kid who I was on June 12th, the day before he died, versus the kid who I was a few days after he died and had to give that eulogy, and it's like the free-spirited, happy, recent college grad who was thinking about a gap year, thinking about going to grad school, and then thrust into that position. I really sort of thought it as a duty. And when I was offered the position, I wasn't naive to think that it wouldn't--there wouldn't be charges of nepotism and there wouldn't be charges of this is unearned, but I also knew that in the moment that I was striking a chord. And I thought, especially at that time, that youth issues were very important in the 2008 election, and I said, hey, you know, this is a year contract, might as well take a look at it. If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out, but there's a sort of reason why all this happened, and go explore it.

And my mom, I gave her a lot of credit for this at the time. She didn't try to steer me in one direction or another. She said, "This is something you yourself really have to make a call on, and just whatever you do own it, because it will it will follow you for a very long time." And it was good advice, and I did it, but it wasn't always easy. And it wasn't really until I got to Capitol Hill that I found my niche and I was comfortable, and that's because I just--like you, Leigh Ann, you get to be a--if you're a political nerd, there's no better place than Capitol Hill. It really is the best job in Washington.

MS. CALDWELL: I love that you wrote that in your book, and I was like, yes, so right, the best job in Washington. So, you know, when you were still on Capitol Hill, how did you deal with the--you know, there were still charges of nepotism, elitism but also kind of still living under the shadow of your father. Did that--is that something that you struggled with on a daily, weekly basis? Yeah.

MR. RUSSERT: What I did as a young kid is I put this very jocular sort of shield of bravado and confidence and never let them see you sweat, and that I'm going to work ten times harder because I have to prove myself. And that really was something that for a while was beneficial. However, doing that, there was a lot of what I call "storing and ignoring," which was I wasn't allowing myself the space or really the time to feel my way through some of these anxious moments or some of these uncomfortable feelings about the job or just about who I am independent of it, and did I ever really grieve Dad?

I think what was also interesting for me--and, you know, part of this I chalk--I chalk it up to some of the folks we covered on Capitol Hill who were a wee bit older than us.

[Laughter]

MR. RUSSERT: But I would be called "Tim" by them so many times.

MS. CALDWELL: Oh, my God.

MR. RUSSERT: And one member of Congress, who I won't mention, I don't think ever called me "Luke." I think he called me "Tim" about every single one of our interactions.

[Laughter]

MR. RUSSERT: So that was a reminder that that shadow was long. It was always going to be there, and I think leaving for--well, it was only supposed to be about six months to a year originally--was a little bit of, all right, you got to escape that because you don't know who you are independent of that at all, and that's not a good way to live.

MS. CALDWELL: And John Boehner--

MR. RUSSERT: Yeah.

MS. CALDWELL: --was Speaker at the time, I believe, during this conversation. He pulled you aside, and he was kind of instrumental maybe in your decision to leave your job.

MR. RUSSERT: It was so random. He stopped me in the hallway, and I thought that he was mad about coverage, and I thought that he was going to chew me out. As you know, that happens to us on Capitol Hill. You get a politician that didn't like something, and they give you an ear about it, an earful about it.

MS. CALDWELL: Yeah.

MR. RUSSERT: He actually said to me--he asked me a very simple question. He goes, "What are you doing here?" and I go, "Well, you invited me into your office. What do you mean what I be doing here?" He goes, "No. What are you doing here?" He goes, "This place--time is a flat circle. You could be here till you're 50, 60, 70, 80 years old. You have no idea what happened." He goes, "This job also, it just--it gets too easy for you. You can do this in your sleep." I'm like, "It's not too easy. I'm here seven days a week, sometimes 20-hour days. It's not easy." He goes, "No, no." He goes, "You know what it is? Go challenge yourself. Go out and do something else. This will always be here, and honestly"--he goes, "I can tell you. I've been here over 20 years. I'm the Speaker of the House. It never changes. It will always be here in some capacity. You'll always have the scene. You'll always have the politics. Go out and explore a different side of yourself and the world."

And it was really good advice, and I think for me, it served as a real validation because Boehner had a similar--a similar story to my father growing up, paid his way through school, the working-class Catholic community in the Rust Belt. So it was sort of--it was paternalistic in a way, which was completely unexpected. And it nudged me in the direction that I went.

MS. CALDWELL: Our colleague, Kara Voght, actually talked to Speaker Boehner, and he talked about you again. He said that he had some more advice for you. Have you gotten that advice yet?

MR. RUSSERT: I have not. He sent me a nice message the other day, and he says, "We got to"--you know, "We got to talk." So the oracle of Boehner, it's on the calendar. We'll have it soon enough, I'm sure.

MS. CALDWELL: Amazing. You can come back on and tell us about it.

MR. RUSSERT: That's good.

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[Laughter]

MS. CALDWELL: So you did leave your job, and you traveled for how long was it? How many years did you end up being on the road?

MR. RUSSERT: So it was about a three-year journey. I would come back home for periods of time, and then I did start some writing before I ended up going to the Holy Land for the last leg of it. But it was--it was a very interesting journey because it would--I think the longest I went out on the road nonstop was about two, two months and change. So I got very good at learning how to live out of a suitcase, and it was something for me that was--what was most important about it, Leigh Ann, was I was able to embrace uncertainty. I found comfort in uncertainty. Uncertainty was something that had haunted me for a very long time because of how my father passed away. And there would be moments when I would wake up at night thinking, "Oh, gosh, I'm going to have a heart attack today," or "This is my last day," or I would have these pulsations and these sweats and be terrible.

But once I started traveling and I was constantly in uncertainty because I did not know the language, I did not know how--you know, where exactly I was--where I was going each certain--each day, it was sort of an adventure, and I realized that "Okay. Like you can handle this. You can sleep on a dirt floor of a pig farm in Nicaragua. You can get yourself on a bus system through Vietnam, like without speaking the language. You're okay." And that went a long--a long way to ultimately making me much more of a fulfilled and happy individual, and I worried a lot less after that.

MS. CALDWELL: What do you think of the comparison to an "Eat, Pray, Love"? Do you hate it? Do you love it?

MR. RUSSERT: Oh, it's flattering for me. Someone said it's like "Eat, Pray, Love," for men.

MS. CALDWELL: Yeah.

MR. RUSSERT: And I think one of the things I was trying to do in the book was explore that space of vulnerability. I mean, it's talked about a lot now in these self-help books where it's like radical vulnerability, and the more vulnerable you are, the more you are able to look inward and have that journey of self-discovery. And it puts you in places where you actually are listening to the voices in your head. You're confronting the man in the mirror.

But I think for me, it was one of those things where I think it--I wanted to take the opportunity, especially for men. I mean, men, we're taught now--even today, I think men are still taught to kind of be tough and hold things in. And I did that for many years, and it's a real difficult weight. So if we can just start talking a little bit more about processing those emotions and that it's okay to feel quite burdened and it's okay to feel grief and it's not, you know, just staying tough all the time, that's a real positive.

MS. CALDWELL: One thing that struck me in the book that I wasn't expecting is you traveled to find yourself. You traveled to grieve and come to terms with your--the loss of your dad, but you also dealt with your relationship with your mother. Can you talk about that a little bit?

MR. RUSSERT: So my mom was sort of the bad cop to my dad's good cop growing up. She was more the disciplinarian, and for some--for some years, that was tumultuous, especially when in my teenage years. I would be like, "Oh, my gosh, this woman is cramping my style. What is she doing?" And there's, you know, machismo, I think, because of the relationship I had with my dad. We were so close, the male bond.

And my mom was 21, 22 years old when she graduated from Cal Berkeley, ended up going to the Peace Corps in Colombia, and at the time, the positions available to young women who graduated college were you could be a teacher, you could be a nurse, but she wanted adventure and she wanted to travel. So she went to Colombia, ended up building schools down there, and it was a very impactful moment in her life, because she said it allowed her to measure herself up against the world. And after building schools in Colombia, anything that she did in journalism, especially in a very sexist environment in the 1970s and in the '80s was easy, that she had already accomplished a lot there.

And it wasn't until I traveled with her one-on-one at age 31, 32, that I understood her, and what I mean by that is I understood her independent of mom. I saw a woman who you could throw into any situation abroad and pass through it with flying colors and not be affected, not be anxious, not be nervous.

And so when I traveled with her and I saw this, it was a sort of aha moment, because I realized, oh, the reason why she was so hard on me growing up is because she wanted me to have that ability that she got from being in the Peace Corps, about being comfortable in uncertainty, about having that type of toughness that you can be thrown into a situation and be okay and not be coddled, not live in a bubble, not be spoiled. And that's really what she was trying to do because she saw the value in her lived experience. And I was so grateful to finally understand that about her, and then I was also so upset that it took so long. But it's one of those things where I was so happy I had it, and our relationship has always been decent, but it's gotten much better because I truly understand her.

It's not easy to write about that. She wasn't thrilled--

MS. CALDWELL: Yeah.

MR. RUSSERT: --with the first draft about it, but I think over time, as some other people read it and said, "You know, you come out looking like a badass, Maureen. It's pretty cool," she's now owned the role. And that's neat to see.

MS. CALDWELL: And she is quite a badass. She is an accomplished journalist in her own right, award-winning, long-form magazine writer, so--

MR. RUSSERT: I told the story about her. I'll never forget this. It was a few months after 9/11, and she's like, "I'm going to the Afghan border." I said, "What?" and my dad was like, "What? You're going to the Afghan border?" She's like, "Yeah, I'm want to go--I'm going to go do a story for Vanity Fair about the opium trade and the heroin trade there that funnels all the terrorism."

And she went to the Afghan border and right after 9/11, and then that's--I don't have the courage to do that. So my mom is--she's quite a badass.

MS. CALDWELL: Yeah, she is pretty incredible.

What did she say to you? I know you wrote that she was really encouraged of you to go travel. She is worldwide traveler herself. But as you continued to travel, this trip kept getting extended and extended.

MR. RUSSERT: Yeah. I think it reached a point where after about a year and change, she sort of did what mothers do. She had the intuition of, okay, what are you doing with your life? And it was not a conversation that I really wanted to engage in because I thought it was hypocritical, because here's the person who had encouraged me to travel, had encouraged me to measure myself up against the world. And I was doing that, and I was finding real value. But I think she began to notice that the kid who had taken off traveling in late 2016 was not the same young man that she was seeing in 2018, that there was a sort of feeling of being untethered. It was just travel for the sake of travel, waiting for this aha moment to happen, and not actually trying to find it.

And I write about that, and that's the sort of moment which was difficult for me, which was I had to come to the realization that this thing that was supposed to give me this validation wasn't showing itself, and that I actually had to look for it more aggressively.

I look back on that, and I thank my mom for it, because it did nudge me in a more serious direction and got me into the space of being more reflective. But it's never easy to have a parent tell you, you're not doing your life right.

[Laughter]

MS. CALDWELL: No, it's not.

We have a question from a reader--or excuse me--a viewer who's asked--Kathryn Wood of Georgia--"What three countries most surprised you by visiting and learning more about them, and why?"

MR. RUSSERT: Oh, that's a good question. So I would say Vietnam was very surprising to me because I had grown up in a family where my mom was an anti-war--very much an anti-war activist. My father went to college, and 1968 was his freshman year, and they always said, you know, you can't flunk out, because if you flunk out, you're going to go to Vietnam. And there was members of my dad's family who had served, and there was always that tension of Vietnam that was always discussed at my dinner table growing up because of my boomer parents. And it would--you know, conversations would be like, "It was the Vietnam War," or, you know, there's the tension around Vietnam.

And I went to Vietnam not knowing what to expect. My parents had never gone there, and here's a country where the United States napalmed and did some real serious damage over many, many years. And the reception I got from the Vietnamese people was so incredibly loving and so incredibly kind, and there was no animosity for, you know, this American guy. And that was surprising to me because I was thinking in my own mind, "Wow. If Vietnam had infected generational trauma with bombs in the United States and a Vietnamese person came and visited the United States, I don't know if they would've been welcomed like that so many years later."

MS. CALDWELL: Yeah, yeah.

MR. RUSSERT: So that was one that really surprised me. One country I didn't mention in the book is the country of Georgia, and I wish I could have gotten it in the book. Unfortunately, things got edited out. But Tbilisi, the city of Tbilisi, was one of the neatest places I've ever seen. It maintains its--its authentic charm is not filled by mass consumerism yet, and the food is incredible, and Georgia is the birthplace of wine. I was not expecting that.

I think one of the things in America that we are ignorant of is we assume, like all those Soviet satellite countries are--oh, they're all the same, or they're all just old former Soviet Union, and they're not. They're very distinct in each of their cultures, and that was really neat to see in Georgia.

And then the other country that really stuck with me for a long time was Bolivia, and that's mainly because it was very hard for me to go to because I had a struggle with altitude. But I was just surprised by the--just the beauty of the whole space and how very much attached to the Indigenous past it still is. It was definitely, I felt the most connection to the Indigenous roots of any places I visited. I really enjoyed that.

MS. CALDWELL: Yeah. And Bolivia was the country that was hard to get into, right?

MR. RUSSERT: Yes. I did not have all the visa--the things. I did not have all the things I needed for a visa, so I had to talk my way through and bribe my way through, but it ended up working out.

And you touch on something there, we can connect back to my mom. The night before I was to go to Bolivia, I was with my mom in Paraguay, and I was like, "Mom, I'm kind of freaked out about this. I don't have the right documents," and she just looked at me and she said, "Oh, you'll do it. Figure it out." I go, "Well, even if I do figure it out, I'm going go into La Paz. The airport there is 14,000 feet up. I really struggle with altitude." She's like, "You can do this. You're equipped. Go do it."

And it was a transformational moment for me because it was, all right, you have these capabilities, go do it. And I also think, as you know, Leigh Ann, when you work in politics and you have to talk your way through a rope line or get in, that helped out. [Laughs]

MS. CALDWELL: Yeah.

MR. RUSSERT: And then Bolivia--

MS. CALDWELL: Yeah, you do--sorry. Yeah, you do learn some skills from covering politics. That's for sure. Lifelong skills.

MR. RUSSERT: Mm-hmm.

MS. CALDWELL: Can you talk a little bit about how you are a different person now than you were before this travel? Like what did you learn not only about yourself but about the world, the United States, politics? Like what has shifted for you, both personally and externally?

MR. RUSSERT: Oh, it's a really good question. I think just me personally, I am way more grounded, way more centered. I kind of see things more at a 35,000-foot level that--you know, we sometimes, especially in United States--we get really in our own little bubbles, and we forget about that there's a whole world out there, and there's just people that really operate differently and see things differently. And we need to be more conscientious of that and more understanding of that.

I would say part of what I found so fascinating on my journey was my own exploration of my American identity, and one of the things I really came to realize, that America is really a land of abundance, and that, we would say is a good thing. But I think sometimes that abundance, it blinds us to some of the more nicer things, and what I mean by that is we're not as in tune with nature as we could be or we're not as in tune with our fellow human being living next door to one another.

I mean, one of the things that you see in a lot of other countries is that neighborhoods, there's a real sense of connective tissue. And one of the things I learned in traveling, especially in Latin America, is that every morning, a lot of neighborhoods, people will just take their coffee. There's no phone. They leave their phone at home, and they just walk around the neighborhood, and they talk to everybody. And I think that's such a--that's such a neat thing. So that's something I wish we had more of the United States.

And then lastly, I would say I'm very, I think, conscientious of that most people want to do right, and most people are very--are very willing to help you out. I didn't--you know, I didn't have a single negative experience from people when I traveled.

MS. CALDWELL: Wow.

MR. RUSSERT: The only bad time I ever had--the only bad time I had was on the subway system in Budapest, Hungary, where it's like this old Soviet era, mean lady said I had the wrong ticket and gave me a $30 fine. That was it. And I went all around the Middle East and all around these places that we're taught are so mean to Americans, and everyone was helpful. And it's just if you're nice, they'll be nice back.

MS. CALDWELL: What happens next, Luke? Where do you go now?

MR. RUSSERT: I like storytelling. I think I want to stay in that space. I don't know if it's another book or long-form, but as you see now on Washington Post Live, I mean, the beauty is there's so many different outlets and options. It's not just newspapers and broadcast news.

MR. RUSSERT: So I think I'd like to stay in that space, but I don't know. I want to go through the book process and finish that out. I've been floored by the response, and I've gotten a lot of really heartwarming, personal messages from people who are on their own grief journey or who want a minute just to sort of figure out where they are in life and perhaps refocus on something that they may have lost sight of. And it's been really neat connecting with people and talking to them, and I don't know. Maybe there's something in that space. We'll see.

MS. CALDWELL: Yeah. Great. Well, Luke, we are out of time, but thank you so much for chatting today and telling your story not only in this format but in book format for everyone out there, "Look for Me There." It's actually back-ordered. I tried to order it on--I mean, I have a copy, but I tried to order it. Do you have an update?

MR. RUSSERT: We are working overtime to fix that problem. And it was--look, it's a great problem to have. It was flattering.

MS. CALDWELL: Great problem.

MR. RUSSERT: But it's scary, nonetheless.

[Laughter]

MS. CALDWELL: Yeah. No, it's fantastic.

But order the book. Thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it, and I will be waiting to hear what, you know, once you decide what happens next. So good luck to everything.

And thank you all for watching today. For this program and all other programs, please go to WashingtonPostLive.com, and we’ll see you next time.

[End recorded session]

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