The Bulwark Podcast - Luke Russert: Look for Me There

Episode Date: May 26, 2023

In the summer of 2016, on the eve of the Republican and Democratic conventions, Luke Russert—an NBC News star and a scion of media royalty—walked away from it all. Russert joins Charlie Sykes for a special Memorial Day weekend pod to share a story of parental love, loss, and finding your own way. show notes: https://www.harpercollinsfocus.com/9780785291817/look-for-me-there/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

landlord telling you to just put on another sweater when your apartment is below 21 degrees? Are they suggesting you can just put a bucket under a leak in your ceiling? That's not good enough. Your Toronto apartment should be safe and well-maintained. If it isn't and your landlord isn't responding to maintenance requests, RentSafeTO can help. Learn more at toronto.ca slash rentsafeTO. Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is May 26, 2023. We are going into the long Memorial Day weekend. We will not have a show on Monday, but I think that that's going to be okay because we have a very special weekend podcast today. We're joined by Luke Russert, former NBC news correspondent and author of a new book, Look For Me There, Grieving My Father,

Finding Myself. Luke, thanks for coming on today. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. It's from one dog lover to another. It's nice to be here. I love the fact that when you went off on your journeys, you actually took your dog with you. That you wanted to be alone, but you couldn't do it all on your own. You had to have Chamberlain sitting there riding shotgun. Isn't it amazing? It's the travels with Charlie inspiration. But there's just something about taking that first leap with the dog next to you that makes it all the more reassuring.

And you also feel that bond of, okay, well, I have to take care of the dogs. If I take care of the dog, I'm going to take care of myself, and that makes it a little bit better. Exactly. Let's start with a flash from the past, or maybe it's back to the future. Here's a soundbite from 2012. This is 11 years ago. And this is you, Luke, on MSNBC talking about the crisis of the time. Let's play this. Senate leaders are back to the brink, publicly pointing fingers about who's to blame for the looming fiscal cliff. But behind the scenes, both parties are trying to figure out a way to keep over a trillion dollars in spending cuts from kicking in.

With me now, Wyoming Republican Senator John Barrasso, chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee. Senator Barrasso, good morning, sir. How are you? Good, Luke. Thanks. Thanks so much for being on here. Before we get into the business of Capitol Hill, I've got to ask you, in the GOP leadership, Mr. McConnell was asked this question yesterday about Mitt Romney's tax returns. This was his response. I wish the president would let us know what he knew about Fast and Furious. He's in office. It feels like ancient history, but very, very fresh, doesn't it, Luke? Everything old is new again.

Yeah. I was there when the debt limit was first used as a real substantive issue in the sense of trying to get cuts and different types of spending and appropriations. And here we are again. Do you miss any of it? Do you miss being in this news cycle?

Because of course, you left in 2016. And since then, it's been just an absolute firehose. Every single day has been like 20 different news cycles. Do you miss any of it? the equivalent in my mind of a PhD in American government. It was so exciting, especially as a young man, to understand the committee process, understand the appropriations process, get to be front and center with all these fascinating, interesting characters. And I was there, you really still had some heavyweights. You had the John McCains of the world, the John Lewis's of the world, really interesting people. I think now it's not exactly something that would be first on my list. Sometimes I miss the camaraderie of the moment. I'll watch a broadcast about a certain story when Kevin McCarthy was having difficulty getting elected speaker. There was a moment in my mind where I thought, man, I know all those players involved in this still. That would be

fun to be back out there. But like athletes say, there's a reason why you're retired. And while you may miss the locker room, you don't want to go back out of the field every single day. It's just, it's not in you anymore. I was going to save this for later, but we'll do this in sort of a securitist way. When you made the decision that you were out in 2016, and I want to come back to all of that, you described the breaking moment, the moment where you realized, okay, I'm going to move on when you realized that all programming was going to become Trump TV. You said the story that does me in is in late May, 2016. Harambee, a famous gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo had been killed by keepers after a child fell into his enclosure and he dragged the boy in a menacing manner. Whether or not Harambee deserved to be shot becomes a topic of debate on TV.

As I prepare to go live with a substantive report from Capitol Hill, I am bumped for Donald Trump's reaction to Harambee the gorilla. And I understood that the news, as I knew it, will never be the same. Yeah. And I think that proved true. What I remember most about that day, if anything else was, I believe the story I had to do was something regarding veterans affairs. I mean, it was a very important substantive story. And I just saw in a period of a few moments, as soon as that clip came on about Donald Trump reacting to the death

of Harambe the gorilla, that people who I very much respected and who I knew were quality journalists and quality programmers were completely in the realm of, oh my gosh, we have to get this on TV as quickly as possible because this is the biggest story of the day. And we can say there's many reasons as to why that occurred as a sort of chicken or the egg argument. But for me personally, I took that as the ultimate sign of these feelings that have been swimming around in your head for quite a while. Time to act on them because it's going to get a lot worse before it gets any better. Look for me there. Tell me about the title first, because I have to say that grabbed me. Oh, I appreciate that. So when you write a book, the amount of pressure that publishers put on you

for a title is absolutely just fever pitch levels. And I was sitting back in my home office and I had a legal pad out. And that was something that my father used to always do. He used to take legal pads out because he was training his lawyer and he would sort of write things out for different ideas, jotting down notes. And I'm trying to come up with this title for this book. And I realized when I had written the book that I was looking for something and I go, look, look, what am I looking for? And then I remembered something that my father used to say, which was in the pre-cell phone era. If he was going to pick me up from a rock concert or a ball game or from the airport, he would always say, look for me there as I will be in this location. And that's

where you can see me and I'll come take care of you. And I remembered the first time that I heard it was I was about nine years old and we went to Oriole Park at Camden of you. And I remembered the first time that I heard it was I was about nine years old and we went to Oriole Park at Camden Yards and it was a very hot mid-Atlantic summer day. It was very humid and he was holding my hand and we got separated in the concourse with the crush of the crowd. And I fell behind him about 10 or 15 yards and he never lost sight of me, but there was a lot of people. So he kind of ran back, maneuvered through, and he put his hand over my shoulder. And he said, if we're ever separated, just look for me there. And he pointed at a hot dog stand with the old Oriole bird logo on it.

And then he said, but we'll never be separated. And I remember that story in the course of trying to come up with the title. I go, that's it. It is look For Me There. And I was very happy when I put it into Google to make sure that nobody else had it. And then I went to the publisher and they said, oh, that's great. I said, thank you. That decision is off my mind. And it's a very comforting title for me. I really very much enjoy it. And it's something where I hear his voice every time I read it in my mind. So that's also very comforting. And the book obviously talks about some of the pivotal moments of your life,

the moments that are always going to be seared, that you recognize, that we all recognize are these just fundamental changes in our life. And for you, it came in June 2008, and most Americans heard about the news this way. I'm Tom Brokaw, NBC News, and it is my sad duty to report this afternoon that my friend and colleague Tim Russert, the moderator of Meet the Press and NBC's Washington bureau chief, collapsed and died early this afternoon while at work at the NBC News Bureau in Washington. Tim had just returned from a family trip to Italy with his wife, Maureen Orth, the writer, and his son, Luke. They were celebrating Luke's graduation from Boston College just this spring.

Tim, of course, has been the host of Meet the Press longer than any other person in that long-running television broadcast. So reading your account, Luke, every moment of that day is seared in your memory. What is it like listening to that all over again? When I hear it in that capacity through headphones, you can really hear Brokaw's voice and the emotion in it. He's struggling to get through that because when he's reading it from the prompter, it's surreal to him. And I think for every time I sort of hear that music, that NBC breaking news music, there is a part of my brain that goes back to that day and to, is this really happening?

And I think that's what so many of us were trying to grasp at that moment, especially my mother and I. We were lucky, and I say this, which a lot of people would not know, but we were, in our minds, lucky to have been in Italy when that happened. And the reason why was it gave us this sort of 24-hour period where we could mourn as mother and son away from the onslaught of the coverage which was going to come. When my father passed away, we expected there to be some news coverage, but we had no idea that it would lead the news for so many consecutive days and there would be thousands of people who would come to Washington, D.C. for his wake, which was incredibly sweet and kind

and very, very nice. But it gave us a sort of moment to center ourselves and really figure out, okay, what are we going to try to do going forward? And we committed ourselves to each other in the sense of we'll stay very close as a family. And there is a silver lining in being away. But people ask me now, what is the significance? Why do you think so many people love your dad 15 years later? We're coming up on the 15-year anniversary in a few weeks. And I really think, Charlie, if you look back to that day, it really does feel like an end of an era.

And what I mean by that is you think about the days of broadcast news. There was a morning show, an evening show. There was daily cable during the day. Newspapers and print still had a pretty nice circulation. And you weren't subjected to social media constantly punching you in the face with news all the time. And you had gatekeepers who were trusted, gatekeepers who were effective. Politicians were nicer. So I think you look back at that period when he died, it was sort of the end of an era and the beginning of a new one, the one that we're

very much in now, which is news starts to move to social media. It's way more fragmented. It's so hard to keep track of who's doing what, who's saying what. And people look back at that time and they go, oh man, I missed Tim Russert, but I also missed that era. You know, as I was reading this passage and several others, you know, I thought to myself, and you and I have never met, I've never spoken before, but I know this guy. I know what he's going through. And I mentioned to you before we started this. So my father died at the age of 63 when I was 30, and it was that shock. And like you, I'm an only child.

And so it's a unique experience. You use the term, you know, welcome to the club, you know, until you experience something like that, until you experience that loss, it's very difficult to understand how intense it is. So this was obviously a turning, you're 22 years old. Your father has just died at 58. You were very, very close to him. He was a remarkable man. And he was a remarkable man in

the media. But also, I was struck by your process of sitting down and writing his eulogy, which was obviously another massive turning point for you. And I guess the first question is, you're 22. You have just lost the most important person in your life. Your mother obviously is still alive, but this is a tremendous shock. And yet you decide that you're going to deliver the eulogy for him. Now, you perhaps didn't know there'd be like thousands of people that are watching you, but just composure, because I remember when my father died, I was not able to give the eulogy. And I felt bad about that because he had given the eulogy for his father. I was later able to give the eulogy. And I felt bad about that because he had given the eulogy for his father.

I was later able to give the eulogy for my mother. But that day, I wasn't able to do it. What made you think that you could stand up and give that eulogy at that age? So I remember when that decision was made, we were sitting in the living room of the family home. It was my mother and I and our parish priest. And one of the beauties of Catholicism is that we know death very well. There's a thousand year script to follow. And the priest just sort of looked at me and he looked at my mom and he looked around the room and a few other people who were there and said, well, who's going to do the eulogy? And kind of

looked me dead in the eye, very much this, what I call the Jesuit mind games of, are you going to step up? What are you going to give? And immediately my brain shifted into, oh, that is my duty. I must do that. And at that moment, I took on the challenge. I took on the task. It was sort of, to me, I have to do this not only for dad, but I have to do this for my family, and I'm uniquely positioned to do it, and went head first in this idea of being strong and being tough because that was the duty and I had to rise to it. Didn't figure that out for many, many years. But in that moment, as a 22-year-old kid, I saw the responsibility of I have to preserve this man who I love's legacy and I really have to honor him the best that I have to preserve this man who I love's legacy, and I really have to honor him the best that I can. And I look back at those days, and I don't think I appreciated it at

all in the moment, but I was about three weeks out of college when I gave that eulogy. And I'm looking out over pews of Barack Obama and John McCain and Ethel Kennedy. And it was really a surreal moment. I don't know to this day how I really did it. I chalk it up to divine intervention is that I was alone in the apartment that my father had set up the day that he died when I was going back from college. And I sat there and just wrote away. And sometimes you can get into that zone and things come out. But it's something which I don't really think I grasped the magnitude of it for many, many years. Well, you also talk about how you were internalizing his spirit. We had a copy of his memoir, Big Russ and Me, which was about his father.

And I was really struck by, I mean, you open it up and he talks about death through the prism of faith. And so this is what you were reading that your father had just written. The importance of faith and of accepting it, even celebrating death was something I continue to believe in as a Catholic and a Christian. To accept faith, we have to resign ourselves as mortals to the fact that we are a small part of the grand design. He continues, we can't withstand major crises and the huge changes they bring about alone. We are not strong enough. We really aren't. When people are confronted with a crisis, particularly the death of a loved one, the most important thing is to reach out to them, help them, because they can't go through their loss alone. It is inexplicable in the lives at that time. You have to be there for them and help

them understand there is something here to accept. This is out of your control. This is a power far beyond yours. And as you write, dad does not leave me alone in that apartment. I feel he is showing himself almost immediately. I internalize his spirit. That's a very powerful moment. specifically, it does serve as a blueprint, right? And I think when you think about the decision to give the eulogy, and then you have those passages that you just read, there's a sense of comfort there, right? Which I'm continuing the mission that I have the playbook go out and execute it. And in terms of feeling the spirit that was so prevalent at that time, and as I write in the book, his spirit, my mind peeks through at certain moments. But back then, especially, I was a 22-year-old kid. I'm gravitating towards those words, and I'm trying to put them into action. And I think it's very emblematic of what I was feeling at the time was taking the man's legacy, taking what he had done and putting it into action.

And I'm uniquely positioned to do it because I know it so well. It was something which I tried to do and rise to that task and occasion. Hey, folks, this is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark to provide a platform for pro-democracy voices on the center right and the center left for people who are tired of tribalism and who value truth and vigorous yet civil debate about politics and a lot more. And every day we remind you folks, you are not the crazy ones. So why not head over to thebulwark.com and take a look around. Every day we produce newsletters and podcasts that will help you make sense of our politics and keep your sanity intact.

To get a daily dose of sanity in your inbox, why not try a Bullwork Plus membership free for the next 30 days? To claim this offer, go to TheBullwork.com slash Charlie. That's TheBullwork.com forward slash Charlie. We're going bulwark dot com forward slash Charlie. Let me get through this together. I promise. So you deliver this eulogy, which is extremely well received, and it results in many, many offers from people saying, hey, would you like a job in television? You eventually take a job at NBC working at your father's network where, in effect, you grew up because your dad used to bring you along to the interviews, the production. So this was kind of like family in a way, I mean, with all the complications of all of that. And you reading it, I thought, okay, I get this because, you know, after my father died, I did feel that I had that legacy that he had given me a gift, but I also felt a sense of obligation. So I wanted to talk to you about that. You're 22 years old.

You had probably, I don't know what you had been planning to do with your life. Now you're suddenly a network correspondent at NBC. You have the name Luke Russert. Half the universe thinks you got it because your name is Russert. But it's also what's your dad's environment. You're surrounded by the things that he was surrounded by. So he gave you a gift. This was his legacy. But it was also kind of an obligation for you, wasn't it? That you had to live up to it. I think it's a very good way of putting it. The last name, especially at that time, it was my greatest asset, but it was also my greatest liability. And I thought long and hard about the offer that had come, different offers from different networks, and whether it was the best decision. I had figured I would take a gap year, and then I wanted to go to graduate school for international relations. And I sat back and I contemplated everything, and I really did feel the idea of fate in the universe sort of positioning me in a certain way. And my mom, to her credit, was very much hands-off and said, look, you're a young man. This is a decision that you really need to make for yourself. You need to own this decision, whatever it is, the one you do.

And so I said to NBC, I go, look, what if I do this for one year? And the idea being that if it didn't work out, it was only one year, it would have been an incredible experience. And we go on. And for the first six months of that, when the youth vote that I had originally covered during the election sort of dried up, there was a period where I said, I think I'm done. I think I'm going to go do something else. But I had some months on my contract and my grandfather was a garbage man. He worked two jobs for 40 years, a truck driver, garbage man. So I saw an obligation to, I don't want to get paid for doing nothing. That's ridiculous. So let me go help out where I can. And that's how I ended up on Capitol Hill. They were short staffed. And I said, take me off air. Just let me be an off air reporter. And I can use the name there to help me open doors

because my father worked on the Hill in the 1970s and half the people were still there, which says a lot about the age of Congress at the time. But to get to the answering your question about the obligation, I think as a 22-year-old kid, I definitely felt the need to try and preserve that legacy. But there was another component to it. And that was when I went on television or I would do events or whatever it was, people would look at me and they would see Tim and they would see that light. They would see that twinkle. And it brought comfort to a lot of people, including a lot of people at my father's network who would message me and be, oh,

that was a great shot. It was sort of, you know, Tim is not really gone because his blood is around. And I was trying to be there for those folks. But I think in the course of doing that, I wasn't necessarily there for myself all the time. And that came back to bite me. And I wanted to get to that because to a certain extent, then you're living his life instead of yours. Correct. Yes. And I don't think you realize that as a young man, because the power of duty is so strong and you feel the need that if you don't do this, you're disappointing someone who is no longer there and then you're disappointing everything that he built. Never once really thinking that your dad, more so than anything,

because he loved you so much, would want you to be comfortable and we want you to be okay. But you don't think like that as a young man. And you don't think like that in the moment because there's so much to do. You have to do so much. You have to preserve and you have to save. And what do I get that? Yeah. But I think the most fascinating part of it for me was the sort of nuance at the time, because there is a lot of excitement when you're 25, 26 years old and on television, you're covering Capitol Hill. And at that moment, the technology had shifted to such a degree where young reporters were really coming into our own because of Twitter, because of social media. So everything had shifted. It wasn't so long as wait your turn anymore. My colleagues were on Capitol Hill. They all started

getting on TV and we're around the same age. So I think the environment lended itself to, okay, you got to do this more for your dad than ever before, because this is not his NBC. This is not his politics. Make sure that his lessons in the spirit are still involved in this era. And I think there is an element of that too. Parenthetically, when I said that, I really understand this. So I was editor of a magazine back in the mid-1980s, and my father was a professor at the university. And a month before he died, he brought in an article that he'd written about what academia was like for me to publish in the magazine, which I had not yet done when he suddenly died. And I obviously did publish it. But then I got contacted by a publisher who said, would you like to write a book based on this? And I said, well, okay, my father wrote it.

Oh, wow. But you want me to write the book? So I wrote it. But so it was very much what you're describing. It's a gift that he gave this to me. It's a legacy, but then it's an obligation because you feel that you need to do this for him. So I understand all of that. And I imagine that you've also experienced this, which is that, have you imagined having the conversations with your dad saying, boy, dad, I wish I could tell you what's happened. I wish I could talk to you about what I have decided to do and how things turned out. Do you have those moments where you think just sitting there thinking, Dan, I need to bring you up to speed on what's happened in the 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 15 years?

Oh, sure. And Tom Brokaw said something to me early on that I don't think I really appreciated when I was younger, which is that your parents or those who you loved who are gone, they're with you every day. You just have to talk to them. You just have to get yourself into that headspace. And for me, I didn't do that for a number of years until I really disengaged from the job and the pressures of the stresses. And I would go back for real moments of reflection. I think there were moments sprinkled throughout during there where I would go back for real moments of reflection. I think there were moments sprinkled throughout during there where I would try and take a moment, especially around the anniversary of his birthday or his passing and have those conversations and whatnot. And when I would go

to baseball games or watch the Buffalo Bills, I could really feel his presence. And I would think about what he would think at a given moment or what advice that he would give me. But I think that's the hardest part, Charlie, right? Is that you're so much looking for something. You're looking for that validation. You're looking for that sign that you're doing things the right way, that you're living up to their legacy, that you're honoring them because you love them so much. And those signs don't show themselves in the most distinct, memorable ways. You have to seek them. But once you do find them after seeking them, you realize they really are

all around you. You just have to open yourself up to it. And that takes a certain mentality that you're not born with that. You have to sort of work that muscle out a little bit. You had an interesting paragraph, I thought, when you were describing that, yes, you were Tim Russard some, but there was a lot of shit that came with it as well. As you said, there's no preparation for life as a public figure, not even a childhood spent as the son of famous parents. As a public figure, you are not a person. You are a name that can be ridiculed, and you will be. I'd expected some heat. I'm a white heterosexual male whose privilege has given me a cherished opportunity.

I understand what my life and my name have afforded me, but I can't renounce my name any more than I can renege on my one-year contract, both of which seem to be what many of my online critics wanted. I can only prove my worth by doing the work. So there was a lot of, there was a lot of crap, but you motored through it and you were there from 2008 through 2016. And then in 2016, you decided to leave. And it was kind of a big shock. I mean, I'm looking here at the script of Brian Stelter, who was still at CNN back then, reporting on your

surprise departure in the middle of the presidential campaign on the eve of the Republican and Democratic conventions. And he said, Luke Russert's decision to leave NBC News shot TV newsrooms and congressional offices when it was announced on Wednesday. His father, Tim, worked for NBC News for 24 years, 17 of them as moderator to meet the press. Now he's taking a break. He just wants to get off the treadmill and make sure that he's doing what he wants to do, a close friend of Russert said. And you did take some time away from political reporting. So I want to talk about that decision. But the most surprising thing in your book, though, which I should have known about, I suppose, was the intervention and the role that John Boehner played in all of this.

John Boehner, who is the speaker of the House of Representatives. You are not once a cub reporter, but you're a young reporter. So tell me about that intervention in your life by John Boehner of all people. Isn't it wild that John Boehner becomes this sort of ghost of Christmas past that is nudging you in the right direction?

So I got to know Boehner when I started on Capitol Hill and we built a nice rapport. He has a very similar story to my father, a Catholic guy from a large family. He grew up in Cincinnati. My father's from South Buffalo. They both were the first member of their family to go to college, worked their way through school by doing odd jobs. Boehner was a janitor. My father worked cleaning the rectory. He worked as a cab driver and all sorts of things. And so we sort of bonded a little bit over that, but he was a speaker of the house and I covered him rather aggressively. So I saw him in the hall one day and he says to me, Hey, look, I want to talk to you. Yeah. Loudmouth. He also called me, I can say this

on the podcast. He used to call me shithead too, which was very funny. so shithead loud mouth obviously affectionate loud mouth shithead very affectionate yes yes yes and he says i want to talk to you he said okay so he has me into his office and he asked me well what are you doing here i said well you call me into your office what do you mean what am i doing here it's very baner he has a golf magazine he's smoking a camel cigarette a fascinating bit of trivia that I'll tell you is that when he was speaker, they actually gave him the worst artwork because the architect of the Capitol didn't want the cigarette smoke ruining the nice stuff. So Boehner's artwork is just really dated, kind of weird Americana stuff. Yeah, it's very funny. So I'm sitting in this office and he goes, what are you doing here? And I'm sort of perplexed. And then he goes, no, no, no. What are you doing here? And I'm sort of perplexed.

And then he goes, no, no, no. What are you doing here? He goes, you're 30 years old. You've been here now about eight years. Everything here is cyclical. Time is a flat surface. You could be here 30, 40, 50 years and not really know who you are and not really know what this institution is. The only consistent thing here is change, but then it's also a circuit. There's always parties. There's always new people. You always feel like you're at the center of the world, but you may not have known what the world is outside of this. And you'd be well-served to go learn something else, whether it's about people or yourself. And I was really taken back, Charlie, because here's a guy who had a very

similar story to my father, but here's a guy who's at the top. Here's a guy who has everything. He's second in line to the presidency. He has proven himself. I mean, he's a few months away from having the Pope come address Congress. And he says this to me almost as a warning of make sure this is really what you want to do. Don't become a creature. Don't become a creature of Washington and get out of the swamp. Because you were snarky. You said, well, are you a creature? Yeah, I did say that.

That got a, you know, get out of here, shithead moment. But it puts me in a period of reflective thought and these feelings that I had about, man, this job has really dictated so much of who I am and who am I independent of this job? Who am I independent of my parents? Who am I independent of my last name? A lot of friends at age 30 who were getting married and getting mortgages and even having kids. And I realized if I was going to get off this hamster wheel, this is probably the time to do it. So he was a catalyst for a lot of things that I had been thinking. There was also different anxieties that had crept up in the job where I write in the book. I felt as if my necktie was strangling me. I would get anxious about some hits that there's something was off that I wasn't feeling whole that

that Roosevelt main in the arena feeling that I had had in my mid-20s, it starts to go away a little bit. And I start to become more introspective and reflective. And Boehner puts that thought in my mind, and I wrestled with it for a few months. And then, as you mentioned at the top of the broadcast, Mr. Trump and Harambe the gorilla act is the thing that finally pushed me out the door. But I had dinner with Boehner a few months ago before the book came out and I brought him a copy. And I said, I just want you to know this is in here. And thank you so much for that. And he was like, oh, I love that. And thank you so much. And of course, swirling his Merlot. And he goes, well, what are you going to do now? I said, well,

let me get the book out, sir. And we'll go for that. But he was happy to take credit for that. He's doing quite well these days in Marco Island, Florida. So why do you think he did it? And I guess as I was reading this, I'm thinking, okay, obviously he was thinking of himself that you were one of his kids. But also, you know, warning you about not becoming a creature, I wonder whether he was also talking to himself. Right. Because you guys were both in the middle of it. You point out he has all the power.

You described that it was awfully exciting. You love the job. I think you described at one point that you spent way too much time with very attractive lobbyists or sitting next to the head of the CIA. I mean, this is pretty heavy stuff for a guy in his 20s. I mean, so, and yet he is basically saying,

you know, before you get sucked in too deep, get out. There must've been something going on in his head because he was out within about a year, right? It's a very astute point. And I think you're uniquely positioned to understand this. But if you think about when Boehner left, he leaves in October of 2015, right after the Pope comes and addresses Congress. And I think here is a guy who when he came in in the republican revolution in 94 was really a reformer who went on a certain types of congressional investigations really trying to sort of update the institution and you know root out corruption etc he also did give lobbying checks from the tobacco industry on the house floor and got reprimanded for that. So it went all full circle. But I think Boehner in his own mind, I think probably at that time is beginning to see the fabric of the place sort of come apart a little bit and is perhaps issuing somewhat of a warning there. But also, I think in larger scale, the idea of, oh, gosh, here's someone at the top, and maybe it's not, it's all cracked up to be, and to think about

that a little bit. And the point you just referenced is, yeah, to be arrogant for a moment, pardon me, it's like, yes, the President of the United States does know me by my first name, I sat next to the head of the CIA and a senator at dinner, there are these young, beautiful lobbyists that, you know, are on a whim saying, oh, we represent the liquor industry, and we can take you to concerts, and we can have dinner with you, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it's quite a nice life. But that all being said, is it fulfilling? wrestling with a little bit of himself is, wow, I've accomplished so much, but there's something off. Was that part of it because of the vitriol in Washington or that he felt that people just were constantly trying to take him out and what that sense was? Maybe there was an element of warning there, but we go back to divine intervention and fate and how the universe works.

I don't think it's completely random that Boehner decides to leave right after the Pope is there. It sort of comes to this moment of, oh, I did it. So you were saying that you felt unfulfilled, that something was amiss. You described the growing sense of just unease, but this feels like it was deeper than that, a spiritual hole. What was unfulfilled? I think you wake up in the morning and you have this incredible opportunity. You have this incredible job. You're so blessed. You're so privileged, but you don't necessarily want to do it. And you don't know why you're doing it. And you don't know

if you're the best person to do it anymore. And the fuel is just not there. And then you have to then wrestle with these very uncomfortable thoughts in your head of what's wrong with me or what's going on that I haven been so incredibly fixated upon that obligation, as you mentioned, upon that duty, that I never really grieved for my father. But independent of that, I didn't know who I was. And when you turn 30 years old and you don't know who you are, that's terrifying. And that's when people say, oh, is this very abrupt decision? Well, it wasn't an abrupt decision because I just, as I was speaking with you, I'd been feeling these things for months. But what I did was, and I was very good at this, Charlie, is I internalized it. And one of the skills that I took from both of my parents that I really learned right

after my father passed away was this never let them see you sweat, put forward this very jocular, happy go lucky bravado, no matter what, no matter what, which masked any internal struggles. So yeah, it was a difficult time. You know, you'd read very nasty things about yourself. I never responded to them. Did they upset me? Certainly they did, but I never let anyone in that they did. Not even, you know, women I dated or some of my closest friends, Wendy from kindergarten, I kept all that inside and that would wear on you to some point. But I think for me, it was what Boehner did more so than anything else was, hey, it's okay to listen to those voices because you know what? I'm the speaker of the house and they might be in my mind too, right? And it was before the podcast, you mentioned that it took you two years to sort

of get over the Sunday night. Okay, what do I need to do? What's coming up in Congress? It's not just like leaving any job. You were walking away from a lot at a crucial moment. You must have had people saying, what, Luke, are you crazy? I mean, why would you give this up? And they, why don't you just get through this next election cycle? I mean, you can't leave now. And yet you did. It's funny. You hit the nail on the head right there. So many people were trying to talk me out of it and say, oh, just get through the election.

Just get through the election. People go through these moments in their mind. Get out and come back in early 2017 and sort of see where you are. You don't want to leave all this behind. You can't leave now. Yeah, you can't leave now. But part of me was like, no, I can and I have to. And I think the other component of it was you saw the changes that were being made without doubt. And I also, I try to sort of visualize like, okay, where do I fit in that future? And do you want to be part

of it? And you talk about obligation. I do think one of the big obligations that my father probably passed on to me was this idea of civic participation. My father was very much a patriot. He very much was a believer in democracy. And he believed that to have an effective democracy, we all have to have an ownership in it. That's the only way it works. And I think if there was any Catholic guilt, it was what you mentioned, this idea of, oh gosh, you're going to really leave in this crucial moment where you do have an ability to help people understand issues and you do have an ability to help hold people accountable. But I think sometimes you look back and you go, hey,

I've given eight years to this and I've given many more years prior to that in terms of always getting good grades, always performing for mom and dad, never taking anything for granted. You're always loved. You're not entitled to, geez, I don't know who I am right now. And that to me was sort of, you got to figure that out because if you don't figure that out, you're never going to be as good as you can, and you're never going to be as productive as you can. And that ultimately was something that I found some comfort in. Do you think you did figure it out? I mean, your book is a description of these journeys to Vietnam, Cambodia, Bolivia, Paraguay, Hungary, New Zealand, the Middle East. So did you find what you wanted?

Oh, yeah. I mean, I would say I'm a work in progress. We all are. But one of the things that I was able to do through the journey of traveling to all these places over the course of a few years and having a lot of highs and having some very deep lows was I came to a place of peace as it pertained to losing dad. And while there are certainly other parts of life that I would wish there was some more clarity on. I think we all have those feelings. When it comes to losing dad, I realized that dad would be very supportive of me being my own person and would essentially say, look, so long as you laugh often, work hard and keep your honor, you're living a very productive life. One of the things he used to always say to me was my namesake, Luke, chapter 12, verse 48, to whom much is given, much is expected.

And I was haunted by those lines for many, many years. Do you have that tattooed on your arm? I do have that tattooed on my inner arm, yeah. And it was something that I thought about frequently in my 20s. That passage was read at his funeral, and it was something he very much believed as the first member of his family to go to college. And the work ethic that my grandfather, a World War II veteran, passed down to him. And it wasn't until I traveled and I had journaled all these things and I was reflective that I had realized that the magnitude of that passage is really being a good human being. And that more so than anything is you're meeting expectation, which is not something that I had always known. I thought that meeting the expectation is something in that passage is you have to go off and do great things.

And one of the things I write about in the book is I was 24, 23, 24, right after dad died, I get in the industry and I would just have random people come up to me and say, you know, they'd be nice and hug me and, you know, I miss your dad. But then there'd be a line that goes, well, we expect great things from you, or you got to do a great job or, you know, you got to live up to it. No pressure. Yeah. And I don't think I realized that because this is a 22, 23 year old kid, 24 year old kid. You're like, okay, thank you. And then it's years later where I would No pressure. did he really comprehend that? And I don't think I did. It wasn't until years later when I was able to have the time away from politics and that cycle to really process it and then become at peace with it. I mean, one of the things that I'm really enjoying about this book and talking to you

in other interviews is that these are the first interviews to a degree and things that I've been able to really do on my own terms. And what I mean by that is sort of about my own story and about my father, which I'm happy to tell someone I work with. It's like, Oh, you must be exhausted. This must be so much. I said, yeah, sure. But it's really cathartic. It's really refreshing. And I think it was to why it's like, okay, yeah, this is, this is you. This is not you trying to live up to something, and this is not you performing for an NBC or for people. This is you telling your story and trying to hopefully leave folks a little less lost. You know, until I got to the very end of your book,

I was already thinking about our conversation today. I was going to ask you, so is this book a letter to your father? And of course, it ends with a letter to your father. You think of it that way. Yeah, I think there's an element of that, for sure. It's also a letter to my mom, if anything else. One of the things I write about in the book is I didn't really understand who she was independent of the role of mom until I took an opportunity to travel with her to some of these countries. My mom was a Peace Corps volunteer in the 60s. At the time when she graduated from college, the only opportunities available to women were really to be a schoolteacher or a nurse.

And she wanted to do something else. She wanted that sort of life of adventure. So she joined the Peace Corps to measure herself up against the world. And she was very hard on me growing up. My dad was sort of the good cop. She was more the bad cop, very much the disciplinary and very much the you're spoiled, you're entitled, you haven't done enough to earn these things. And I kind of resented that growing up and I didn't know where it came from. And when I started traveling with her, I saw,

oh, wow, this is somebody who really had to fight for so much in her life. And she was trying to instill those lessons upon me at a great magnitude. So writing it was very cathartic in that capacity. I think it was also a letter to myself, which was an idea of, all right, here is your experience. You've put it out there. It's honest. You talk about the good, you talk about the bad and everything in between. And you come out of it a more fulfilled person and a more well-rounded and centered person. But I think if anything else is that it is this making peace with dad. And we had a wonderful relationship. He was my guiding light, and I loved him more than anything in the world.

But I made peace with this idea of I'm not exactly like you, dad, and that's all right. And I think you would be supportive of that because the last thing you would ever want me to do is white knuckle through things. And that's the sort of term we hear about processing grief is that you try to white knuckle and stay strong and go through it. And I did that for a lot of years, but they leave scars. It leaves scars. And the book is Look For Me There, Grieving My Father, Finding Myself. Luke Russert, thank you so much for writing the book and for joining me today. And I think you'll appreciate this farewell

as we go into Memorial Day weekend. Somewhere over the rainbow Way up high, there's a land that I heard of once in a lullaby. Luke, thank you so much again. Of course, this was played at your father's ceremony, one of his favorite songs. It's been a pleasure talking with you today.

Well, it was so kind, Troy. I appreciate it. And this song was played as we processed out of the Kennedy Center for his memorial, and lo and behold, we go out onto the balcony, and there's a beautiful rainbow over Washington, D.C. on the day of his funeral. And that was Dad saying hi. And when I traveled around the world, I see rainbows at significant moments.

I always thought that was his dad there. But thank you so much for having me. I hope you have a wonderful Memorial weekend. It always makes me think of my grandfather, Big Russ. He used to put the American flags on the graves of soldiers who had passed on Memorial Day weekend. So enjoy it. It's a special time for us.

And you and your family as well. And by the way, you gave me goosebumps with the story about the rainbows. And thank you all for listening to this weekend's Bulwark podcast. I'm Charlie Six. We'll be back on Tuesday and we'll do this all over again.

Birds fly over the rainbow Why then oh why can't I?