From Keith Olbermann comes a perspective on Tim Russert which really alters my perception of him

Keith O, from the Rolling Stone interview

"I don't know that there's going to be anything hugely different that's visible to the viewer. It's not going to be like, 'I'm going to do the last half of the show topless.' But the freedom from the wear and tear of having to get past a bunch of people mumbling, 'Oh, I don't know . . .' It's the key to the operation, it really is."

-- Keith Olbermann, in Rolling Stone,
on the new Current TV incarnation of Countdown

by Ken

I don't mean to become a shill for Keith Olbermann, although I suppose there are worse things a person could become a shill for. But I really was surprised by how satisfying the Thurber celebration he ringmastered from his wheelchair (for his broken foot) Sunday night at the 92nd Street Y was. His own reading, with projections of the drawings, of the whole of the "parable in pictures" The Last Flower, one of the supremely great books ever to find its way into print, left me kind of shivery. (It was, by the way, E. B. White -- I couldn't remember whether it was White or Thurber -- who pronounced this his favorite Thurber book.)

ONE THING I MEANT TO MENTION SUNDAY . . .

Rosie and Keith backstage at the 92nd Street Y Sunday

The Last Flower also has one of the all-time great book dedications. Published as World War II was breaking out, it was dedicated: "For Rosemary. In the wistful hope that her world will be better than mine." What I didn't know is that the latest edition of The Last Flower, from the University of Iowa Press, was designed by Rosie's daughter, Thurber's granddaughter, Sara Thurber Sauers. Both she and her mother signed copies afterward.

Rosie, by the way, among other contributions, read the great fable "The Little Girl and the Wolf" (which we read here), which she recalled first reading at about the same time she found out that Thurber was her father, when she was eight, and was delighted to find that it was her father who had written the moral, "It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be," and understood this about what little girls understood.

I do want to make sure everyone knows that the new Countdown with Keith Olbermann debuts on Current TV this coming Monday at 8pm. How many people will be able to watch is another question, and one that Keith is clearly agonizing over. In the question period of the Thurber program, an audience member expressed the hope that he would soon be able to see Current TV on Cablevision, and Keith wished him luck. Evidently there have been discussions with "Mr. Dolan" and his people which haven't been terribly fruitful.

NOW, ABOUT KEITH O AND TIM RUSSERT (AND
ALSO, NOT TO HIS CREDIT, TOM BROKAW)

Anyway, none of this is why I brought Keith up again. It's because of some things he says which I found fascinating in a recent interview with Mark Binelli in the June 23 Rolling Stone. If you haven't read the interview, you really should -- and also the selection of "outtakes" from the interview published online. 

Here's the thread that particularly got my attention:

When did things start to change for you at MSNBC?

It was three years ago, when Tim Russert died. One of the reasons I got as far as I got was that Tim was there to run interference for me. He never made a big deal out of the fact that he probably was my biggest supporter within the network. He used to go to them and say, "Leave him alone, we can handle the blowback, I'll take care of it." After he died, Maureen, his wife, told me that she used to have to wrest the channel-changer away from him every night, because he loved to watch the show. She said, "You deal with this all day and you have to watch it again?" He said, "I have to see what he's saying about it, it's the best." I teared up and said, "I didn't know that." She said, "He thought you already had a big enough head."

Mark asks Keith about Tom Brokaw's public criticism of him "for 'going too far' in injecting commentary into your campaign coverage," and apparently before he gets Brokaw's name out, at the words "during the 2008 election," Keith is fetching a piece of paper from his wallet.

Let me read this to you. You can see how old it is -- it already came apart. March 5, 2008, Wednesday morning, 9:45 a.m. "Keith, game ball goes to you for last night. I've been at this for 40 years and have a full appreciation for how tricky it is to go from commentator to anchor, get the news out, manage the many egos, make sure lots of different points of view are represented, maintain your own place in the proceedings, you did it all splendidly." You can see the name of who sent that [Tom Brokaw].

So there you have it. I've never shared that with anybody before. Now you have a private comment that he didn't seem to remember when he made his public comment five months later.

Originally, Keith says, he carried this note around because --

it was confirmation from somebody I had great respect for. What he said there was that you can be a commentator and an anchor, you can get your points across and yet be neutral when you're supposed to be neutral. From one of the best in the business, it meant a great deal to me. Then what it meant to me is, "Wow, things change fast after people like Russert die."

I have to say, what Keith has to say about Tim Russert really does change my view of the guy. Not of his performance on the air, which still seems to me to have been cowardly and self-serving, but of what we learn here about his impact behind the scenes, where he really does seem to have extended himself to make it possible for NBC News people to be, well, less cowardly and self-serving than the pressures of the business would otherwise have permitted.

Is it possible that this effort was so heroic as to confuse him into thinking he was being heroic on the air? Because my very strong image of Russert as a journalist is that he was the consummate, perhaps even ultimate, Village Insider, using those considerable smarts and that quick verbal agility to enforce the conventional wisdom of the status quo. In fact, the very fact that he came to Big Media from the political world (first as chief of staff to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, later as counsel to New York Gov. Mario Cuomo) seems to have helped cement the alliance of Beltway politics and media.

I don't suppose Russert was necessarily beloved of the pols who trooped onto Meet the Press and ran into his "gotcha" buzzsaw. But I think even the stumblingest victims understood that he was on their side, that they were in it together -- and unfortunately they were in it together largely against us, the unwashed and unserious masses. That he was as good at what he did as he was made it on the whole worse.

Nothing Keith says here changes my opinion about any of that. But that there was more to what Tim Russert was and did, that someone like Keith thought of him as both an inspiration and a protector -- well, this really adds a dimension to my image of him.

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