Russert’s son joins NBC News as correspondent

Brokaw welcomes appointment
Tom Brokaw, the former anchor of “NBC Nightly News” who succeeded Tim Russert, a longtime friend, as moderator of “Meet the Press,” said he had no doubt that Luke Russert could do the job.

“Luke, in a way, has been preparing for this moment all his life,” Brokaw said. “He grew up in the loving care of two world-class journalists.”

“He’ll do fine, but more than the rest of us, he’ll miss the sage counsel — and fatherly pride — of his dad,” Brokaw said.

Russert could even pop up from time to time on his father’s old show.

“I’ll try not to call him Baby Luke, and he’ll try to remember not to call me Uncle Tom,” Brokaw said.

Betsy Fischer, Tim Russert’s longtime executive producer on “Meet the Press,“ said she “watched Luke grow up as a part of the NBC family, so it’s especially thrilling for me to be able to welcome him in a professional capacity.”

Fischer said she remembered running into Russert as a young boy. Even then, she said, he showed “an early fascination with and love for politics.”

“I remember a trip he took with us in 1995 to interview Ross Perot for ‘Meet the Press’ live from Dallas,” Fischer said. “Like his dad, even when the pressure was on, he always kept a sense of humor about the situation.

“When Perot showed up for the interview, he was met by a mini-version of himself — a young Luke Russert sporting a Ross Perot mask. ... Perot got the biggest kick out of it.”

‘Study hard, keep your honor and laugh often’
Russert said he didn’t yet know what his first story would be, but he said he already has definite ideas of what he wants to cover, and how.

“I want to introduce people to young people across the country,” he said.

A typical report might be the story of “a 22-year-old veteran who just got back from Iraq who, perhaps, lives in Albuquerque [in New Mexico], which is going to be a very influential state this year in the presidential election. Is he going to vote at all? Who does he want to vote for? He might be married with a wife — who is she like?

“Stories like that, about voting groups and voting blocs that people like to look past. I think in this year, where it’s going to be a close election and with Senator Obama supposedly garnering all this attention from youth, I think there’s a lot of areas we could explore.”

Because the NBC deal came together quickly, he said, he hasn’t had a chance to run his ideas past his new colleagues.

But he knows what his father would say: “Study hard, keep your honor and laugh often.”

“I think he’d be proud of me,” Russert said. “I think that he would very much want me to work as hard as I possibly can, to do the best I can.”

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