Luke Russert: Look for Me There

Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. It is May twenty six two thousand twenty three. We are going into the long memorial day weekend. We will not have show on Monday, but I think that that’s going to be okay because we have very special weekend Secret Podcast today.

We’re joined by Luke Russard, 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 for 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 gonna take care of myself, and that makes a little bit better.

Exactly. Okay. Let’s start with with a flash from the past or maybe it’s back to the future. Here’s a sound bite from two thousand twelve. This is eleven years ago, and this is you, Lou, on MS and BC talking about the crisis of the time.

Let’s play this.

Senate leaders are back to the brink publicly pointing fingers about whose 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 I’m kicking in. With me now, Wyoming Republican senator John Barrasso, chairman of the Senate Republican policy committee. Senator Barrasso? Hey, just fine. How are you?

Good Luke. Thanks.

Thanks so much for being on here. Before we get into the business of capital hill, I gotta ask you in the GOP leadership. Mister McConnell was asked this question yesterday about Mitt Romney’s tax turns. 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 and here we are again.

Do you miss any of it? Do you miss being in this new cycle because, of course, you left in twenty sixteen Ron DeSantis then, it’s been just an absolute fire hose every single day has been like twenty different news cycles. Do you miss any of it?

I was a history major in college, and one of the things I loved about covering Capitol Hill was that it was 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 b front and center with all these fascinating characters. And I was there, you really still had some heavyweights. You had the John McCain’s 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 missed the camaraderie of the moment. I’ll watch a a broadcast about a certain story when Kevin McCarthy was having difficulty getting elected speaker. There’s 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 wanna go back out of the field every single day. It’s just it’s it’s not in you anymore.

I was gonna save this for later, but we’ll do this in sort of a securedest way when you made the decision that you were out in twenty sixteen. I wanna come back to all of that. You described the breaking moment, the moment where you realized okay. I’m gonna move on when you realized that all programming was gonna become Trump TV You said the the story that does me in is in late May two thousand sixteen. Harame, 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 harambe 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 pahrumpi The Grlah. 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 with something regarding Veterans Affairs. I mean, it was a very important substance story. And I just saw in a period of 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 lecher perspective and who I knew were quality journalists and quality programmers were completely in the realm of, oh my gosh, we have to 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 for chicken or the egg argument. But for me, personally, I took that as the ultimate sign of these feelings have been swimming around in your head for quite a while. Time to act on that because it’s gonna 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 trained as a 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, looking for, and then I remembered something that my father used to say, which was in the pre cell phone era.

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 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 Oreo Park at Camden Yard, 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 a crowd.

And I fell behind him about ten or fifteen 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 old Oreial bird logo on it. And then he said, but we’ll never be separated. And I remembered that story in the course of trying to come up for the title and go, that’s it.

It does 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 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 that’s also very comforting.

In the book, obviously, talks about some of the pivotal moments of your life, the the moments that are always going to be seared that you recognize that we all recognize are are these just fundamental changes in our life. And and for you, it came in June two thousand and eight. And most Americans heard about the news this way.

I’m Tom Broke, NBC News, and it is my sad duty to report this afternoon that my friend and colleague Tim Russert, a moderator of Mita 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, Marine 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 and that long running television of broadcast.

So reading your account, Luke, every moment of that day is seared in in your memory. What is it like listening to that all over again?

It’s you know, when I hear it in that capacity through headphones, you can really hear Brocall’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 into, 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 a sort of twenty four 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 DC 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 and we committed cells to each other in the sense that 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 fifteen years later, we’re coming up on the fifteen year anniversary in a few weeks. And I really think Charlie Sykes 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 is 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 looked back at that time, they go, oh, man. I I missed him Russard, but I also missed that era.

You know, as I was reading this passage and several others, you know, I I thought to myself, and you and I have never met. I never spoke before. But I know this guy. I know what he’s going through. And I mentioned before we started this, So my father died at the age of sixty three when I was thirty and it was that shock.

And like you, I am 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 that this was obviously a turning you’re twenty two years old.

Your father has just died at fifty eight. You were very, very close to him. He was a remarkable man. And is a remarkable man in the media. But also, I was struck by your process of sitting down and writing his which was obviously another massive turning point for you.

And I guess the first question is, you’re twenty two. You have just lost the most important person in your life. Your mother obviously is still alive, but this is a 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 there watching you.

But just composure because I remember when my father died, I was not able to give the eulogy. And and I and I felt bad about that because he had given the eulogy for his father. I was later able to give 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, and it was my mother and I and our 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 to few other people who were there Ron DeSantis said, well, who’s gonna do the eulogy and kinda 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 I’m going to muster up the strength and courage to. Retrospectively, I think Charlie Sykes you just spoke about and admitted to a degree, is something that I papered over. Which is I didn’t necessarily process those emotions of the fact that he was really gone in the moment. I stored and ignored 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 twenty two 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 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 you know Barack Obama and John Mc Kane and SLO Kennedy and and, you know, it was really a surreal moment. Mhmm.

I don’t know to this day how I really did it. I chalk it up a 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 rode away, and sometimes you can get into that zone and and things come out. But it 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 Ross and Me, which was about his father. And I was really struck by. I mean, you opened it up and and he he talks about death through the prism of faith. And so this is what you are reading that you’re 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 and 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.

It is. And I’m happy you brought up big rest of me. In that 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, you know, his spirit did my mind peaks through in certain Ron DeSantis. But back then especially, I was a twenty two 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 I tried to do and rise to that task and occasion.

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So you deliver this eulogy, which is extremely well received, and it results in many, many offers from people saying, hey, you know, 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 of the production. So this was kind of like family in in a way with all the complications of all of that. And you, you know, thrust yourself into being a congressional reporter, etcetera. This was one of those things that as I was reading it, I thought I can’t 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 just talk to you about that. You’re twenty two years old. You had probably I don’t know what you had been you 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 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. In 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 Bulwark, and whether it was the best decision. You know, I had figured I would take a gap year, 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.

My mom to her credit was very much hands off and said, look, you’re a young man. This is 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 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 is a period where I said, I think I’m done. I think I’m gonna go do something else. But I had some months of my contract, and my grandfather was a garbage man. He worked two jobs forty years of truck driver, garbage man. So I saw an obligation to I don’t wanna 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’d 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 can my father work on the hill in the nineteen seventies? 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 twenty two year old kid, I definitely felt the need to try and preserve that legacy, but there is 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 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 than 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 we 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 to?

Yeah. But I think the most fascinating part of it for me was this sort of nuance at the time because there is a lot of excitement when you’re twenty five, twenty six 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 are really coming into our own because of Twitter because of social media. So everything had shifted. It wasn’t so long as weight 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 landed itself to okay, you gotta 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.

Parent, when I say that I I really understand this. So I was editor of a magazine back in in the mid nineteen eighties, and and my father was a professor at the university. And a month before he died, he 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 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 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 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, damn, I need to bring you up to speed.

On what’s happened in the five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, fifteen years?

Oh, sure. And you know, Tom Brokall 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 love to org They’re with you every day. You just have to talk to them. You just have to get yourself into that head space. And No.

For me, I didn’t do that for a number of years until I really disengaged from the job and the pressures of it of the stresses, and I would go back for real moments of reflection. I think there were moments sprinkled throughout during there, but I would try and take a moment, especially around the anniversary of his birthday or his passing and and have those conversations and 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 there’s no preparation for life as a public figure, not even a child had spent as a 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 You know, 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 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 two thousand and eight through two thousand Ron DeSantis. And then in two thousand sixteen, you decided to leave.

And it

was 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 Russell’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 twenty four years, seventeen of them as moderator to meet the press. Now he’s taking a break. He just wants to get off treadmill and make sure that he’s doing what he wants to do. A close friend of Russ said, and you did take some time away from political reporting. So I want to talk about that decision.

The most surprising thing in your book though, which I should have known about, I suppose, was the intervention and the role that John Banner played in all of the John Bainer —

Yeah.

— who is the speaker of the House of Representatives You are not one say a cub reporter, but you’re a a young reporter. So tell me about that intervention in your life by John Bainer of all people.

Isn’t it a while that John Bainer becomes the sort of ghost of Christmas past that is not the view of the right direction? So I got to know Bainer 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 himself Buffalo. They both were the first member of their family to go to college, worked their way through school by doing odd jobs.

Bainer was a janitor. My father worked cleaning directory. He worked as a cab driver and all sorts of things. So we 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 I wanna talk to you. Yeah. Loud He talked

to loud loud.

Loud mouth. We also called me. I could say this on the podcast. He used to call me shithead too, which was very funny. Yeah.

So shithead, loud mouth. Obviously, affectionate, loud mouth, shithead. Very affectionate. Okay. Yes.

Yes. Yes. And he says, I wanna talk to you. 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 boehner. 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 capital didn’t want the cigarette smoke ruining the nice stuff. So Bader’s artwork is just really dated kinda weird Americanist stuff. Yeah. It’s very funny. So I was sitting in this office and goes, 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 thirty years old. You’ve been here now about eight years. Everything here is cyclical. Time is a flat surface. You could be here thirty, forty, fifty 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 you’re at the center of the world, but you may you 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. Who 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 wanna 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. And that got it. You know, get out your

shit head bone.

Yeah.

But it puts me in a period of reflective thought and these feelings that I had about men, 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 thirty who were getting married and getting mortages and even having kids.

And I realized, like, if I was gonna 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 made in the arena feeling that I had had in my mid twenties. It starts to go away a little bit, and I start to become more introspective and reflective.

And Bainer 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, mister Trump and Harame, the gorilla, just the thing that finally pushed me out the door. But I had dinner with Dana a few months ago before the book came out and I brought him a copy and I just want you to know this is in here, and 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 and then he goes, well, what are you gonna do now? I said, oh, well, let me get the book out, sir. And we’ll go for that. But he he was happy to take credit for that.

He’s 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 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 loved 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 area.

I mean, This is pretty heavy stuff for a guy in his twenties. I mean, so and yet he is basically saying, you know, before you get sucked in too deep, get out. There must have 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 under understand this. But if you think about when Bainer left, he leaves in October of twenty fifteen right after the pope comes and addresses Congress.

Yeah.

And I think here is a guy who when he came in in the Republican revolution in ninety four, was really a reformer who went on certain types of congressional investigations, really trying to sort of update the institution and no root out corruption, etcetera. He also did give lobbying checks from the tobacco industry on the house floor and got reprimanded for that. So it went like, oh, full circle. But I think Bainer 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 reference is Yeah. To be arrogant for a moment, pardon me, it’s like, yes, the president of the United States doesn’t know me by my first name. I sat to the head of the CIA and a senator at dinner. There are these young beautiful lobbyists that, you know, they’re on a whim saying, oh, you know, we represent the liquor industry and we can take you to concerts and we have dinner with you, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

So it’s quite a nice life. But that all being said, is it fulfilling? Mhmm. And I think what Bainer was probably 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 a warning there. But we go back to divine intervention and fate now the universe works. I don’t think it’s completely random that Dana decides to leave. I have to the pope is there. It’s sort of comes to this this moment of I did it.

So you were saying that you felt unfulfilled that something was amiss. You described the sort of the growing sense of just, you know, unease. But this feels like it was deeper than that, a spiritual whole. 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 through so privileged. But you don’t necessarily wanna 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’s 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’t really dealt with And what I come to realize is that I had been so incredibly fixated upon that obligation, as you mentioned, upon that duty. Mhmm. That I never really grieved for my father, but independent of that, I didn’t know who I was. Yeah.

And

when you turned thirty years old and you 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 had 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 Bainer did more so than anything else was, hey, it’s okay. To listen to those voices because you know what? I’m speaker of the house and they might be in my mind too. Right? And it was a very powerful moment.

But it’s also an extraordinary step to take for for you in the middle of a presidential campaign to get off that treadmill to walk away from all of that, prominence, the busyness. I think it was before the podcast, you mentioned that it took you two years to sort of get over the 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 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. Mhmm. We’re trying to talk me out of it and say, oh, just get through the election.

Just get through the election. You know, people go through these moments in their mind.

Yeah.

You know, get out and come back in in early twenty seventeen and sort of see where you are, you don’t wanna leave all this behind.

You can’t leave now.

Yeah. You can’t leave now, but I and part of me was like, no, I I can and I have to. And I think the the other component of it was you saw the changes that were being made without doubt. And I also I I try to sort of visualize, like, okay. Where do I fit in that future?

And do you wanna 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.

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 which you mentioned this idea of, oh gosh, you’re gonna 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, you know, always getting good grades, always performing for mom and dad, never taking anything for granted. You’re always the you’re not entitled.

To jeez. I don’t know who I am right now. And that to me was sort of you gotta figure that out because if you don’t figure that out, you’re never gonna be as good as you can and you’re never gonna be as productive as you can. And that ultimately was something that I 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, 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 pertain to losing dad. And while there’s certainly other parts of life that I would wish there were 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. Now one of the things he used to always say to me was my namesake Luke chapter twelve verse forty eight 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 twenties. And 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 and the work ethic my grandfather who were two veteran passed down to him. And it wasn’t until I traveled and and I had journaled all these things that 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 reading x 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 have his, you know, twenty four twenty three, twenty four right after dad died, I get in the industry. And I would just have random people come up to me and say, you know, be there be nice and and hug me and, you know, be, I miss your dad.

But then there’d be a line that goes Well, we expect great things from you. Or you gotta do a great job or, you know, you gotta live up to it.

No pressure.

No. Yeah. And I don’t think I realize that because this is a twenty two, twenty three year old kid, twenty four year old kid, you’re like, okay. Thank you. And then it’s years later where I would think about those interactions.

My god. Like, who are you to say that? Number one. And then two, what an amount of pressure did you just put on a young kid? And 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 in that cycle to really process it. And then become at peace with it. I mean, one of the the things that I’m really enjoying about this book and talking, you know, to you in in other interviews is that these are the first interviews and 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, so I’m happy to tell.

Someone I worked with was 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 as 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 are 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 your conversation today, I was gonna 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. There’s a either there’s an element of that for sure. It’s also a letter to my mom. If anything else, you know, 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 an opportunity to travel with her to some of these countries.

My mom was a peace corps volunteer in the sixties at the time when she graduated from college, the only opportunities available to women were really to be a school teacher or 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 disciplinarian. Very much the you’re spoiled. You’re entitled.

You haven’t done enough to earn these things. And I kinda 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 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 r h 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 and you come out of it a a more fulfilled person and a more well rounded and centered person. But I think of 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 alright. 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 we hear about processing grief is that you try to white knuckle and stay strong and and go through it. And I did that for a lot of years. But they leave scars, they leave scars.

In the book is look for me there, grieving my father finding myself, Luke Russell, thank you so much for writing the book and for joining me today. And I think you’ll appreciate this fare well as we go into Memorial Day weekend.

Way up high. There’s a land that I

once in a lullaby.

Luke, thank you so much again. Of course, this was played at at your father’s ceremony, one of his favorite songs. Yeah. It’s been a pleasure talking with you today.

Well, it’s so kind. 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 see on the day of his funeral. And that was dad singing high.

And when I traveled around the world, I would see rainbows at significant moments. Now I thought that was just 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 the soldiers who had passed in the world a weekend. So enjoy it. It’s a special time for us.

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

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