The first time I heard of the name Luke Russert, son of Tim Russert, was when he was a guest on the program Last Word with Lawrence O’ Donnell on May 3, 2023. Luke Russert’s book “Look for me there” had just come out, and O’ Donnell praised it highly. Indeed, he said he was going to buy many copies and send them to friends as gifts.
I had watched Tim Russert on “Meet the Press” for many years. He was one of the most respected journalists and “Meet the Press” was a most watched news program. Sadly, he died of a heart attack on June 13, 2008. Luke and his mother, Maureen Orth, a well-known journalist at Vanity Fair, learned of the sad news while vacationing in Florence, Italy, the month after Luke’s graduation from Boston College.
In the interview with Lawrence O’Donnell, Luke told the story that, one day in the Spring of 2015, after spending six years as a NBC correspondent assigned to Capitol Hill, the then Speaker of the House John Boehner asked Luke to have a chat in his office. Boehner, who had spent 20 years in Washington, apparently had some regrets. He sensed that his life was consumed by politics/Washington and nothing else. He advised Luke not to do the same. Boehner suggested that it’s time for Luke to go do something, build something, see, and learn about the outside world. “You don’t want to be a lifer here.”
In 2015, Luke was still grieving for his father’s death. Prompted by Boehner’s advice, and influenced by her mother’s world travelling experience, Luke decided to quit his job at NBC and embarked on a journey to six continents and 65 countries which lasted 3 years, for the purpose of “grieving my father, finding myself.” His travel journals form the basis of the book “Look for me there”, which would not exist without the chat initiated by John Boehner.
The beginning of the book described how his brilliant eulogy of his father at the funeral launched his career in journalism. This is an excellent illustration of the power of words. Luke credited the brilliance of his eulogy to the inspiration he got from his father’s book: “Big Russert and me”. The then Senator Obama, later recognized as among the best orators in the country, sitting in the front row in the audience, was the first to stand up to applaud.
Luke’s grandfather was a World War II veteran who worked as a truck driver and a garbage man. As President George W. Bush was among the attendees of the funeral, it prompted the line on p. 14 of the book: “The son of a garbage man, getting a US president to his wake? I can hear Dad mouthing, ‘What a country.’”
In the book jacket, it states that 65+ countries were visited. I counted only 19 that are described in the book. Of these, I found the chapters on Japan, Vietnam, and Senegal particularly poignant. All three are intimately tied to American History. Senegal to Slave Trade, Japan to World War II and the atomic bomb, Vietnam to War again.
The most poignant part of the Chapter on Vietnam was the visit to the Hanoi Hilton, which is the name given to the prison camp during the war. The author said that even now, he felt sick after being inside for three hours. John McCain was a prisoner there for five years, during which he was repeatedly tortured. Because his dad was an Admiral in the US navy, he was offered to be released before his turn. He refused, more than once. The author understood why Americans were enraged by the treatment of McCain and others, even though McCain, after his release, said that he had no ill-feeling towards the Vietnamese people. The author described a scene that, on a Sunday afternoon, a group of Vietnamese children playing while their parents ate ice cream on a park. When one of the parents smiled as Luke walked by the kids’ game, it hit him that he was from the country that napalmed innocent Vietnamese civilians, including kids just like this.
Hiroshima reminded us of the never-ending debate whether the decision by President Truman to use the atomic bomb to end World War II was the right one. The argument for this was that this saved countless American lives, not to mention Japanese lives as well. The counter argument, attributed to General Eisenhower, was that Japan was on a path to defeat and it would not take long for Japan to surrender, rendering the use of the atomic bomb unnecessary. Before the author’s visit, his answer to these two arguments was “I don’t know.” After visiting the museum in Hiroshima and seeing the recorded devastation of lives and the city, the author concluded that Eisenhower was correct.
In the visit to Goree Island in Senegal, the author saw the place where the slave trade began. The slaves were dumped in the House of Slaves, for days, before they were led past the infamous Door of No Returns, put on a crowded ship to America, to a hard and miserable life beyond. Some jumped off the dock and drowned themselves to avoid this fate. When his guide, a fellow named Oumar asked Luke “How do you feel?” He replied: “Ashamed.”
In “Big Russ and me”, Tim Russel ended the book with a letter to his son Luke. The letter finished with the words: “As Grandpa likes to say: ‘The world doesn’t owe you a favor. You do, however, owe this world something. To live a good and meaningful life would be the ultimate affirmation of Grandpa’s lessons and values.”
In the interview with Noah O’Donnell on June 17, 2023, Luke said that, after his “Grieving my father, finding myself” journey, he finally understood what his dad’s words meant. He hoped that his book would be of some help for anyone dealing with grief or in search of the direction of his/her life.
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TRAVELLOG -LIKE DESCRIPTIONS INTERSPERSED WITH PERSONAL REMEMBRANCES AND SELF QUESTIONING
Reviewed in Canada on June 17, 2023