Having lived through the Cronkite era, I can say that "the most trusted man in America" title was no better suited to Cronkite than Russert. Many of us don't remember that it took Cronkite six years after he became CBS Evening News anchor to declare the Vietnam War lost during the time of the Tet Offensive. Russert was taken a year before he might have opinionated on the Iraq War with the same timeliness or lack of it.

Russert was more than a newsman, much more than a political junkie. He believed passionately that the give and take of politics is the lifeblood of democracy. And he believed just as passionately that a good journalist gets out of the way of the news and lets history-in-the-making speak mostly for itself.

He was just as passionate about his faith, his country, his family and his colleagues.

Russert believed in his work and all that he held dear. And that is more than most of our obituaries will say when they are written.

Word. You always get it right.

Frankly, I was never an admirer of Russert's. I felt that that he too often went shallow with his "gotcha" journalism and that, in the nature of things, shallow gotchas always hurt Democrats and leave Republican's unscathed. I was appalled by his testimony at the Scooter Libby trial that he assumed any conversation he had with someone important was off the record unless the person he was speaking to said otherwise. It seemed to me to be the epitome of the way the modern MSM has come to equate access with journalism.

But today, I've found myself deeply moved by his death. It's not just that death has a way of putting what you thought were large disputes into perspective. And it's not just the sadness of his dying so young and so suddenly, though it's one to which I have related deeply today from personal experience. My own father was about a year older than Russert when he died, I was a bit younger than Russert's son who just graduated. And it was also an early summer funeral. My heart goes out to him and his mother and grandfather and the rest of their family.

So that's affecting me, but its not just. It's not even just the tragic proximity of his death to Father's Day.

No, what's really got me choked up is that king-sized Russert-shaped hole that's suddenly been punched into our body politic. It's the fact that the man cast such a gigantic shadow over our national discourse and now he's gone. Presidents came and went, and elections came and went, but Russert was always there. I'm used to griping about him, thinking around him, reacting to him, responding to the reactions he got from those he interviewed. It's the fact that we felt we knew him as intimately as the people we work with and yet he was also that remote, larger than life, presence and now its gone.

Above all, its the cruelty that he had to go this year of all years and that he will miss this coming election night. He'll miss the end of a campaign so fraught with twists and turns and drama that you're constantly getting that feeling that this can't be real because stuff like this only happens in novels and movies. The drama of having the last two standing be a woman and a black man who fought it out to the last primary. Obama's brilliant come from behind victory, Hillary's repeated comebacks, McCain crashing, burning and then rising from the ashes of his first campaign to run a second one on a shoestring and then winning.

It's been an election year written by Allen Drury and produced and directed by Robert Capra and Big Tim was feeling it. As they were counting the votes from the last Democratic primaries, there was Russert, waxing lyrical about the historic nature of an Obama nomination, talking about how much he'd love to be a history teacher in an inner city school the next morning. His eyes were glowing and he was grinning that slightly manic grin, overwhelmed by the embarassment of riches provided for a newsman and a political junkie. And,then, to my amazement, he started talking about how maybe he and his cohorts really did owe it to the American people to have a serious discussion about the issues, and the real differences between these candidates and not allow themselves to get distracted, and to distract us, with sideshow gotchas. There he was, Tim Russert of all people, saying, in effect, Not This Time!

I hope they remember that, above all else, at NBC.

I spent years being irked by the big galoot, and now all I can think of is how much I'll miss him and that innane whiteboard on election night. It's just wrong, just damnably wrong, that Russert doesn't get to at least see this incredible, Capraesque election through to its end.

Tim Russert's testimony during the Libby trial that he granted all of his sources anonymity unless other wise requested by the source. Tim Russert was less a journalist than an enabler.

He wasn't uniquely an enabler in today's media - but he wasn't a fine journalist at all. Perhaps a fine individual, a fine son... but not a fine journalist.

It's sad that he died so young - but let's look with open eyes at his journalism.