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people privately. And the Monica thing—in the OVAL OFFICE!!! Jesus, don’t get him started.
    Tim’s crowning smack against them, the Clintons believed, occurred on the May evening that Obama defeated Hillary in the North Carolina primary and came close in Indiana. “We now know who the Democratic nominee will be,” declared Russert of Obama on the air, definitively, with the kind of live-TV authority that few possessed. The Macker paid Tim a visit at the office soon after. They went back and forth, agreed to disagree, and laughed quite a bit, like they always did.
    •   •   •
    T he Kennedy Center memorial service is broadcast live on MSNBC, complete with pregame and postgame. Luminary speakers, polished remarks, Brokaw hoisting a Rolling Rock at the lectern, and Bruce Springsteen materializing via satellite from Germany. Brian Williams, the NBC News anchor, is given a prime place in the Murderers’ Row of celebrity eulogists. The Russert family is, uh, surprised about this, since Williams was never really one of Tim’s guys. Nor is the family happy about the presence at the funeral of former NBC president Andrew Lack, whom Tim despised, or the degree to which NBC has hijacked the Kennedy Center time as a network branding opp. But such a dance is part of living and dying as public property. They understand that, as Tim must have understood it, and the Russert family will benefit, none more than Luke, who already has his own sports talk show on XM satellite radio with his and Tim’s buddy James Carville. Luke’s amazing eulogy will effectively launch his television career. He will be hired by NBC soon after—just like McCain’s kid, and W’s kid, and, eventually, Bill and Hillary’s kid. At some point NBC became a full-employment agency for famous political offspring.
    But Luke is a special prince, and will eventually be assigned the Capitol Hill beat for MSNBC, where he will become our congressional sage before his twenty-sixth birthday and be auctioned off for charity (“tour of the Capitol and lunch with Luke: current bid $1,050”). He will grow nicely into the family business. But today’s service is a star turn for Luke: funny, sentimental, and poised to a point where you could almost hear all of Bethesda and Chevy Chase hissing at their inert teenage/college-age sons, “WHY CAN’T YOU BE MORE LIKE LUKE RUSSERT?”
    Tim spoke with bottomless pride about Luke, his only child. They talked every day. For pioneering the joys of fatherhood, Tim was rightly recognized: among other accolades, the National Father’s Day Council named him “Father of the Year” in 1995 and
Parents
magazine honored him as “Dream Dad” for 1998.
    Washington eats up the dad conceit. Unusually high proportions of ambitious men—and potential male book buyers—love to self-mythologize through their fathers. John Edwards was “the son of a mill worker,” John Boehner “the son of a barkeeper,” etc. The prevailing social dynamic in Washington—a city of patrons—mimics the quest for paternal love. “Who do you work for?” is typically the first thing people ask here.
    Russert, who described Moynihan as his “intellectual father,” died just before Father’s Day, at the dawn of a general election campaign that featured two presumptive nominees, Obama and McCain, whose sagas were steeped in fraught paternal legacies. Obama’s memoir was titled
Dreams from My Father
, while McCain’s was
Faith of My Fathers
. “A man’s either trying to make up for his father’s mistakes or live up to his expectations,” Obama told
Newsweek
’s Jon Meacham that summer.
    “My dad was my best friend,” eulogizes Luke, twenty-two. “To explain my bond with my father is utterly impossible to put into words.”
    And then the white screen rolls down and Springsteen enters via satellite. Like Bruce, Tim deftly made himself a spokesman for America. He was “the Boss” of the nostalgic male playgrounds he presided over in