had a hard time on Russert's show.

He had a political background, but there was nothing much in it to foster the spirit of defiance. A Catholic, educated by the Jesuits, he was still in his 20s when he became chief of staff for Mario Cuomo, governor of New York. From there he went to work for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, paradigmatic neo-con and formulator of the infamous advice to President Nixon that matters of racial justice should enter a period of "benign neglect". Moynihan was for many years a negative, uncreative force in American politics, and Russert was very close to him.

When it came to the nuts and bolts of politics, Russert knew what he was talking about. But his expertise was in the ebb and flow of mainstream politics, not in where the system was headed, or where it might be going seriously off-track. When he sensed something unusual, he took fright, as in one of the primary debates he moderated back in February, where he started swatting Obama with questions about possible ties to the Rev Farrakhan as well as to Jeremiah Wright. Like

Moynihan, he didn't care for uppity blacks.

After the Watergate scandal was over in 1974 and Nixon bundled off in disgrace to California, Katharine Graham, chairman of the Washington Post and employer of Woodward and Bernstein, cautioned journalists: "The press these days should... be rather careful about its role. We may have acquired some tendencies about over- involvement we had better overcome. We had better not yield to the temptation to go on re-fighting the next war and see conspiracy and cover-up where they do not exist."

Out of that warning came the failures to see conspiracy where it did exist, in the manufacture of the WMD threat and in the treatment of politics as business-as-usual, somewhat like a game - an approach in which Russert excelled. He never had to lunch alone. In the 1880s, Joseph Pulitzer hung a sign in the newsroom of his paper, the New York World, which read: "The World has no friends." Russert, as the recent obsequies attest, had far too many.