We don't need yet another essay on the death of Tim Russert, but it
might be time to consider the culture that produced him and many other
journalists. That culture is Irish American and Roman Catholic, the
same culture that produced me even though I do not have a drop of Irish
blood within me.
The motto of this culture is simple: If you are lucky enough to be Irish, you're lucky enough.
Such self-congratulation is tolerable in a pub on St. Patrick's Day,
even to the non-Irish. And who could not be proud of a culture that,
according to historian Thomas Cahill, saved Western civilization from
the forces of darkness? The light of Irish culture gave us poets and
scholars, playwrights and musicians, church men and women of
astonishing accomplishment, and some of the world's greatest
journalists and political figures.
But it took St. Patrick, an
outsider, to drive the snakes out of Ireland, and he didn't get them
all, not by a long shot. For all the charm, lyricism and camaraderie of
Irish culture, the serpents survived in the form of clannish
intolerance, political corruption, sexual repression and, most
famously, the demon rum.
When my mother, the daughter of
Italian and Jewish immigrants, hears me attach myself to Irish
Catholicism, I'm sure it hurts her feelings. While Irish immigrants of
the 19th century suffered terrible forms of discrimination in America
-- our crude imitation of the British crimes against the Irish -- there
came a time when the Irish themselves became the oppressors.
Long after the "paddy wagon" became a relic, it was the Irish in cities
like New York and Boston who turned political patronage into an art
form and filled the police and fire departments with names like
O'Sullivan, O'Reilly, O'Malley and Quinn. In such an environment, the
new Americans from Italy and Eastern Europe came to see the Irish as
petty tyrants. Irish schoolmarms would shave their heads looking for
lice, and the Irish police would crack their skulls.
Such
corruption would lead to the election of reformers like Fiorello
LaGuardia as the mayor of New York City. But the once oppressed could
never fully abandon their grudges. Years after my brother Ted married a
lovely Irish girl from Notre Dame, my Italian relatives would still
make fun of the Irish on St. Paddy's Day: "Let's all go up to City
Hall," my mother still says in a mock Irish dialect, "and get our asses
painted green."
And yet my teachers were Irish, my next door
neighbors were both Irish cops, my girlfriends were Irish, many of my
closest friends and teammates were Irish. In later years, I would meet
Irish-American journalists -- Francis X. Clines, Anna Quindlen, Jim
Dwyer, and Dan Barry, just to mention veterans from The New York Times
-- and recognize in their eyes many of the same cultural influences
that had shaped me.
I was born in
1948, two years before Tim Russert. I've learned from the hagiography
that has grown since his passing that Father Tim also attended Catholic
schools for 16 years. After law school, he joined the staff of New York
senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, arguably the most brilliant
Irish-American politician of his generation. In his days at NBC,
Russert's pals included the likes of Chris Matthews, Doris Kearns
Goodwin, Mike Barnicle and Maria Shriver, prominent Irish-Americans
whose careers, like Russert's, bridged the worlds of journalism and
politics.
To feel the influence of various expressions of
Irish Catholicism on journalism, I only need turn to my friends and
colleagues at The Poynter Institute. Jim Naughton, who once covered the
White House for
The New York Times,
served as Poynter's president. Bill Mitchell, once a veteran editor
with Knight Ridder newspapers, created Poynter Online. Butch Ward came
to teach leadership at Poynter after serving as managing editor of
The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Naughton, Mitchell, and Ward are all devout Irish Catholics from the
Russert generation. All root for the Fighting Irish of their alma
mater, Notre Dame.
The late James Carey, perhaps journalism's
most famous scholar, served for years on Poynter's national advisory
board and greatly influenced Poynter's attitudes toward journalism,
community and democracy. Carey was so sickly as a child that his Irish
Catholic parents didn't bother to send him to school. For the rest of
his life, he would attribute much of his success to the Catholic
priests who took him to Red Sox games and enlightened his conversation
and view of the world.
Kelly McBride, who teaches ethics at
Poynter, wears the map of Ireland on her face. Raised in Toledo, Ohio,
she, too, is the product of parochial education with a graduate degree
from Gonzaga, a Jesuit school in Washington State. She became one of
the nation's most able reporters on issues of religion and ethics.
Chip Scanlan attended Catholic schools from kindergarten through
college. Now a steadfastly secular Irish-American, Scanlan was raised
by a mother who remains a devout Catholic in a house with an alcoholic
father who died at the age of 46, a burden that has shaped his life and
writing.
That last pattern is of particular significance
because it echoes the classic Irish narrative of the saintly mother and
the drunken father, a pattern described in the best-selling book
"Angela's Ashes" by Frank McCourt and experienced by generations of
Irish American families. Tim Russert's canonization of his father in
"Big Russ and Me" and his conspicuous modeling of fatherhood with his
own son and younger employees can be seen, among many other things, as
an effort to redeem the brutal and beer-soaked reputation of Irish
fatherhood.
I could make the case that Russert's enormous
influence and popularity derived, at least in part, from a special
ability to elevate personal responsibility without dousing the flames
of the more jovial and creative aspects of Irish culture. Father Tim
expressed endless admiration for the beer-and-a-shot blue collar
workers of his native Buffalo, New York. Time and again, he praised
their work ethic, patriotism, and discipline, values and virtues that
Russert himself came to embody.
You'd see him at ballparks and
football stadiums, or at bars or restaurants, always joking, his big
Irish hand clapped on someone's shoulder, his big head smiling like a
Jack O'Lantern. I've never heard it said that his excesses included
alcohol, but he often seemed to me inebriated by the stress, influence,
celebrity and importance of his work, an ethic and lifestyle that could
only have contributed to his untimely death.
The Irish are
fabulously sentimental, with a remarkable ability to romanticize even
the worst kinds of personal experiences, so it did not surprise me when
Russert bragged to Bill O'Reilly about the high school priest who
grabbed him by the collar and slammed him up against a locker for some
act of disobedience. There is not a hint in his recollection that maybe
priests shouldn't be throwing students against lockers, only a gleam in
his Irish eyes that accountability counts.
Accountability.
There is a Calvinist streak in some forms of European Catholicism that
was transplanted to America from places like France and Ireland. That
streak is sometimes called "Jansenism," named after the churchman most
associated with the heresy, and was the hallmark of the Irish Catholic
education that I received in the 1950s. At St. Aidan School, a cruel
nun -- I'm tempted to name her -- made the girls in her class write
letters to orphanages asking to be taken in because their misbehavior
proved they were unworthy of their parents' love. My brother Vincent
witnessed this.
Much of that emotional abuse has been
transformed to humor, hence all the blarney about masturbation,
blindness and girls who wear patent leather shoes. But such attempts to
neutralize the poison of sexual repression, confusion, and alienation
could never heal the agony of the kind of sexual abuse by the clergy,
enabled by the likes of Cardinal Law, in places like Boston. Sadly, the
reputation of American Catholicism is more likely to derive from a
Jansenistic focus on sexual sin than on the ministry of nuns such as my
friend Sister Mary Jane Herlik, who cares for women with AIDS.
It strikes me that Father Tim's best trick was to hold the powerful
accountable for their words and actions. In essence, he pressed
politicians up against their lockers and interrogated them in search of
hypocrisy and inconsistency. His training in the law became a perfect
companion to his postlapsarian vision of a flawed human nature. To
listen to his Sunday morning cross-examinations week after week was to
assume that he himself never spun a message when he worked for New York
pols, or that contradicting a statement you made a year ago was a
mortal sin.
Against this ethic of discipline and
accountability is the more generous expression of Irish Catholicity,
embodied most powerfully by a woman named Dorothy Day, a co-founder of
something called The Catholic Worker movement, and a hero of Poynter's
McBride. Influential throughout most of the last century, Day created
an international corps of Catholics devoted to the social gospel.
Service to the poor and needy was at the heart of their ministry,
efforts which at times put them at odds with the institutional church.
Such a movement, no doubt, inspired the fierce work ethic and sense of
social justice that may have burned out Russert's body, even as it
inflamed his spirit.
The Catholic Workers movement influenced
peace activists like the Berrigan brothers and publications such as the
National Catholic Reporter. But for every Russert or Jimmy Breslin or
Pete Hamill playing for the Irish team, there is a counterpart on the
right, a Pat Buchanan, a Peggy Noonan, a Bill O'Reilly, a Sean Hannity
or that cranky blob of Irish Catholic paranoia, Bill Donohue, president
of the Catholic League.
Whatever their political preferences,
the Irish American journalists I know seem to share a love for
language, an abiding sense of family, a deep disdain for injustice, a
fervent embrace of the social gospel, a theological affinity to good
works as a means to salvation, an attachment to ritual and an openness
to the mysteries of the universe. On some days they see themselves as
saints and sinners, or others as sinners and saints.
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