By: KENNETH MAXWELL

Folha de São Paulo - Op-ed section - page A2  

One of the giants of American journalism, Tim Russert, died unexpectedly late last week of a heart attack at the age of 58. Tim Russert was Washington bureau chief of NBC News. More importantly he was the host of the most influential Sunday morning TV talk show "Meet the Press" where he interrogated the great and the mighty with dogged grace and meticulous persistence.

I doubt very much Tim Russert was widely known in Brazil. He was a very American phenomenon; proud of his roots in the gritty old industrial town of Buffalo, New York; proud of his working class Catholic origins; and he had the well honed instincts of the local street level democratic politician.

Russert began his career working for the legendary New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, another street smart Irishman of very formidable intelligence. Senator Moynihan, a sociologist who had taught at Harvard, was a powerful and eccentric figure in Washington.

Tall and disheveled, and a man who evidently enjoyed his whiskey, he terrified the bureaucrats called to testify before his senatorial committee. Apparently dozing off he would suddenly lurch forward, cast his beady eye on the witness, and demand "complexification".

There is no such word of course: What the senator was demanding was not simplistic assertions but the facts.

Tim Russert's unexpected death made me think of Senator Moynihan, a "public intellectual" who had made his name challenging conventional liberal opinion. Moynihan argued in the mid 1960s that a major problem for American blacks was the lack of Father headed households.

He was vilified by the left for "blaming the victim". But last Sunday, Father's Day in the U.S., and at one of Chicago's largest black churches, Senator Barack Obama said the same thing: "We need Father's to realize that responsibility does not end at conception"

Senator Barack Obama knows. His own father abandoned him and his mother when he was a child. But it was a very sensitive topic for him to address head on and where and when he did; and it makes one think that if Barack Obama becomes President of the United States he will be a leader, like the late senator Moynihan, who demands we recognize there are no simplistic solutions to the world's complexity.

KENNETH MAXWELL is a weekly op-ed columnist (every Thursday) for Folha de São Paulo, Brazil's leading newspaper