EGN NEWS DESK
Betty Cole Dukert, who started her profession in Washington as a secretary within the Nineteen Fifties and later grew to become the highest producer of the weekly NBC News public affairs program “Meet the Press,” died on March 16 at her house in Bethesda, Md. She was 96.
Her late husband’s niece Barbara Dukert Smith mentioned the trigger was problems of Alzheimer’s illness.
In her 41 years at “Meet the Press,” a Sunday-morning fixture on the NBC schedule, Mrs. Dukert booked politicians, diplomats, overseas dignitaries, cultural figures and coronary heart surgeons to be interviewed by a moderator and a panel of journalists; sought out probably the most succesful reporters for the panel; and researched the themes to be mentioned.
“She was the principle level of contact on Capitol Hill for the present,” mentioned Betsy Fischer Martin, who began on “Meet the Press” as an intern and have become this system’s govt producer in 2002. “She labored the telephones continually. It wasn’t an period when you could possibly ship off an electronic mail to e-book somebody.”
As she rose within the “Meet the Press” hierarchy, Mrs. Dukert collaborated with a protracted checklist of moderators: Ned Brooks, Lawrence Spivak, Bill Monroe, Roger Mudd, Marvin Kalb, Chris Wallace, Garrick Utley and Tim Russert.
“I’ve by no means discovered anybody who’s nicer to work with, extra clever, and whose judgment and tact are so very good,” Mr. Spivak informed the Missouri newspaper The Springfield Leader and Press in 1970.
For a lot of her time at “Meet the Press,” which premiered in 1947, Mrs. Dukert was a rarity: a girl in a prime manufacturing job at a serious community information program that didn’t have a everlasting feminine moderator. (The program didn’t have one till Kristen Welker succeeded Chuck Todd final 12 months.) In distinction, at “Face the Nation” on CBS, a competitor of “Meet the Press,” Lesley Stahl served as moderator from 1983 to 1991.
“Betty was such a high-quality, gracious individual and the ‘keeper of the flame’ for ‘Meet the Press,’” Mr. Wallace, the present’s moderator from 1988 to 1989, mentioned in an announcement. But, he added, “behind the gentility, Betty was fiercely aggressive. Even after many years on the present, she would battle for a visitor like a 25-year-old booker. Important Washington politicians knew that crossing Betty was perilous.”
In 1976, Mrs. Dukert and a “Meet the Press” crew flew to Beirut, Lebanon, to document Mr. Monroe’s interview with Yasir Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. She was one in all two girls in an condominium with about 15 males, a few of them carrying giant rifles to guard Mr. Arafat. The different lady handed round cookies and orange juice.
“I simply sat wanting across the room, on the machine weapons and the orange juice, and thought, ‘What a wierd world we dwell in,’” Mrs. Dukert informed the Television Academy in 2003.
When the interview ended, Mr. Arafat introduced Mrs. Dukert with an embroidered black cotton shirt that had been made in a refugee camp. “I felt I ought to take it,” she added. “I didn’t need to insult him.”
While Mr. Arafat was cooperative, the Libyan chief Muammar el-Qaddafi was demanding and elusive. He was to be interviewed by satellite tv for pc, and he required that NBC pay for an costly add-on: a two-way feed that will let him look straight at his interviewer. But he backed out shortly earlier than airtime, forcing Mrs. Dukert on the final minute to spherical up three consultants to speak about Colonel Qaddafi in NBC’s Washington studio.
“Apparently, there was a battle between two aides, and we had been on the aspect of the one who misplaced,” she informed The Tulsa World in 1986. “Qadaffi owes us some huge cash for that one.”
Betty Ann Cole was born on May 9, 1927, in Muskogee, Okla. Her father, Irvin, was a mechanical foreman on an oil pipeline, a job that required him to maneuver his household across the state and ultimately to Springfield, Mo. Her mom, Ione (Bowman) Cole, managed the house.
Betty confirmed an early curiosity in journalism — influenced by the reporter characters performed by Katharine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell within the early-Forties movies “Woman of the Year” and “His Girl Friday” — and wrote a style column for her highschool newspaper.
After attending Lindenwood College for Women (now Lindenwood University) in St. Charles, Mo., and Drury College in Springfield, Mo., she graduated from the University of Missouri with a bachelor’s diploma in journalism in 1949.
She discovered work as a secretary and copywriter at a radio station in Springfield, then as an administrator at an area juvenile court docket, earlier than shifting to Washington. She was briefly a secretary at Voice of America, then discovered secretarial work in a lobbying workplace for NBC and its father or mother firm, RCA.
After a 12 months, she was employed — once more as a secretary — within the programming division of WRC-TV, the NBC station in Washington, the place she moonlighted as a manufacturing assistant.
In 1956, Mr. Spivak, a creator and govt producer of “Meet the Press,” interviewed her for the affiliate producer job. She impressed him together with her manufacturing expertise and her willingness to take a brand new job and not using a elevate to show to him how a lot she needed the place.
“That was high-quality,” she informed the Television Academy, “besides that I had been getting a slight improve yearly, from nothing to just a little above nothing. So it was a handicap.”
She took the job and was promoted to producer in 1975, when Mr. Spivak retired. “She was the one producer for some time,” Ms. Martin mentioned, till Barbara Cochran grew to become govt producer, above Mrs. Dukert, in 1985. Mrs. Dukert was named senior producer in 1992 and govt producer in 1997, the 12 months she retired.
In 1967, Mrs. Dukert met her future husband, Joseph Dukert, who was then the Republican chairman of Maryland, once they each attended the Republican Governors Conference in Palm Beach, Fla. They married the following 12 months.
Mr. Dukert died in 2020. No fast relations survive.
From the beginning of her profession, Mrs. Dukert mentioned, she most well-liked working behind the scenes to reporting. From her perch, she helped to develop an A-list of “Meet the Press” friends, together with President John F. Kennedy; Eleanor Roosevelt, the previous first woman; Golda Meir, when she was Israel’s overseas minister; Fidel Castro, the chief of Cuba; President Anwar Sadat of Egypt; and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel.
Another main determine, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., appeared on “Meet the Press” a number of instances.
“He was simply an awesome presence” Mrs. Dukert informed the Television Academy, including that he had a chilled impact on these round him.
One Sunday Dr. King was on a distant feed from Chicago, whereas different civil rights leaders — together with Kwame Ture (then generally known as Stokely Carmichael), the fiery activist and Black Power advocate whose radicalism nervous Dr. King — had been within the Washington studio.
“Just earlier than we went on the air,” Mrs. Dukert recalled, “once we had been testing the microphones in Chicago and Washington, Dr. King mentioned, ‘Now, Stokely, you behave your self.’”
