Father and son, Commencement 2008. Photograph: Rose Lincoln

Though a graduate of Cleveland’s John Carroll University, a short drive along Lake Erie from his beloved hometown of Buffalo, Tim Russert became a part of the Boston College community when his son Luke enrolled in September 2004. Parents who are public figures are not unheard of at Boston College, but they mostly move discreetly from airport to hired car to campus to hotel and then back to airport. Mr. Russert, however, like an eager freshman, took advantage of every opportunity to bind himself to the University, flying up for football games, sitting through a public interview with the editor of the student newspaper on a sweltering evening in the Shea Room, flipping a BC cap onto his head on Meet the Press, and lending his capacious drawing power and journalistic abilities to public forums sponsored by the Church in the 21st Century Center. Whether in classrooms in which he made guest appearances to talk about journalism, or at a floor table in Conte Forum for Pops on the Heights, or chatting with students on the Dustbowl, Mr. Russert engaged Boston College with the ease and delight of a man who felt sure of his welcome, and not because he happened to be “Tim Russert of Meet the Press.” “Today I’m here as a dad,” he begged off on May 19, 2008, when a reporter approached him at Luke’s graduation ceremony to ask for a comment on Senator Ted Kennedy’s illness. “BC lost a friend,” a senior administrator e-mailed me soon after the news of Russert’s death was announced on the Friday afternoon of June 13. The sentiment was widespread. On Monday, I arrived at the office to find that a young alumnus in Washington, D.C., had gone to the trouble of photographing the floral tributes piled in front of the NBC studios and then e-mailing the jpegs to me, as though thinking Boston College, too, might want to bank those flowers against its front gate.

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