Letters to the Editor: Remembering Mike Russell (Cont.)

was terribly saddened to read of Mike Russell’s untimely death. (Click here for previous coverage.) Your announcement did justice to his extraordinary professionalism, but it didn’t capture at all Mike’s joy in his work.

At the White House, Mike found great joy in what we were doing to reinvent government, and even greater joy in getting our success stories into radio, television, the general press and the business press.

Mike’s press clippings were outweighed only by his laughter and the laughter he induced in his associates. His National Performance Review colleagues learned much from him. We’ll miss him a lot.

i>Former Staff Director

ational Performance Review

os Angeles

I hope this doesn’t discomfit any of his old bosses, but I liked and respected Mike Russell, even though our interests didn’t always converge.

He was a terrific reporter and a very good information officer.

There was never any doubt for whom Mike was working. For him, loyalty was a built-in quality, going back, I suspect, to lessons learned at the Milton Hershey school and in the U.S. Marine Corps.

But Mike also had a gift that is too seldom observed in the modern information officer: The courage, self-confidence, creativity, heck, just plain human decency to go “beyond the script” when his judgment deemed that it was warranted.

Case in point: Some years ago, I was all set to blow off what seemed like a routine Veterans’ Day feature about a Michigan GI whose name was being added to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Then Mike, who had composed the press release, blew in my ear a little more. What I ended up writing, thanks to Mike, was the story of a soldier who lived in a veterans hospital almost 20 years before succumbing to his wounds, lighting up the lives of innumerable older vets along the way. And of his mother, sad, but finally at peace, because her boy, Freddy, was finally “up there with the other boys.”

When we met for breakfast last month, Mike was full of chatter about mutual friends, family, trucking projects, the Marines . . .

Before I left, he tucked a story pitch — a video about hyperactive plaintiffs’ lawyers — in my suit coat pocket.

As I said — never any doubt about Mike’s loyalties.

Mike knew a good story when he saw one because he was a pretty good story himself.

Semper Fi.

Semper Mike.

Richard Willing

i>National Reporter

SA Today

cLean, Va.

These letters appear in the July 10 print edition of Transport Topics. Subscribe today.