Silky, if you'd watched Tim Russert, you'd have seen that he was not too serious at all. He was often funny and easy-going on air. If a guest were not prepared--and he asked easy-to-prepare-for, fair, easy-to-anticipate questions--yes, he'd grill them and often reveal them as the fools that they were. But he always respected his guests and was frequently hysterically funny. He worked hard himself to prepare and do all the reading and background work that his job required. So he was certainly driven to achieve according to his own standards, and journalism is a high-pressure, deadline-driven field, of course, which is stressful. But he was far from too serious most of the time. You should have seen him on the subject of sports!

Phil McGraw comes from this same community I live in and has worked with various legal and medical professionals in this area for many years. He's not laid back at all. He's one of the most driven, workaholic types there is. Notoriously exacting and perfectionistic and widely hailed as one of the most difficult, egotistic men there is--in this community and now in California, too. He clearly keeps that fairly well masked on his TV show, but you can ask anyone who's worked with him and they'll confirm this. They'll use far more colorful language than I've used here, too, including the word "jackass."

That's not what folks say about Russert. He was upbeat. Cared deeply. Believed in people doing their jobs well and cared about getting to the truth. And was always professional, courteous, friendly and fair, even to idiots and people with whom he disagreed. He was respected by everyone on both sides of the political spectrum as all the tributes have revealed.

Tim Russert - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
NBC's Tim Russert dead at 58 - Politics - MSNBC.com

His cause of death was a coronary thrombosis. He was under the care of a physician for asymptomatic heart disease, meaning he didn't have chest pain and hadn't yet had a heart attack when that diagnosis was made. He did indeed have diabetes. He'd had a stress test in April that had come back fine, but my husband wondered if anyone also checked his C-reactive protein levels, a marker of inflammation in the blood. Mr. Russert was on anti-cholesterol medicine, but on Friday the 13th, probably not helped by the fact that he'd just returned from a long, overseas flight back from Italy, the sinister forces of inflammation in his artery walls, plaque build-up inside the lining of that artery wall (the bad thing about anti-cholesterol medicines is they reduce build up in the center of the arteries but not that which is inside the lining of the artery walls along the sides), hypertension, and circulatory challenges from diabetes conspired to cause a tiny break in his left anterior descending artery, which then bled and formed a clot. That clot, in turn, blocked that artery and caused his heart not to be able to supply his brain or body with oxygenated blood. I don't think a case could ever be made that it was NBC's fault. He'd just returned from a vacation. He simply had too many risk factors and his number was, sadly, up.