Betty Cole Dukert, a power behind ‘Meet the Press’
Betty Cole Dukert, who spent four decades as a behind-thescenes power of the NBC weekly public affairs show “Meet the Press,” rising to executive producer of the program and helping secure guests spanning the ideological spectrum from Fidel Castro to Ross Perot, died March 16 at a retirement home in Bethesda, Md. She was 96.
The cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease, said her niece Barbara Smith.
Despite holding a journalism school degree, Mrs. Dukert was offered only a secretarial position by NBC’s Washington bureau when she applied for a job in 1952. After moonlighting as a weekend production assistant for the network’s local station, she joined “Meet the Press” in 1956 as an associate producer.
The program, which was launched on radio in 1945 and TV in 1947 and remains the longest-running show on television, spawned Sunday-morning imitators such as CBS’s “Face the Nation” and ABC’s “This Week.” As “Meet the Press” waxed and waned in the ratings, Mrs. Dukert remained a program stalwart amid a succession of hosts such as Ned Brooks, Lawrence Spivak, Bill Monroe, Roger Mudd, Marvin Kalb, Chris Wallace, Garrick Utley, and Tim Russert.
Until Russert took over in the early 1990s, “Meet the Press” featured a moderator and a panel of guest journalists who were usually specialists in the topic of the news-making interviewee. The program became a destination for political leaders and other dignitaries to convey their perspectives and, in a later, less spontaneous and more spindriven age, deliver their “talking points” to a mass audience.
Mrs. Dukert likened the work to having a “ringside seat on the world” as she negotiated with and arranged airtime for a panoply of presidents, wannabe presidents, dictators, business and labor leaders, authors, scientists, and news-making legislators. Because of structural changes at the network, she was either the main producer of the show or one of the top producers, from 1976 until she announced her retirement in 1997.
For “Meet the Press,” which expanded in 1992 from a halfhour to an hour, she attended national political conventions, traveled to Asia, South America, Europe, and the Middle East to secure interviews, and counted Castro, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Indira Gandhi, Robert Frost, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn among the most fascinating people she met on the job.
In years when staffing was minimal and less siloed by specific responsibility, she did promotional, bookin,g and research work, among other duties. She pored over newspapers and magazines for topics and people of interest to feature on the show. She attended news conferences to determine which journalists seemed most qualified and comfortable asking questions of those in power — and, after their debuts, privately rated them VG for very good, G for good and X if they bombed.
To maintain good relationships, Mrs. Dukert sent handwritten thank-you notes to most of those who appeared on the show, attached to a printed copy of the transcript as a courtesy.
Spivak praised her “superb” judgment and tact in handling guests, who ranged from readily available (then-senator John F. Kennedy and consumer activist Ralph Nader) to many who were decidedly harder to get.
She once flew to Lebanon and was raced by a non-Englishspeaking driver to a darkened apartment in Beirut to produce a segment with Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat, who kept machine-gunwielding guards in the room.
Mrs. Dukert was, by all accounts, a calming but vivacious presence in a high-pressure environment filled with all the usual crisis moments of network news.
In 1986, she was part of NBC’s negotiations with Libyan strongman Moammar Gaddafi, who demanded a two-way TV feed so he would not be at a disadvantage by not being able to see his questioner during a scheduled interview. Mrs. Dukert said such a request was seldom if ever made, even by other heads of state, because of the extraordinary cost and the difficulty of arranging the physical setup at such a distance.
Even after NBC conceded to his demand, Gaddafi never showed up and left the program in a pinch. Mrs. Dukert found three Libyan experts to substitute and arranged for them to be sped to the set with minutes to go before airtime, losing the news value of Gaddafi but saving the show from the embarrassment of empty chairs.
“Apparently, there was a fight between two aides, and we were on the side of the one who lost,” Mrs. Dukert later recounted to the Tulsa World. “Gaddafi owes us a lot of money for that one.”
Betty Ann Cole was born in Muskogee, Okla., on May 9, 1927, and grew up around the state and in Springfield, Mo., for her father’s work as a mechanical foreman on oil pipelines.
Her interest in journalism grew out of watching movie stars Katharine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell portray independent-minded reporters in 1940s films such as “Woman of the Year” and “His Girl Friday.” Hollywood, she told the Television Academy Foundation, “influenced me that there was no reason a woman needed to keep house all the time.”
She met her future husband, Joseph Dukert, in 1967 when both were attending the Republican governors conference in Palm Beach, Fla. — she for her TV work and he for his job as GOP state chairman for Maryland. They were married from 1968 until his death in 2020.