Dukert was 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 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 spin-driven 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.