Top “Meet the Press” producer was rare woman in the room

Betty Cole Dukert, who began her career in Washington as a secretary in the 1950s and later became the top producer of the weekly NBC News public affairs program “Meet the Press,” died March 16 at her home in Bethesda, Md. She was 96.

Her late husband’s niece Barbara Dukert Smith said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.

In her 41 years at “Meet the Press,” a Sunday-morning fixture on the NBC schedule, Dukert booked politicians, diplomats, foreign dignitaries, cultural figures and heart surgeons to be interviewed by a moderator and a panel of journalists; sought out the most capable reporters for the panel; and researched the subjects to be discussed.

“She was the main point of contact on Capitol Hill for the show,” said Betsy Fischer Martin, who started on “Meet the Press” as an intern and became the program’s executive producer in 2002. “She worked the phones constantly. It wasn’t an era when you could send off an email to book someone.”

As she rose in the “Meet the Press” hierarchy, Dukert collaborated with a long list of moderators: Ned Brooks, Lawrence Spivak, Bill Monroe, Roger Mudd, Marvin Kalb, Chris Wallace, Garrick Utley and Tim Russert.

“I have never found anyone who is nicer to work with, more intelligent, and whose judgment and tact are so superb,” Spivak told The Springfield (Mo.,) Leader and Press in 1970.

For much of her time at “Meet the Press,” which premiered in 1947, Dukert was a rarity: a woman in a top production job at a major network news program that did not have a permanent female moderator. (The program did not have one until Kristen Welker succeeded Chuck Todd last year.) In contrast, at “Face the Nation” on CBS, a competitor of “Meet the Press,” Lesley Stahl served as moderator from 1983 to 1991.

“Betty was such a fine, gracious person and the ‘keeper of the flame’ for ‘Meet the Press,’” Wallace, the show’s moderator from 1988 to 1989, said in a statement. But, he added, “behind the gentility, Betty was fiercely competitive. Even after decades on the show, she would fight for a guest like a 25-year-old booker. Important Washington politicians knew that crossing Betty was perilous.”

In 1976, Dukert and a “Meet the Press” crew flew to Beirut to record Monroe’s interview with Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. She was one of two women in an apartment with about 15 men, some of them carrying large rifles to protect Arafat. The other woman passed around cookies and orange juice.

“I just sat looking around the room, at the machine guns and the orange juice, and thought, ‘What a strange world we live in,’” Dukert told the Television Academy in 2003.

When the interview ended, Arafat presented Dukert with an embroidered black cotton shirt that had been made in a refugee camp. “I felt I should take it,” she added. “I did not want to insult him.”

Betty Ann Cole was born on May 9, 1927, in Muskogee, Okla. Her father, Irvin, was a mechanical foreman on an oil pipeline, a job that required him to move his family around the state and eventually to Springfield, Mo. Her mother, Ione (Bowman) Cole, managed the home.

Betty showed an early interest in journalism — influenced by the reporter characters played by Katharine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell in early-1940s Hollywood films.

After attending Lindenwood College for Women (now Lindenwood University) in St. Charles, Mo., and Drury College in Springfield, she graduated from the University of Missouri with a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1949.

She was briefly a secretary at Voice of America then found secretarial work in a lobbying office for NBC and its parent company, RCA.

After a year, she was hired — again as a secretary — in the programming department of WRC-TV, the NBC station in Washington, where she moonlighted as a production assistant.

In 1956, Spivak, a creator and executive producer of “Meet the Press,” interviewed her for the associate producer job. She impressed him with her production experience and her willingness to take a new job without a raise to prove to him how much she wanted the position. “That was fine,” she told the Television Academy, “except that I had been getting a slight increase every year, from nothing to a little above nothing. So it was a handicap.”

She took the job and was promoted to producer in 1975, when Spivak retired.

In 1967, Dukert met her future husband, Joseph Dukert, who was then the Republican chairman of Maryland, when they attended the Republican Governors Conference in Palm Beach, Fla. They married in 1968. He died in 2020.