Betty Cole Dukert, who began her career in Washington as a secretary in the 1950s and later became the top producer of NBC News’ weekly public affairs program “Meet the Press,” died March 16 at her home in Bethesda, Md. . 96.
Her late husband’s niece Barbara Dukert Smith said the cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease.
In her 41 years on ”Meet the Press,” a Sunday show on NBC’s schedule, Ms. Duckert booked politicians, diplomats, foreign dignitaries, cultural figures and heart surgeons to be interviewed by a moderator and a panel of reporters. looked for the most qualified reporters for the panel. and research the topics to be discussed.
“He was the main point of contact on Capitol Hill for the show,” said Betsy Fischer Martin, who started at “Meet the Press” as an intern and became the program’s executive producer in 2002. “He was constantly working the phones. It wasn’t a time when you could send an email to shut someone down.”
As she rose through the ranks of “Meet the Press,” Ms. Duker worked 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 met anyone who is nicer to work with, more intelligent and whose judgment and tact are so wonderful,” Mr. Spivak told the Missouri newspaper The Springfield Leader and Press in 1970.
For much of her time on “Meet the Press,” which premiered in 1947, Ms. Duker was something of a rarity: a woman in a top producing position on a major network news program that had no permanent female anchor. (The program didn’t until Kristen Welker succeeded Chuck Todd last year.) In contrast, on “Face the Nation” on CBS, a competitor to “Meet the Press,” Lesley Stahl served as host from 1983 to 1991.
“Betty was such a good, kind person and the ‘keeper of the flame’ for ‘Meet the Press,'” Mr. Wallace, the show’s host from 1988 to 1989, said in a statement. But, he added, “behind the kindness, Betty was fiercely competitive. Even after decades on the show, she’d fight for a guest like a 25-year-old booker. Important politicians in Washington knew that Betty’s crossing was dangerous.”
In 1976, Ms. Duckert and a “Meet the Press” crew flew to Beirut, Lebanon, to tape Mr. Monroe’s interview with Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. She was one of two women in an apartment with about 15 men, some of whom carried large rifles to protect Mr. Arafat. The other woman passed around cookies and orange juice.
“I just sat and looked around the room and the machine guns and the orange juice and thought, ‘What a strange world we live in,'” Ms. Duker told the Television Academy in 2003.
When the interview ended, Mr. Arafat presented Ms. Duckert with an embroidered black cotton shirt that had been made in a refugee camp. “I felt like I had to take it,” he added. “I didn’t mean to offend him.”
While Mr. Arafat was cooperative, Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi was demanding and elusive. He was to be interviewed via satellite and asked NBC to pay for an expensive add-on: a two-way feed that would allow him to look directly at his interviewer. But he backed down just before the broadcast, forcing Ms. Duckert at the last minute to gather three experts to talk about Colonel Gaddafi at NBC’s Washington studio.
“Apparently, there was a fight between two aides and we were on the losing side,” he told The Tulsa World in 1986. “Gaddafi owes us a lot of money for that.”
Betty Ann Cole was born on May 9, 1927, in Muskogee, Okla. Her father, Irvin, was an engineer on an oil pipeline, a job that required him to move his family across the state and eventually to Springfield, Mo. Her mother, Ione (Bowman) Cole, ran the household.
Betty showed an early interest in journalism – influenced by the reporter characters played by Katharine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell in the 1940s films “Woman of the Year” and “His Girl Friday” – and wrote a fashion column for her high school newspaper.
After attending Lindenwood College for Women (now Lindenwood University) in St. Charles, Mo., and Drury College in Springfield, Mo., graduating from the University of Missouri with a degree in journalism in 1949.
He found work as a secretary and copywriter at a radio station in Springfield, then as an administrator at a local juvenile court, before moving to Washington. She was briefly a secretary at the Voice of America and 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 appeared as a production assistant.
In 1956, Mr. Spivak, creator and executive producer of “Meet the Press,” interviewed her for the position of associate producer. 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.
“It was fine,” he told the Television Academy, “except I got a little raise every year, from nothing to just over nothing. So it was a disadvantage.”
He took the job and was promoted to producer in 1975 when Mr. Spivak retired. ”She was the sole producer for a while,” Ms. Martin said, until Barbara Cochran became executive producer, over Ms. Dukert, in 1985. Ms. Dukert was named senior producer in 1992 and executive producer in 1997, the year retired. .
In 1967, Mrs. Duckert met her future husband, Joseph Duckert, who was then the Republican chairman of Maryland, when they both attended the Republican Governors Conference in Palm Beach, Florida. They married the following year.
Mr. Duckert died in 2020. No immediate family members survive.
From the beginning of her career, Ms. Duker said, she preferred working behind the scenes to reporting. From her perch, she helped develop a “Meet the Press” guest list, including President John F. Kennedy. Eleanor Roosevelt, the former first lady. Golda Meir, when she was Israel’s foreign minister. Fidel Castro, the leader of Cuba. President Anwar Sadat of Egypt; and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel.
Another important personality, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. appeared on “Meet the Press” several times.
“He was just an overwhelming presence,” Ms. Duker told the Television Academy, adding that he had a calming effect on those around him.
One Sunday Dr. King was on a remote feed from Chicago while other civil rights leaders—including Kwame Ture (then known as Stokely Carmichael), the ardent Black Power activist and champion whose radicalism worried Dr . King – were in the Washington studio.
“Just before we went on the air,” Ms. Duker recalled, “when we were testing the microphones in Chicago and Washington, Dr. King said, ‘Now, Stokely, you behave yourself.’
