Over four decades, she rose to executive producer and helped secure interviews with presidents and other leaders in politics and the world of ideas.
Betty Cole Dukert, who spent four decades as a behind-the-scenes 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.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.
For “Meet the Press,” which expanded in 1992 from a half-hour 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 encountered on the job.
She once flew to Lebanon and was raced by a non-English-speaking driver to a darkened apartment in Beirut to produce a segment with Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat, who kept machine-gun-wielding guards in the room. Betsy Fischer Martin, a former executive producer of “Meet the Press,” called Mrs. Dukert the “steady hand” as the show expanded and evolved under Russert.
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.”
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