Putin Before He Retreated to the Far End of the Table by Maureen Orth (Colombia)
Putin’s Character Was Clear Long Before He Retreated to the Far End of the Table By Maureen Orth (Colombia 1964-66) Vanity Fair Magazine March 4, 2022 • Today, the world sees Vladimir Putin from a distance, isolated at the end of a very long table. When I first met him, in September 2000, he was at a very different table, in a private room at New York’s 21 Club, at a dinner hosted by Tom Brokaw for 20 or so media luminaries. Brokaw had interviewed the recently elected Russian president for NBC a few months earlier. I was invited because I had just closed a lengthy profile of Putin for Vanity Fair, and also because my late husband, Tim Russert, was the anchor of NBC’s Meet the Press. The number one topic was why Putin had not interrupted his vacation when the Russian Kursk submarine sank, killing all 118 crew members. By then, Russians were fed up with . . .
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Thanks for the excellent article, Maureen. Having served in the mid-1990s in the Peace Corps in Russia, I witnessed the…