with David Gregory
Sundays 1:00PM-2:00PM
"Meet the Press," the longest-running program ever on network television, premiered on NBC-TV on November 6, 1947, with James A. Farley, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee and Franklin Roosevelt�s postmaster general, as its first guest. The show made its initial debut two years earlier as a radio program with Martha Rountree and Lawrence Spivak as producers. For almost as long as there has been television, there has been "Meet the Press."
NBC's Chief White House Correspondent, David Gregory, was named moderator of �Meet the Press on December 7, 2008. He is only the tenth person ever to be a permanent host of the program. He assumed the role from veteran NBC newsman Tom Brokaw, who had served as interim moderator after the untimely death of longtime moderator Tim Russert on June 13, 2008.
President John F. Kennedy once called �Meet the Press the fifty-first state. Since then, every man who has occupied the Oval Office has appeared on the program during his career, as has every vice president since Alben Barkley in 1952.
In addition to the commander-in-chief, �Meet the Press features interviews with all the key players in each presidential administration. Every Secretary of State from John Foster Dulles to Hillary Clinton and every Secretary of Defense from Robert McNamara to Robert Gates has appeared on the program.
Foreign policy has always been a staple of Meet the Press interviews. Some of the world leaders interviewed on the program include Fidel Castro, Francois Mitterrand, Indira Gandhi, David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Ferdinand Marcos, Jean Monnet, Mikhail Gorbachev, Anwar el-Sadat, Yitzhak Rabin, King Hussein of Jordan, Hamid Karzai, Pervez Musharraf, King Abdullah of Jordan, Tony Blair and Ghazi al-Yawar.
Meet the Press has always been an equal opportunity news program, with women playing a significant role right from the start. The co-creator of Meet the Press and the show's first moderator was noted journalist Martha Rountree. The first female guest was Elizabeth Bentley, a former Soviet spy, who was interviewed on September 12, 1948.
Meet the Press has since interviewed First Ladies Eleanor Roosevelt, Nancy Reagan, Rosalynn Carter, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Laura Bush. Other notable women appearing as guests over the years include Madeleine Albright, Shirley Temple Black, Shuttle Commander Eileen Collins, Shirley Chisholm, Elizabeth Dole, Marian Wright Edelman, Geraldine Ferraro, Jane Fonda, Indira Gandhi, Tipper Gore, Anita Hill, Barbara Jordan, Caroline Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, Janet Reno, Condoleezza Rice, Phyllis Schlafly, and Gloria Steinem.
(from www.msnbc.com)
