One of television's key pundits during the 1990s and 2000s, Tim Russert entered broadcast journalism from the political arena, where he held sway as press secretary to multi-term New York governor Mario Cuomo and chief of staff to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynahan, also of New York State. Russert shifted careers in 1984 by joining NBC News as a regular correspondent, and broke new ground in the venue of American television by featuring one of the first-ever network broadcast appearances of the Pope (filmed live from Vatican City in the mid-'80s), and by emceeing week-long broadcasts from international locations including China and Oceania. Russert is perhaps best known, however, for his 17-year tenure (1991-2008) emceeing the said network's Sunday-morning discussion program Meet the Press, in which he interviewed political movers and shakers with an unusual degree of bluntness and directness. Russert died from a heart attack in 2008, at the age of 58.