Megan Ruth Marshack

Megan Ruth Marshack, associated around the world with the death of former Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller, died October 2, 2024 of liver and kidney failure. She was 70 years old. 

Marshack was the assistant press secretary for the Vice-President in 1976, his last year in public office. Upon his return to private life in New York, she continued as deputy press secretary along with other assignments: working as the director of his art collection, coordinating the related book series and reproductions. She also assisted in projects involving international ventures. 

After Rockefeller suffered a fatal heart attack in 1979, she returned to her career in broadcasting. Marshack worked for CBS News until 1998, including producing at the network’s television news syndication unit covering the Sarajevo Winter Olympics in 1984, the trial of the attempted assassin of Pope John Paul II and scores of domestic stories. She was the producer of “Memories of Vietnam” with the late CBS correspondent Ed Bradley: a documentary of reminiscences from cameramen, soundmen, producers and reporters ten years after the fall of Saigon. 

During two stints at WCBS-TV Marshack produced stories from a line-of-march perspective of balloon captains at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade to unprecedented annual coverage of the Central Park Easter Egg roll. She was the lead “crash and burn” hard-news producer at 11 p.m. for several years.

Before coordinating a feature story on the 1986 opening of the Freud Museum in London, Marshack became interested in the dynamics of psychoanalysis. She audited scientific meetings at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and became a close friend of Leo Stone, M.D., a beloved analyst, and his wife Marta. Marshack also worked as the staff writer for The American Psychoanalyst, a publication of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

Even before her graduation from California State University, Northridge in 1975, Marshack embarked on her first love, covering Presidential politics. She was in the Western White House press room when Richard Nixon’s lead Watergate attorney James St. Clair, announced the revelation of the “smoking gun” audio tape recordings that ultimately led to Nixon’s resignation. She subsequently covered successor Gerald Ford on his trips to the West Coast, including assassination attempts on the president in Sacramento and San Francisco. She later said she was supremely fortunate at the time to be mentored by such veteran White House correspondents as Helen Thomas, James Deakin, Jerry Landay and Peter Lisagor.

Marshack majored in Ancient Near Eastern History and Modern European History and minored in Cultural Geography and Journalism. She wrote for every newspaper at every school she attended and was a member of the national journalism fraternity Sigma Delta Chi. She began her broadcasting career as a freelancer for Pacifica Radio covering the Patty Hearst kidnapping. She continued as an on-air reporter and newswriter at KGIL and KFWB in Los Angeles before working for Associated Press Radio in LA and then Washington, DC.

On assignment covering a 1975 Rockefeller news conference in Los Angeles, Marshack was told to get a comment about the woeful financial bail-out situation for New York City (Daily News headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead”.) With time running out, and Rockefeller, the former governor of New York, who had an intense involvement with Latin America answering questions in Spanish, Marshack broke in; beginning, “Señor Vice Presidente …” Rockefeller paused, responding, “Un momento, por favor.”

“No, ahora, por favor,” Marshack demanded. “Si?” asked Rockefeller graciously.

“Now about New York City,” Marshack continued in English. The room of reporters broke up in laughter. Marshack got her quote and apologized for interrupting as she and Rockefeller walked out of the news conference together. She wound up covering many of the Vice-President’s appearances headlining Bicentennial events in Washington and was granted a farewell radio interview when Rockefeller was not selected by President Ford to run on the 1976 ticket. Weeks later Rockefeller offered her a job.

Marshack was born on Halloween, 1953 and was adopted by Sidney Robert and Credwyn Patricia Marshack. She is survived by her younger brother, Jon, a water quality scientist with the California State Water Boards (retired), and his husband, The Rev. Rik Rasmussen.

Marshack left New York in 1998 and met her late husband, Edmond Madison Jacoby, Jr., a journalist and editor, in Placerville, CA when they both worked for a local newspaper. They were married in August 2003 at the county’s Main Street Courthouse. Marshack covered many proceedings at that courthouse, where she was declared by both prosecutors and defense attorneys as a fair and even-handed reporter always eager to learn more about the intricacies of the law. The Superior Court judge who performed the wedding ceremony once commented that Marshack “never got a ‘three-strikes’ case completely right, but never made the same mistake twice.”

Marshack always viewed journalism as a chronic illness inflamed by the insatiable itch of curiosity. She warned students about the vicissitudes of the lifestyle saying, “If there is anything else in the world you can think of to do, do it.”

She was uneasy with the e-universe, worried there was not enough time to triple check information and provide cogent, responsible, timely, accurate reporting.

She treasured her professional colleagues Ralph Paskman, Dallas Townsend, Douglas Edwards, David Buksbaum, Mario Biasetti, Giorgio Minoprio, Vito Monaco, Barry Weiss, Eddie Galorenzo, Laurie Nadel, Jan Sokota, and camera crews, film and videotape editors around the world.

She loved live theatre, loved tasting new and classic food (but never forgot her roots, fighting the first Iraq war in the Channel 2 newsroom on ten-ingredients lo mein), and was a voracious, eclectic reader.

Her bibles included copies of “Advise and Consent”, a gift she religiously re-read every year from the time she received it as a teenager; “Charlotte’s Web”, “Wind in the Willows”, and the Harry Potter series.

Marshack asked that there not be a memorial or formal funeral services. “Kiss today goodbye, the sweetness and the sorrow,” she would recite lyrics from “A Chorus Line”, “Wish me luck, the same to you… (But I) won’t forget, can’t regret what I did for love.”