After Meet The Press
While still moderating Meet the Press, Rountree also hosted Keep Posted, a discussion program for the DuMont TV network (renamed The Big Issue after The Saturday Evening Post withdrew its sponsorship) from 1951 through 1954. In 1953, she sold her shares of Meet the Press and The Big Issue to Spivak for $125,000, reportedly after a coin-toss, and left her job at Meet the Press. She returned to television in the summer of 1956 as the moderator of Press Conference (later retitled Martha Rountree’s Press Conference), which was similar in format to Meet the Press. In the 60s, she served as Washington correspondent for New York's WOR radio and other stations.
In 1965, Rountree founded the Leadership Foundation, a conservative, non-profit, public-affairs organization in Washington, DC. She was a member of the National Press Club (founded 1908) and the Women's National Press Club (founded 1919).
Her first marriage was to Albert N. Williams, Jr. in 1941. The marriage lasted seven years and ended in divorce in 1948. In 1952, she married Oliver M. Presbrey, an advertising-agency executive.
She covered national conventions in the 1950s and 1960s, appeared as a guest on the Phil Donahue television talk show, led a national campaign in support of school prayer and testified before the 1988 Republican National Convention's Platform Committee. A popular Washington hostess, she included many cabinet members, members of Congress and their wives among her friends.
Martha founded Leadership Foundation, a 501(c)3 entity (educational), and Leadership Action, a 501(c)4 entity (lobbying), located on MacArthur Boulevard, in Cabin John, MD - near her home on Comanche Court in Bethesda, MD in the suburbs of Washington, DC where she lived with her husband Ollie Presbrey.
The board of directors and advisory board of Leadership Foundation included some of the leading political figures of her era.
The foundation published the Leadership Action Alert political newsletter which was mailed on a regular basis to its thousands of members across the country. It also served as the umbrella foundation for special projects, such as the National Center for Pan-American Studies (NCPAS), a group chaired by Joseph Quinn, which created a political youth leadership exchange program between students in Latin America and the United States. The NCPAS was a member group of the IYY Commission (International Youth Year, a UN sponsored program) as well as a participant in the White House Working Group on Central America. Martha's relationship with the Reagan White House was a close one.
In her later years, Martha's vision had grown quite feeble but she never let on. Only her closest friends were aware that her many years in the bright klieg lights of television had taken its toll on her own physical vision (by the mid 1980s she was practically blind), but still her sense of patriotism and heart-felt "vision" of a greater America remained very strong. Her activities with Leadership Foundation served as the final chapter in her long life. In the end of her life, though, her many beautiful memories of famous people and world changing events, were slowly taken away from her.
Martha Rountree won a Peabody Award for her role as co-founder and producer of "Meet the Press". The award, while small in actual size, was framed and kept in a place of honor on the wall next to her desk, at Leadership Foundations headquarters.
Rountree died in Washington, DC, from complications of Alzheimer's disease aged 87.
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