DIED. LAWRENCE SPIVAK, 93, pioneering TV interviewer; in Washington. The aggressive grilling of public officials now considered the norm for video journalism can be traced to Meet the Press, a no-holds-barred interview program introduced on radio, then transferred to television in the late '40s, where it remains the paradigm of Sunday-morning news shows. The Brooklyn-born Spivak originally intended Meet the Press as a promotion for his American Mercury magazine, but its refreshing confrontations with the powerful soon became phenomena unto themselves. In the '50s Meet the Press featured Whitaker Chambers insisting that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy, Thomas Dewey's 1950 revelation that he would not be running for the presidency and a Pentagon general's admission that the Soviets had developed a nuclear bomb. Spivak's tenacious questioning made him an object of admiration and fear among politicians until his retirement in 1975, by which time Meet the Press had long since been paid the ultimate compliment--a flood of imitators.