Roger Mudd, legendary political reporter for CBS News, died at 93

Roger Mudd, the CBS journalist whose political reporting and replacement anchored in “The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite” made him a familiar and respected face for tens of millions of Americans in the 1960s and 1970s, died on Tuesday of complications kidney failure home in McLean, Virginia. He was 93 years old.

“Roger was a hero in the CBS News office in Washington,” said Susan Zirinsky, president and senior executive producer at CBS News. “He was a journalist of enormous integrity and character. He would not move if he believed he was right and would not compromise his ethical standards. He was an inspiration to all of us at the bureau. his in the DC newsroom – Roger was big, not just in his physical presence, but bigger than life. “

Mudd joined CBS News as a congressional correspondent in 1961 and was appointed a correspondent for national affairs in 1977.

On November 4, 1979, he had perhaps his biggest political interview and one of the most famous in presidential politics when he anchored and reported on “CBS REPORTS: Teddy”, an hour-long look at the Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

Mudd, with his concise interviewing style, addressed a very basic question that Kennedy was caught unprepared for: “Senator, why do you want to be president?” Kennedy rambled awkwardly in a public moment of weakness that interrupted his political momentum – he would lose the Democratic nomination for Jimmy Carter.

In another singular moment with Kennedy, Mudd was covering Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign and was one of the last to interview him at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, minutes before Kennedy was assassinated on June 5, 1968.

Mudd participated in other important CBS REPORTS documentaries, none greater than the award-winning Peabody “The Selling of the Pentagon”, a 1971 investigation that exposed the use of taxpayer-funded public relations by the U.S. Armed Forces to enhance its image and sell the Vietnam War. . The hard-hitting report infuriated the military’s friends in Congress, which held hearings and intimidated the documentary’s untranslated images.

This led to the appearance on television of CBS President Frank Stanton in front of Congress. He refused to produce the outtakes, comparing them to the printing of sacrosanct notebooks by reporters. Stanton won a significant victory for freedom of the press when the House voted not to consider him out of contempt.

The Washington Bureau of CBS News in the 1960s and 1970s was full of big names. Seventy-five percent of the United States television in use was tuned to the network’s three news every night, where tens of millions watched Eric Sevareid, Daniel Schorr, Marvin and Bernard Kalb, George Herman, Bob Schieffer, Lesley Stahl, Ed Bradley and Robert Pierpoint.

But none was bigger than Mudd. He reported and co-anchored political conventions, elections and eventually won his place as Walter Cronkite’s regular replacement.

He cut his teeth with stories from the early 1960s In the spring of 1964, Mudd transmitted 67-day reports on the Senate debate over the Civil Rights Bill. At that time, reporters were paid a salary, plus fees each time they appeared on the air. He later said that his salary went from $ 400 a week to $ 2,500.

Mudd soon started to lead his own broadcasts. He anchored “The CBS Evening News with Roger Mudd” on Saturdays from February 1966 to July 1973 and on Sundays from January 1970 to September 1971. All the while, he continued to report on Congress and politics and became known as one of the “leaders of Cronkite knights.”

Other major events he founded or reported on included triple Emmy coverage of Vice President Spiro Agnew’s resignation; Emmy-winning coverage of the George Wallace shooting; Memphis after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr .; and President Richard Nixon’s resignation speech. Mudd co-anchored Nixon’s inaugural coverage with Cronkite in 1969.

Mudd also reported on CBS News Specials, including “Busing” and “The Issue of Busing” in the spring of 1972, and “New Voices in the South,” in 1971. He helped explain the workings of Congress to young people, anchoring “The which is Congress “in 1974 and” What is the Senate? “in 1975.

In 1981, Mudd was considered the favorite to replace Cronkite. But Dan Rather, Mudd’s friend and rival, got the job. Mudd left for NBC News, where his former boss, the former head of CBS News Washington Bureau and then president of NBC News, Bill Small, joined him with Tom Brokaw to co-present “NBC Nightly News”.

He left NBC in 1987 for the PBS broadcast “The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour”, where he served as a political commentator and reporter. In 1992, he began teaching at Princeton and Washington and Lee Universities while working on The History Channel, from which he retired in 2004 after 10 years as its main on-air presenter.

In 2008, Mudd published his memoirs, “The Place to Be: Washington, CBS and the Glory Days of Television News” (Public Affairs). In an advertising interview with the Huffington Post, he was quoted as saying, “I am a man from CBS, no matter how many times you hear me say, ‘Roger Mudd, NBC News.'”

Roger Harrison Mudd was born on February 9, 1928, in Washington, DC. He received his undergraduate degree at Washington and Lee University in 1950 and his master’s degree in American history at the University of North Carolina in 1951. He was deceased by his 54-year-old wife, Emma Jeanne Spears Mudd, with whom he had four children, all which survived it: Daniel, Maria Mudd-Ruth, Jonathan and Matthew. He also left 14 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.