There’s an interesting irony in the long, productive life of Roger Mudd, the veteran broadcast journalist and newsreader who died last week at his home outside Washington, age 93.
The great failure of Mudd’s professional career was his inability to secure a permanent berth as a network anchorman, first at CBS and then at NBC. But in fact, that failure was a form of success. Mudd was quite good at reading news copy into a camera, but his true talent was in writing and reporting the news with consummate skill, a natural sense of distance and fair-mindedness, and charm and polish. For four decades, beginning in the early 1960s, there was no better network news correspondent in political Washington and no more wry, entertaining, or informative voice on television.
He spent the bulk of his career doing what he did best, and when his career ran into roadblocks, it was a sign of the coming decline of his industry overall.
A collateral descendant of Dr. Samuel Mudd, the Maryland physician who set John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, Roger Mudd was born and raised in Washington, D.C., where his father was a mapmaker for the U.S. Geological Survey and his mother was a nurse. After the Army, he was a classmate of Tom Wolfe’s at Washington and Lee University and earned a master’s degree in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Mudd’s progress as a broadcasting journalist was rapid. As a reporter at the Richmond News Leader, he was named director of its radio station and, in the late 1950s, returned to Washington to join the staff of the local CBS radio/television outlet, WTOP. In 1961, he became the CBS congressional correspondent and anchor of the CBS Evening News Saturday edition.
In the following two decades, his dry humor, Middle Atlantic tone, and mastery of the mysteries of Capitol Hill prompted the network to use him as a regular substitute for Walter Cronkite on the Evening News and to groom him as Cronkite’s successor. Mudd specialized in politics and campaigns. He co-anchored the 1964 Democratic National Convention, wrote and reported an influential documentary, The Selling of the Pentagon (1971), and, after leading the network’s Watergate coverage, was named the CBS News national affairs correspondent.
Then, in his early 50s, Mudd’s forward march came to a halt. When Cronkite retired in 1981, CBS News President William Leonard chose to replace him not with the laconic, even-handed Mudd but the partisan and melodramatic Dan Rather. The snub was a shock and disappointment to Mudd, who left CBS for its rival NBC. It was also a pivotal moment in the gradual decline of network news and the prestige of voice-of-god anchormen.
Worse still, for Mudd, his tenure at NBC was equally ill-fated. Expected to succeed its Nightly News anchorman John Chancellor, he was initially paired with Tom Brokaw in an effort to recapture the formula for the network’s popular Huntley-Brinkley Report. But it proved to be an awkward arrangement and unpopular with viewers. Brokaw, an NBC veteran, successfully elbowed his colleague aside, and Mudd later reflected on anchoring as “among the most boring jobs in television news,” transforming writers and reporters into “hood ornaments for their companies.”
In 1987, he left NBC for PBS and more congenial quarters as a correspondent, essayist, and resident wise man for The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.
Mudd is best remembered for his interview of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy on the eve of Kennedy’s campaign to wrest the 1980 Democratic nomination from President Jimmy Carter. In political folklore, the encounter is remembered as devastating to Kennedy, blighting and probably dooming his prospects, which may well be true. Given the current state of television news, however, it’s tempting to suppose that Mudd was determined to confront and embarrass Kennedy. But the interview, easily found on YouTube, is a master class in broadcast journalism: The questions were solely intended to inform viewers and elicited a series of rambling, incoherent, and self-destructive responses from Kennedy.
Roger Mudd made history by doing his job well.
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
