Roger Mudd, the legendary political reporter for CBS News, has passed away at the age of 93

Roger Mudd, the CBS journalist whose political coverage and substitute anchorage on “ The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite ” made him a familiar and respected face to tens of millions of Americans in the 1960s and 1970s, died Tuesday of complications from kidney failure at his home in McLean, Virginia. He was 93.

“Roger was a hero at the CBS News Washington bureau,” said Susan Zirinsky, president and senior executive producer of CBS News. “He was a journalist with tremendous integrity and character. He wouldn’t admit if he believed he was right and would not compromise his ethical standards. He was an inspiration to all of us at the agency. Personally – I was sitting right across the street. his in the newsroom in DC – Roger was great, not only in his physical presence, but he was bigger than life. ”

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

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

Mudd, with his concise interviewing, addressed a very basic question that Kennedy was not prepared for: “Senator, why do you want to be president?” Kennedy clumsily walked on at a public moment of weakness that halted his political momentum – he would lose the Democratic nomination to Jimmy Carter.

At another unique moment with a Kennedy, Mudd covered 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 major CBS REPORTS documentaries, none bigger than the Peabody award-winning “ The Selling of the Pentagon, ” a 1971 study that exposed the U.S. military’s use of taxpayer-funded public relations to embellish its image and sell the Vietnam War. The damning report infuriated the military’s friends in Congress, which held hearings and subpoenaed the documentary’s un-aired footage.

That led to CBS president Frank Stanton’s TV appearance before Congress. He refused to produce the outtakes and compared them to journalists’ sacred notebooks. Stanton took a major win for freedom of the press when the chamber voted not to disdain him.

The Washington Bureau of CBS News in the 1960s and 1970s was full of big names. Seventy-five percent of the US televisions in use were tuned into the network’s three newscasts every night, which saw tens of millions of Eric Sevareid, Daniel Schorr, Marvin and Bernard Kalb, George Herman, Bob Schieffer, Lesley Stahl, Ed Bradley and Robert Pierpoint.

But none were bigger than Mudd. He had reported and co-enshrined political conventions and elections and eventually earned his place as Walter Cronkite’s permanent deputy.

He cut his teeth in the stories of the early 1960s. In the spring of 1964, Mudd broadcasted reports for 67 days on the Senate debate on the Civil Rights Bill. In those days, reporters were paid a salary, plus allowances for each time they appeared on the air. He later said his salary went from $ 400 a week to $ 2,500.

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

Other major events he anchored or reported on included the triple Emmy-winning coverage of Vice President Spiro Agnew’s resignation; Emmy-winning coverage of the George Wallace shooting; Memphis in the aftermath of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr .; and President Richard Nixon’s speech. Mudd had anchored Nixon’s inaugural coverage along 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 youth, and entrenched “What Is Congress All About?” in 1974 and “What Is the Senate All About?” 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 old boss, former CBS News Washington Bureau chief and then NBC News president Bill Small, teamed up with Tom Brokaw to anchor “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 taking a job with The History Channel, where he retired in 2004 after 10 years as principal on-air host.

In 2008 Mudd published his memoir “The Place to Be: Washington, CBS and the Glory Days of Television News” (Public Affairs). In a publicity interview with the Huffington Post, he said, “I’m a CBS guy, no matter how many times you’ve heard me say, ‘Roger Mudd, NBC News’.”

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