Roger Mudd Biography

}}

Roger Mudd (born February 9, 1928) is a U.S. television journalist and broadcaster, most recently as the primary anchor for The History Channel. Previously, Mudd was weekend and weekday substitute anchor of CBS Evening News, co-anchor of the weekday NBC Nightly News, and hosted NBC's Meet the Press, and NBC's American Almanac television newsmagazine. Mudd is the recipient of the Peabody Award, the Joan Shorenstein Award for Distinguished Washington Reporting, and five Emmy Awards.

Early life and career

Mudd was born in Washington, D.C. His father, John Kostka Dominic Mudd, was the son of a tobacco farmer and worked as a map maker for the United States Geological Survey, and his mother, Irma Iris Harrison, was the daughter of a wheat farmer and worked as a lieutenant for the Army Nursing Corps and also as a nurse at the physiotherapy ward in the Walter Reed Hospital, where she met Roger's father. Roger Mudd received a B.A. from Washington and Lee University in 1950 (where one of his classmates was author Tom Wolfe) and a Master's degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1953. He is a member of Delta Tau Delta International Fraternity.

He began his journalism career in Richmond, Virginia as a reporter for The Richmond News Leader and for radio station WRNL. At the News Leader, he worked at the rewrite desk during spring 1953 and became a summer replacement on June 15 that year. The News Leader ran its first story with a Mudd byline on June 19, 1953. At WRNL, Mudd did the daily noon newscast. In his memoir The Place to Be, Mudd describes an incident from his first day at WRNL in which he laughed hysterically on-air after mangling a news item about the declining health of Pope Pius XII. Because Mudd failed to silence his microphone properly, an engineer intervened. WRNL later gave Mudd his own daily broadcast, Virginia Headlines. In the fall of 1954, Mudd enrolled in the University of Richmond School of Law but dropped out after a semester.

WTOP News

In the late 1950s, Mudd moved to Washington, DC to become a reporter with WTOP News, the news division of the radio and television stations owned by Post-Newsweek. Although WTOP News was a local news department, it covered many national stories. At first Mudd did the 6 a.m. newscast for WTOP and did local news segments on the local TV program Potomac Panorama. In the fall of 1956, Mudd hosted the first newscast he wrote independently, WTOP's 6 p.m. newscast that included a weekly commentary piece, all without "the constraints of the wire service vocabulary". Mudd produced a half-hour TV documentary in summer 1957 advocating the need for a third airport in the Baltimore-Washington Metropolitan Area. In September that year, Mudd conducted his first live TV studio interview. The interview was with Dorothy Counts, a black teenage girl who suffered racial harassment at her all-white high school in Charlotte, North Carolina. WTOP replaced Don Richards with Mudd for its 11 p.m. newscast in March 1959.

CBS News

CBS News was located on the third floor of WTOP's studios at 40th and Brandywine in NW Washington. Mudd quickly came to the attention of CBS News and moved "downstairs" to join the Washington bureau on May 31, 1961. For most of his career at CBS, Mudd was a Congressional correspondent. He also was anchor of the Saturday edition of CBS Evening News and frequently substituted on the weeknight broadcasts when anchor Walter Cronkite was on vacation or working on special assignments. During the Civil Rights Movement, Mudd anchored coverage of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom for CBS. On November 13, 1963, CBS broadcast documentary Case History of a Rumor, in which Mudd interviewed Rep. James Utt (Republican of Santa Ana, California) about a rumor Utt spread that Africans were working with the United Nations to take over the U.S. Utt sued CBS in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York for libel, but the court dismissed the case.

Mudd also covered numerous political campaigns. He was paired with co-anchor Robert Trout in the 1964 political convention anchor booth, temporarily displacing Walter Cronkite, in an unsuccessful attempt to match the popular NBC Huntley–Brinkley anchor team. He covered the 1968 Presidential campaign of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and was in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when Kennedy was shot on June 5, 1968.

Mudd hosted the seminal documentary The Selling of the Pentagon in 1971. He was a candidate to succeed Walter Cronkite as anchor of the CBS Evening News. Despite substantial support for Mudd within the ranks of CBS News, network management gave the position to Dan Rather after the longtime White House and 60 Minutes correspondent threatened to leave the network and sign a contract with ABC News.

Ted Kennedy interview

Mudd is perhaps best remembered for an interview he conducted with Senator Edward M. Kennedy for a November 4, 1979 CBS special, Teddy, which aired three days before Kennedy officially announced his challenge of President Jimmy Carter for the 1980 Democratic Presidential nomination. In addition to questioning Kennedy about the Chappaquiddick incident, Mudd asked, "Senator, why do you want to be president?" Kennedy's stammering answer which has been described as "incoherent and repetitive" as well as "vague, unprepared" raised serious questions about his motivation in seeking the office, and marked the beginning of the sharp decline in Kennedy's impressive poll numbers. Carter defeated Kennedy 50% to 38% in the Democratic primary vote. Although the Kennedy family refused any further interviews with Mudd, the interview helped strengthen Mudd's reputation as a leading political reporter. Broadcaster and blogger Hugh Hewitt and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson have used the term "Roger Mudd moment" to describe a self-inflicted disastrous encounter with the press by a presidential candidate.

NBC News

In 1980, after being turned down in favor of Dan Rather to succeed Cronkite as weeknight anchor of the CBS Evening News, Mudd chose to leave CBS News and accepted an offer to join NBC News. He co-anchored NBC Nightly News from April 1982 until September 1983, when Tom Brokaw took over as sole anchor. From 1984 to 1985, he was co-moderator of NBC's Meet the Press with Marvin Kalb, and later served as co-anchor with Connie Chung on two NBC news magazines, American Almanac and 1986.

PBS and The History Channel

From 1987 to 1992, Mudd was an essayist and political correspondent with the MacNeil–Lehrer Newshour on PBS. He was a visiting professor at Princeton University and Washington and Lee University from 1992 to 1996. Mudd was also a primary anchor for over ten years with The History Channel, where many of his programs were often repeated in reruns. He retired from full-time broadcasting in 2004, yet remains involved with documentaries for The History Channel.

Memoir

Mudd's memoir, The Place to Be: Washington, CBS, and the Glory Days of Television News, was released on March 24, 2008.

Personal

Mudd was married to the former E. J. Spears of Richmond, Virginia, who died in 2011. They had three sons and a daughter: Daniel, CEO of Fortress Investment Group LLC and former CEO of Fannie Mae, singer and songwriter Jonathan Mudd, author Maria Mudd Ruth, and Matthew. He has eleven grandchildren. His family is indirectly related to Samuel Mudd, the doctor who was imprisoned for aiding and conspiring with John Wilkes Booth after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He resides in McLean, Virginia.

Mudd has been active as a Trustee of the Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges, with which he helped to establish its popular "Ethics Bowl," featuring student teams from Virginia's private colleges debating real-life cases involving ethical dilemmas. He is also a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery and author of the memoir The Place to Be: Washington, CBS, and the Glory Days of Television News.

On December 10, 2010 Former CBS, NBC, and PBS newsman Mudd donated $4 million to his alma mater, Washington and Lee University, to establish the Roger Mudd Center for the Study of Professional Ethics and to endow a Roger Mudd Professorship in Ethics. "For 60 years," he says, "I've been waiting for a chance to acknowledge Washington and Lee's gifts to me. Given the state of ethics in our current culture, this seems a fitting time to endow a center for the study of ethics, and my university is its fitting home."