Longtime CBS broadcast journalist Roger Mudd dead at 93

MCLEAN, Va. — Roger Mudd, a longtime CBS News political correspondent, died Tuesday at his Virginia home, his son said. He was 93.

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Mudd died of complications from kidney failure in McLean, one of his sons, Jonathan Mudd, said.

Mudd spent almost 20 years covering Capitol Hill, political campaigns and corruption scandals for CBS News, The Washington Post reported. Mudd also reported on the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974, the newspaper reported.

“Roger was a hero in the CBS News Washington bureau,” said Susan Zirinsky, president and senior executive producer of CBS News. “He was a journalist of enormous integrity and character. He would not budge if he believed he was right and would not compromise his ethical standards. He was an inspiration to all of us in the bureau. On a personal note -- I sat directly across from him in the D.C. newsroom -- Roger was big, not just in his physical presence but he was larger than life.”

Mudd’s 1979 interview of Edward Kennedy derailed the Massachusetts senator’s presidential ambitions as he was preparing to challenge President Jimmy Carter for the 1980 Democratic nomination, the Post reported.

Kennedy was stopped cold when Mudd asked him directly, “Why do you want to be president?”

There was a long, awkward pause, and Kennedy’s answer gave viewers the impression that the senator was not prepared to become president, the Post reported.

Roger Harrison Mudd was born on Feb. 9, 1928, in Washington, the Post reported. The family was distantly related to Samuel A. Mudd, a Maryland doctor who treated John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg after Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln in 1865.

Mudd graduated from Washington and Lee University in 1950 and received a master’s degree in history in 1953 from the University of North Carolina. His first job in journalism was at the Richmond News-Leader and then at WRNL, a radio station owned by the newspaper.

Mudd joined CBS News in 1961 after a five-year stint at WTOP, the Post reported. He began as a congressional correspondent with the network and was named national affairs correspondent in 1977.

Mudd covered the 1968 presidential campaign of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and was one of the last to interview him at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, minutes before the candidate was assassinated on June 5, 1968, CBS News reported.

Mudd also reported on the Peabody award-winning “The Selling of the Pentagon,” a 1971 investigation that exposed the U.S. military’s use of taxpayer financed public relations to enhance its image and sell the Vietnam War, CBS News reported.

When Walter Cronkite stepped down as anchor of the “CBS Evening News” in 1980, Mudd was passed over for the job by fellow correspondent Dan Rather. Mudd would leave CBS for NBC, where in 1982 he became a co-anchor for the “NBC Nightly News” with Tom Brokaw.

NBC bought out Mudd’s contract in 1987, and he moved to PBS, where he became a correspondent for the “MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour,” the Post reported. He later worked as a host on the History Channel from1995 to 2004.

Mudd wrote about his career in a 2008 memoir, “The Place to Be.”

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