My Friend, Roger Mudd

A writer and journalist reminisces about his neighbor and childhood pal who became one of the foremost television news broadcasters of our time.
Many, many years ago, when we were kids, a couple of friends and I would hide in the bushes near where we swam to watch our pal trudge by. We would point and giggle at his thick ankles, as if we didn’t also have physical characteristics that anyone could find amusing.

Little could we imagine then that one day our pal would be among the most honored television news broadcasters of our time, winning awards and admiration from generations of Americans—a leader in objective and quality journalism, rarely found on TV today.

Roger Mudd broke into broadcasting at a Richmond, Virginia, radio station after graduate school and a short stretch of newspaper reporting. He was 25.

His first broadcast was a disaster. He always has had a keen and quirky sense of humor, accompanied by a deep and slightly raucous laugh. Reporting that day on the worsening illness of Pope Pius, he referred to “Pipe Poeus” and “the Pipe’s doctor and two Swish specialists.” Before he could be cut off the air, “I burst into laughter. Hitting what I thought was the cut-off switch, I kept laughing. What the audience heard for the next few minutes, however, were brief bursts of insane laughter followed by dead air.”

I know what Roger’s laugh is like. We were college chums. Roger played a starring role as the school doctor in a musical comedy another friend and I wrote and produced in 1949 at our university, Washington and Lee.

And I recall a car ride from our college back to Washington for summer vacation. Roger and I were in the back seat. My neckties were draped on a coat hanger beside Roger. He began to tie each one around my neck until I had a dozen ties with a gigantic knot in front. Roger was laughing boisterously at the size of the knot, calling me “goiter boy.”

Roger’s new book, The Place to Be, published by Public Affairs Books in New York, focuses on the heart of Roger’s legendary career, the Washington bureau of CBS News. The bureau was unequaled in its professionalism and competitiveness. The book chronicles actions and personalities of scores of reporters, editors, and producers, many of them household names over the past few generations.

From Virginia, Roger moved to Washington to join a CBS affiliate station, WTOP. While there, he covered Nikita Khrushchev’s 1959 tour of the U.S. On May 31, 1961, Roger became a correspondent in the Washington bureau of CBS. He followed in the footsteps of the famed Edward R. Murrow.

With the start of the 1960s, the elegant John F. Kennedy gave TV its first political superstar. Then came such events as the civil rights movement and man in space; TV news began to shrink the world with its satellites and videotape.

As Roger describes the passion to broadcast: “Getting on camera satisfied the primal urge of every television reporter to be seen. In television news, not to be seen is not to exist.”

What he declares in his book as the “seismic shift that moved television news ahead of the newspaper as the country’s main source of news” occurred on September 2, 1963, when the first daily half-hour news program, anchored by Walter Cronkite, was broadcast from CBS in New York. Previously, all the TV news broadcasts had been 15 minutes; a week later, NBC followed suit with its own half-hour news broadcast.

Roger built his reputation on “making sure I knew what I was talking about and being almost excessively well-informed” about any assignment he covered, which he says “gave my reporting a high degree of accuracy and authenticity” but “gave my editors and superiors at CBS a pain in the neck and elsewhere.”

He had already become a familiar face on America’s TV sets (and a recognized voice on CBS Radio as well) when he covered the historic Senate filibuster debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act as the network’s chief Congressional correspondent. The Senate welcomed TV long before the House of Representatives permitted live coverage. In his book, Roger quotes my father, who covered Congress for many years and whom he knew from being in our home as a young man. Dad had minimal praise for the Senate:

“Of course it’s a great body,” he said. “It’s just been in the water too long.”

Roger and his wife, E.J., were great friends of Bobby and Ethel Kennedy, and frequent visitors to their Hickory Hill home in Virginia, outside of Washington. Roger was covering Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign for the Democratic nomination when Kennedy was assassinated on June 5, 1968.

In his book, Roger writes that amidst the chaos and shrieking shortly after midnight at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, “I saw Mrs. Kennedy standing all alone. I put my arm around her waist…. She hugged me as if I were an oak tree—just something to cling to.”

By the ’70s, Roger was the weekend anchor for CBS Evening News, eventually becoming Walter Cronkite’s primary substitute anchor while doing documentaries and late-night specials. But it took CBS top management a while to get over a 1970 speech Roger made at the invitation of Washington and Lee University. In his speech, he defined TV as a “powerful means of communication but also a crude one, which tends to strike at the emotions, rather than the intellect…. The industry somehow still is unable or unwilling now to move beyond its preoccupation with razzle-dazzle…the quality has declined….”

He was called on the carpet; however, he was such an asset to CBS that management eventually suppressed its anger.

Roger made history and won a prized Peabody Award for his documentary that included his devastating interview with Sen. Ted Kennedy, who was then feeling his way toward running for president. Roger asked Kennedy, “Why do you want to be president?” Kennedy floundered and rambled in an embarrassing fashion, failing to give an answer.

Walter Cronkite, by 1978, had been the anchor of CBS Evening News for 15 years. He wanted to retire. The question was: Would his replacement be Roger or Dan Rather, the ambitious White House correspondent?

Management proposed a Rather-Mudd co-anchor. Roger turned it down. “I saw only trouble in harness with a man about whom I had professional misgivings,” Roger wrote. So, to the dismay of a host of respected journalists (and millions of viewers), Rather got the nod. Roger signed with archrival NBC the following summer, where he became co-anchor of NBC Nightly News, co-host of Meet the Press, and anchor of NBC’s American Almanac. In 1986, he joined Public Broadcasting’s MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour, followed by 10 years as documentary host of the History Channel.

Recently I ran across a letter from Roger, written seven years ago. In it he said that, counting children and grandchildren, “The Mudd tribe now numbers 21—four of ours and 11 of theirs. No divorces, no second marriages, nobody out of wedlock, none living in sin, as far as we know. God knows how it happened and how we got through it all.

“We do not drive by Western Avenue [where I once lived] without thinking of all the good times with the Trussell family.”

Not long ago, I had lunch with Roger and my brother, who was in Roger’s wedding. Our meal was at the famed Palm Restaurant, a gathering place for Washington movers and shakers, always packed at lunchtime.

My brother and I arrived first. But soon, Roger was led to our table. He strode in wearing a blue blazer and gray pants. Along the way, he was stopped briefly a couple of times for a handshake with men at other tables who knew him. Roger has aged relatively little over the years. He was full of conversation and witty as ever.

“I’ve been getting together with former TV newsmen now and then, talking about old times, the news of the day, and politics,” Roger told us. He mentioned how proud he was that his son Daniel (now CEO of Fannie Mae) was helping straighten out the housing market’s financial mess. Roger also said that he still had the habit of searching used bookstores for first editions of Southern writers. In that connection, he mentioned that he and his wife, E.J., had become fast friends several years ago with the late Eudora Welty, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Mississippi author.

As our luncheon meeting wound down, as usual, I kidded him about his thick ankles, and he chuckled. It has been a standing joke throughout our lengthy lives. Roger once told me, “In my contract, I have a clause that forbids any photograph of me that would show anything below my knees.”

“His first broadcast was a disaster. Reporting that day on the worsening illness of Pope Pius, he referred to ’Pipe Poeus‘ and ‘the Pipe’s doctor and two Swish specialists.’”

“In his speech, he defined TV as a ‘powerful means of communication but also a crude one, which tends to strike at the emotions, rather than the intellect.’”

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September 22, 2008