CBS News Veteran Roger Mudd, Who Derailed a Kennedy With One Question, Dead at 93
Roger Mudd, the longtime CBS News political correspondent who famously helped sink Edward Kennedy’s White House ambitions by asking in an interview why the senator wanted to be president, leaving the candidate…
Roger Mudd, the longtime CBS News political correspondent who famously helped sink Edward Kennedy’s White House ambitions by asking in an interview why the senator wanted to be president, leaving the candidate flustered, died on Tuesday at age 93.
Mudd, who covered politics and national affairs at CBS for two decades before working at NBC News, PBS and the History Channel, died at his home in McLean, Virginia, of complications from kidney failure, according to a CBS News statement.
Mudd reported on some of the biggest stories in Washington, his hometown, during the 1960s and ’70s, including passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 assassination, the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974.
But he became best known for his 1979 interview with Kennedy in an hour-long profile of the prominent liberal senator from Massachusetts as Kennedy prepared to announce his bid to challenge Democratic President Jimmy Carter for their party’s 1980 presidential nomination.
Kennedy, then heir to one of the most prominent U.S. political dynasties, appeared awkward and unsure through much of the interview but came off as flummoxed when Mudd posed a simple, straightforward question: “Why do you want to be president?”
The senator’s halting, rambling reply was later seen as pivotal to dooming his presidential prospects. Carter defeated Kennedy for the nomination before losing the general election to Republican Ronald Reagan. Kennedy, who died in 2009, never ran for the White House again.
Mudd, who also covered the 1968 presidential campaign of Kennedy’s older brother Robert F. Kennedy, was one of the last to interview him at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles moments before the senator was fatally shot there on June 5 after winning the Democratic presidential primary.
President John F. Kennedy, elder brother to Robert and Edward, was himself assassinated in Dallas in 1963.
AMONG CRONKITE’S ‘HORSEMEN’
Mudd, born in Washington, began his career in the 1950s as a newspaper and radio reporter in Richmond, Virginia, and later went to work at WTOP News, then the CBS affiliate in Washington.