Roger Mudd Veteran Newsman for CBS and NBC Dies at 93

Once considered Walter Cronkite's heir apparent, he was on the scene when Robert Kennedy was killed and later asked Ted Kennedy what seemed to be a routine question. Roger Mudd, the Peabody Award-winning journalist who spent a quarter-century at CBS News and NBC News and came close to becoming a No. 1 network anchorman — not that he wanted that, anyway — has died. He was 93. Mudd died Tuesday of complications from kidney failure at his home in McLean, Virginia, his son Jonathan Mudd told The Washington Post. Mudd joined CBS News in 1961 and served as a congressional and national affairs correspondent and as a regular substitute for Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News. When the famed anchorman retired and Dan Rather was selected to replace him, a humiliated Mudd exited in 1980 for NBC, where he was chief Washington correspondent, then co-host of the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw for a little more than a year."Being an anchorman is probably one of the dullest jobs there is if what you are really interested in is reporting … it's a performing job," a reflective Mudd said in a 2011 interview for the website The Interviews: An Oral History of Television. "For me, it was a misalliance with what I wanted to do."A native of Washington, D. C., Mudd covered every national political convention, as well as each national election, from 1960 through 1990. He also was an essayist and correspondent for PBS' MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour from 1987-92 and a host of History Channel programs from the network's 1995 launch through 2004."All of us at A+E Networks mourn the loss of Roger Mudd," said its president Paul Buccieri, in a statement. "Roger was our first on-air anchor in the early days of The HISTORY Channel. We will be forever grateful for his leadership and enormous contributions which helped build The HISTORY Channel brand. He had a remarkable, award-winning career in television and we are very proud to be a part of his legacy. Our deepest sympathies are with his family."Covering a presidential campaign appearance by Robert Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, Mudd cleared the way for Ethel Kennedy to kneel beside her wounded husband after he was shot. He had just concluded a "lively, funny" interview with the candidate, then spent hours staked out at Central Receiving Hospital until RFK was pronounced dead. The veteran journalist also was known for "The Roger Mudd Question" — a simple "Why do you want to be president? — posed to Robert's brother, Ted Kennedy, during a 1979 CBS Reports documentary as the senator was gearing up to challenge Jimmy Carter for the 1980 Democratic nomination. Mudd, accompanied by CBS execs Howard Stringer and Andy Lack, went to Cape Cod for the Kennedy interview.