Roger Mudd, a probing TV journalist and network news anchor, dies at 93

Roger Mudd, a longtime CBS News political correspondent who reported on the Pentagon's profligate spending, whose interview with Ted Kennedy ended the senator's White House prospects and who briefly shared the anchor job at his onetime rival, NBC News, died March 9 at his home in McLean, Va. He was 93.

The cause was complications from kidney failure, said a son, Jonathan Mudd.

Mudd spent almost 20 years covering Capitol Hill, political campaigns and corruption scandals for CBS News. He did special reports on the Watergate scandal and its fallout, including the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974.

His 1979 interview of Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., was credited with crushing the senator's presidential ambitions just as he was preparing to challenge President Jimmy Carter for the 1980 Democratic nomination.

Kennedy awkwardly offered incomplete, rambling answers to basic questions about his family and personal life and was stopped cold when Mudd asked him directly: 'Why do you want to be president?”

There was a long, awkward pause before Kennedy could say a word. When Mudd asked what distinguished him from Carter, Kennedy did not provide substantive answers to fundamental questions, giving viewers the impression that the senator was ill-prepared for the job of commander in chief.

The interview remains one of the most devastating in political history. Kennedy - whose brother John was president and whose brother Robert was assassinated on the campaign trail - lost his bid for the nomination and never mounted a run for the presidency again.

For years, Mudd cultivated a straightforward, almost folksy manner on camera, and he was long considered the heir apparent at CBS to the venerable evening news anchor Walter Cronkite.

Mudd sat in the anchor chair on weekends and during Cronkite's vacations, but when CBS announced Cronkite's retirement in 1980, Mudd's onetime Washington-bureau colleague Dan Rather received the nod. Mudd quit the network for NBC, where he shared the anchor desk for a year with Tom Brokaw before being pushed aside in 1983.

By his own admission, Mudd's greatest strength was not at the anchor desk, but as a reporter covering elections and the halls of Congress.

Mudd joined the CBS Washington bureau in 1961 at a time when CBS was considered the premier network for news. He became nationally known for his coverage from the Capitol during a two-month filibuster of what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of the most significant pieces of civil rights legislation in history.

In 1968, Mudd covered the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy and was present at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when Kennedy was assassinated on June 5 that year.

After the shooting, he saw Kennedy's wife, Ethel, standing by herself. He put his arm around her waist and elbowed his way through the milling crowd, guiding her to her husband.

'She hugged me as if I were an oak tree - just something to cling to,” Mudd wrote in his 2008 memoir, 'The Place to Be.” 'I recall forcing some screaming, bellowing men to give way so that Ethel could reach the side of her dying husband.”

Mudd also became known at CBS as the host of in-depth investigations, which were once a common prime-time presence on the major networks. In 1971, he was the narrator and chief reporter of 'The Selling of the Pentagon,” which raised questions about extravagant military spending and the Pentagon's $30 million annual public-relations budget during the Vietnam War.

The broadcast was criticized by the Pentagon and hawkish politicians. A House committee called for an investigation - not of unchecked military spending but of CBS. Rep. Harley Staggers, D-W.Va., issued subpoenas to the network, demanding that it turn over its raw footage and other materials related to the documentary. CBS refused. Frank Stanton, the network's president, testified before a congressional panel and was threatened with a citation for contempt.

In the end, Congress backed down. 'The Selling of the Pentagon” came to be seen as a landmark achievement in TV investigative reporting. Mudd received one of his five Emmy Awards for the program, which also won the Peabody and George Polk awards for journalism.