Television journalist remembers TV’s best

THE PLACE TO BE: WASHINGTON, CBS, AND THE GLORY DAYS OF TELEVISION NEWS

By Roger Mudd,

Public Affairs, $27.95, 432 pages, illus.

REVIEWED BY JOHN GREENYA

If you’re one of those embarrassingly young people, a demographic darling between the ages of 18 and 34, you’ll find this book interesting, but if you’re one of us older birds, you’ll find it fascinating. This is not to say you’ll find everything in it to your liking, or that you will find television anchor-journalist Roger Mudd’s authorial persona consistently attractive.

Nonetheless it remains a fascinating book because it does such a good job of recreating an era when television news was an important, and powerful, part of American life, a significant influence on the hearts and minds of citizens.

Interestingly, this is not the book Mr. Mudd originally set out to write. As he explains at the end, in the acknowledgments section, he started to write a full-blown memoir. Then, “A telephone call to one of Washington’s most successful lawyer-agents nearly caused me to abandon the project. He told me there was no market for a journalists’ [sic] memoirs unless I dished about the famous and powerful. Otherwise, he said, only the academic press would be interested.”

But then Mr. Mudd’s friend Jim Lehrer suggested he approach Peter Osnos, founder and editor of Public Affairs Press here in Washington. Mr. Osnos, a former star reporter himself, told Mr. Mudd, “Everybody knows what’s happened to the networks. Why don’t you write about that great Washington bureau you were part of?”

“Oh, my God!,” writes the author. “There it was, handed to me.”

And what good advice that turned out to be, as the result is a highly entertaining while at the same time highly informative popular history of what was indeed a great Washington news bureau and a proud extension of what the iconic Edward R. Murrow had created at CBS over the previous decades.

Roger Mudd has had a distinguished career in television news, which he came to after several years as a print reporter in the South. Most recently he’s been the main anchor for the History Channel, but he’s best known for his dogged reporting of the news, mostly through the prism of politics, for CBS from 1961 to 1980. As the network’s congressional correspondent, his beat was Capitol Hill, where he covered all the big stories of those tumultuous decades, at one point broadcasting live three times each day from the steps of the U.S. Capitol during the Senate filibuster debate over the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

From the summer of 1973 to what was for him a very fateful day in November of 1980 Mr. Mudd was the summer substitute and later the weekend anchor sitting in for the venerable Walter Cronkite, and was generally considered his heir apparent. But in November of 1980, CBS announced that it would be Dan Rather, not Roger Mudd, who would take over for Cronkite as anchor of the CBS Nightly News. The network offered Mr. Mudd a variety of prizes for coming in second, but the disappointment was too great and Roger Mudd, the CBS stalwart, decamped for NBC, where, he admits, he never really felt at home.

When Cronkite retired, Mr. Mudd could have lobbied for the job, but that wasn’t his style: “As the stiff, unbending son of a stiff, unbending father I had always been unwilling to sell myself … ”

And besides that, he was ambivalent about being a network anchor. He writes, “Anchors are created personages, public personages, promoted by the network publicists as authoritative, informed, trustworthy, and, above all, likeable. They are hood ornaments for their companies … Of course, the money was beyond belief, the fame and recognition were vast and almost instantaneous, and the thrill of being first with breaking news or running the competition into the ground was exhilarating.”

Despite his anger and angst over the “We’re going to go with Dan” decision by his beloved CBS, Roger Mudd manages to rise above it and do a very good job of chronicling the major events of the 1960s and 1970s and the CBS newsmen and women who reported them. Daniel Schorr, Lesley Stahl, Dan Rather, Connie Chung, Eric Sevaried, Bob Schieffer — they’re all here and in action during the Kennedy years, the war in Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers, and Watergate, among other important stories. It’s a mosaic of history as seen by one of the stars of the era, a man who has won five Emmys, a Peabody and the Joan Shorenstein Award for Distinguished Washington Reporting.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that Mr. Mudd didn’t exactly discard all of the “highly successful lawyer-agent’s” advice, as he seems unable to describe some of his former colleagues without dishing just a little bit. He compliments the person, then gets in a jab, and then covers it with another compliment. Of Dan Rather when he first joined the bureau, after complimenting him on his sense of humor, Mr. Mudd writes, “But for all of that, Rather was taut, tightly-wound, and not quite sure of who or what he wanted to be.” Next he mentions his good looks and his effect on women, but then adds, “Both his background and his education were meager.”

Of the later, now-famous Rather, he writes, “In a Hearst magazine piece on the historical figures television journalists would most like to interview, Walter Cronkite said Hitler, Tom Brokaw said Jesus Christ, Connie Chung said Greta Garbo, I said Robert E. Lee, and Barbara Walters said Jackie Kennedy. But Rather listed not only the pope, but also Gorbachev, the Prince and Princess of Wales, Shakespeare, Louis XIV, Queen Elizabeth, and Freud.”

On the last page, he describes what he obviously considers to have been the best news bureau ever. “It was a rare combination of principled leadership at the top; talented and honest journalists; dedicated and skilled producers, editors, photographers, and couriers; and all of us locked in on stories unequalled for their importance, their drama, and their violence …

“Even during the six years I spent at NBC, trying my best to beat CBS, there was always a little hitch, perhaps a slight choke, in saying, ’I’m Roger Mudd, NBC News, Washington,’

“I had never truly ceased being a CBS man.

“It was, indeed, the place to be.”

John Greenya is a Washington-area writer.