Television journalist remembers TV's best

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By John Greenya

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.