Roger Mudd
Roger Harrison Mudd[1] (February 9, 1928 – March 9, 2021) was an American broadcast journalist who was a correspondent and anchor for CBS News and NBC News. He also worked as the primary anchor for The History Channel. Previously, Mudd was weekend and weekday substitute anchor for the CBS Evening News, the co-anchor of the weekday NBC Nightly News, and the host of the NBC-TV Meet the Press and American Almanac TV programs. Mudd was the recipient of the Peabody Award, the Joan Shorenstein Award for Distinguished Washington Reporting,[2] and five Emmy Awards.[3]
Roger Mudd
March 9, 2021 (aged 93)
- TV news anchor
- journalist
- correspondent
1953–2021
4
Early life and career[edit]
Mudd was born in Washington, D.C.[4] His father, a World War I veteran, John Kostka Dominic Mudd, was the son of a tobacco farmer and worked as a map maker for the United States Geological Survey. His mother, Irma Iris Harrison, was the daughter of a farmer and was a nurse and lieutenant in the United States Army Nurse Corps serving in the physiotherapy ward in the Walter Reed Hospital, where she met Roger's father.[5] Roger attended DC Public Schools and graduated from Wilson High School in 1945.[3]
Mudd earned a Bachelor of Arts in History from Washington and Lee University, where one of his classmates was author Tom Wolfe, in 1950, and a Master of Arts in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1953.[6][7] Mudd was a member of Delta Tau Delta international fraternity.[8] He was initiated as an alumnus member of Omicron Delta Kappa at Washington and Lee in 1966.[9]
Mudd began his journalism career in Richmond, Virginia, as a reporter for The Richmond News Leader and for radio station WRNL.[2] At the News Leader, he worked at the rewrite desk during spring 1953 and became a summer replacement on June 15 that year.[10] The News Leader ran its first story with a Mudd byline on June 19, 1953.[11]
At WRNL radio, Mudd presented the daily noon newscast. In his memoir The Place to Be, Mudd[12] describes an incident from his first day at WRNL in which he laughed hysterically on-air after mangling a news item about the declining health of Pope Pius XII, mispronouncing his name as "Pipe Poeus". Because Mudd failed to silence his microphone properly, an engineer intervened.[13] WRNL later gave Mudd his own daily broadcast, Virginia Headlines.[14] In the fall of 1954, Mudd enrolled in the University of Richmond School of Law, but dropped out after one semester.[15]
PBS and The History Channel[edit]
From 1987 to 1993, Mudd was an essayist and political correspondent with the MacNeil–Lehrer Newshour on PBS. He was a visiting professor at Princeton University and Washington and Lee University from 1993 to 1996. Mudd was also a primary anchor for over ten years with The History Channel, where many of his programs are still repeated in reruns. Mudd retired from full-time broadcasting in 2004, and remained involved, until his death, with documentaries for The History Channel.[35][23]
Personal life[edit]
Mudd resided in McLean, Virginia. He was married to the former E. J. Spears of Richmond, Virginia, who died in 2011. They had three sons and a daughter: Daniel, the former CEO of Fortress Investment Group LLC and the former CEO of Fannie Mae;[36] the singer and songwriter Jonathan Mudd; the author Maria Mudd Ruth; and Matthew Mudd. He was survived by 14 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Mudd was a collateral descendant of Samuel Mudd (meaning he descended from another branch within the same extensive family tree), the doctor who was imprisoned for allegedly aiding and conspiring with John Wilkes Booth after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.[37]
Mudd was active as a trustee of the Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges, with which he helped to establish its popular "Ethics Bowl", featuring student teams from Virginia's private colleges debating real-life cases involving ethical dilemmas.[38] He was also a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery.[7]
On December 10, 2010, he donated $4 million to his alma mater, Washington and Lee University, to establish the Roger Mudd Center for the Study of Professional Ethics and to endow a Roger Mudd Professorship in Ethics. "For 60 years," he said, "I've been waiting for a chance to acknowledge Washington and Lee's gifts to me. Given the state of ethics in our current culture, this seems a fitting time to endow a center for the study of ethics, and my university is its fitting home."[39]
Mudd died from complications of kidney failure at his home in McLean, Virginia, on March 9, 2021, at the age of 93.[40][24][41]