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 Mudd, who covered politics and
national affairs at CBS for two decades before
working at NBC News, PBS and the History
Channel, died at his home in McLean, Virginia,
of complications from kidney failure, according
to a CBS News statement.
Mudd reported on some of the biggest stories in
Washington, his hometown, during the 1960s and
'70s, including passage of the 1964 Civil Rights
Act, the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.'s
1968 assassination, the Watergate scandal and
the resignation of President Richard Nixon in
1974.
But he became best known for his 1979 interview
with Kennedy in an hour-long profile of the
prominent liberal senator from Massachusetts as
Kennedy prepared to announce his bid to
challenge Democratic President Jimmy Carter for
their party's 1980 presidential nomination.
Kennedy, then heir to one of the most prominent
U.S. political dynasties, appeared awkward and
unsure through much of the interview but came
off as flummoxed when Mudd posed a simple,
straightforward question: "Why do you want to be
president?"
The senator's halting, rambling reply was later
seen as pivotal to dooming his presidential
prospects. Carter defeated Kennedy for the
nomination before losing the general election to
Republican Ronald Reagan. Kennedy, who died in
2009, never ran for the White House again.
Mudd, who also covered the 1968 presidential
campaign of Kennedy's older brother Robert F.
Kennedy, was one of the last to interview him at
the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles moments
before the senator was fatally shot there on
June 5 after winning the Democratic presidential
primary.
President John F. Kennedy, elder brother to
Robert and Edward, was himself assassinated in
Dallas in 1963.
AMONG CRONKITE'S 'HORSEMEN'
Mudd, born in Washington, began his career in
the 1950s as a newspaper and radio reporter in
Richmond, Virginia, and later went to work at
WTOP News, then the CBS affiliate in Washington.
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 Joining CBS News as a
congressional correspondent in 1961, in an era
when most American television viewers tuned into
one of the three major networks' nightly
newscasts, he went on to gain national
recognition covering the two-month Senate
filibuster that preceded passage of the Civil
Rights Act. Mudd also became
well-known for in-depth CBS News special
reports, including a documentary titled "The
Selling of the Pentagon," which exposed
extravagant Pentagon spending to promote its
pursuit of the Vietnam War.
The segment ignited a furor on Capitol Hill and
earned Mudd a Peabody Award.
A frequent weekend anchor for the "CBS Evening
News" and stand-in for regular weeknight anchor
Walter Cronkite, Mudd became known as one of
Cronkite's "lead horsemen" in an era when CBS
led the Big 3 broadcast networks in the news
ratings.
But Mudd left CBS for rival NBC News after the
weeknight anchor chair was awarded to Dan Rather
- a move CBS said it made to keep Rather from
accepting a big ABC News contract - following
Cronkite's retirement in 1981.
Mudd served briefly as co-anchor with Tom Brokaw
of "NBC Nightly News" before Brokaw took over as
sole anchor of the broadcast in 1983. Mudd then
joined PBS' "The MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour" in
1987 as a political commentator and reporter.
In 1992, he began teaching at Princeton and
Washington and Lee universities while going to
work for the History Channel, retiring in 2004
after 10 years as its principal on-air host.
Mudd was distantly related to Dr. Samuel Mudd, a
Maryland physician imprisoned as a conspirator
in the 1865 assassination of Abraham Lincoln
after treating John Wilkes Booth's broken leg
hours after the actor fatally shot the
president.
(Reporting by Dan Whitcomb and Steve Gorman in
Los Angeles; Editing by Leslie Adler and Peter
Cooney)
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