Enrique Cerna Interviews Roger Mudd
This is a transcript of an interview with Roger Mudd on Conversations at KCTS 9 which aired on August 22, 2008.
Other Transcripts:
RM: Thank you.
EC: Well, tell me about the phone call you received, offering you a job at CBS news.
RM: Well if it’s the phone call I think you’re talking about, it was from Wells Church, known as Ted Church, and I had been doing the radio news at 6 o’clock for the local CBS station. And for some reason I had neglected to give a certain story Mr. Church thought should’ve been on the air. And he called as soon as I got off the air, and said, “if you ever do that again, you’ll be local the rest of your life.” And he hung up. And my world almost blew up in front of me. I was so worried that he would go tell the people at CBS. I was at local CBS at the time, and I would, never ever get a job at CBS. Fortunately, god rest Ted’s soul, I think he’d been drinking. And I think he forgot to tell anybody. So within a couple months the real phone call came from Howard K. Smith, who was then our bureau chief, and he offered me the job and I started in 1961 at CBS for $19,000 a year.
EC: You made it to CBS, and really you joined CBS at a time when television and television news was coming of age, and in particularly in the political scene in Washington.
RM: With the election of John Kennedy in 1960, and his arrival in Washington, television news really had a fantastic, he was a prince of the realm. And he knew how to use it. He knew how to use it, and with his arrival in Washington, and with the excitement of the Kennedys and the all the glamorous people they attracted, television news responded with bigger and bigger budgets and more and more coverage. And so beginning in 61’, CBS began to expand its Washington bureau, and in 1963, Walter Cronkite had by this time taken over the evening news. And in 1963, we went to 30 minutes for the first time, and his first guest was President Kennedy, to inaugurate. And at that point, with the 30 minute broadcasts, and satellites, called Telstar back then, no place was out of reach in television. It had been before. Paris was 7 hours away by jet plane, so film you had shot in Paris, almost had to wait overnight before it got on the air. But now with the TelStar, with satellite, it was within the hour.
EC: Tell me about the competition and the competitive spirit within the Washington bureau to get on the Cronkite show.
RM: Well, unless you got on the broadcast and were seen, you didn’t exist. Being on camera is to a television reporter what a byline is to a newspaper reporter. It proves you are somebody, that management thinks enough of you to put you on the air, so you can see your face. If you’re a television journalist, and you’re at the local grocery store, and the check out clerk says, “Hi Mr. Mudd I haven’t seen you on the air lately, is anything wrong?” It’s the absolute worst.
EC: Your career isn’t going too well.
RM: So it was necessary just professionally to be seen from time to time. So that was the basis of the competition. It was not cut-throat. It was intense but generally gentlemanly. But I know for instance, Bob Schieffer, when he first started, would get past over a time or two by the Cronkite show and he would lose his temper and we would hear him in the back row kicking the waste basket across the floor.
EC: Covering the Hill, you became, you know that was your beat, you became the guy that the Senators and the Congressmen knew. You worked that, you got to know the ins and outs of that. But how did your work change the way television was covering Congress?
RM: Well, what happened was that it took almost 30 years. It was not until 1980...2…3, that the Senate of the United States, actually allowed television inside the chamber. Probably a lot of people don’t even realize, the younger generation now, knowing that’s always been there. And the house was a little earlier, but not much. It was both in the 1980s that we could cover committee hearings, but nothing inside. And as a consequence, television finally became part of the political culture. And it opened up a whole new raw source material for us because now we had the debates we could cover. But it was a difficult and I think it probably did more. We all believed that if we only could get our cameras inside the Senate and the House chambers, everything, the public would now know everything. It didn’t work that way, because the members of the Congress became so conscious of the cameras, that it lost some of its spontaneity. And I was always disappointed that television itself has not made full use of the coverage of the Senate. What happened during the 80s was that the competition between and among the television channels became so intense, and Washington politics got boring for the New York television managers, got boring. And less and less was seen on the air. Television producer in New York would yawn to hear it…Another Mudd hearing from Capitol Hill. We don’t want those guys just arguing back and forth. So that was a great disappointment…
EC: Let’s talk about some of the major events you got a chance to cover. You covered civil rights. You covered the march on Washington on August 1963. And you were actually given uh, the opportunity to do the live coverage. But before you got there that day, as you’re preparing for it, you lost your cookies.
RM: [laughs] Well, you could put it that way. No, it was, it was my first of major- well it was my first assignment to do live coverage. It was one thing to be in the studio and read off the teleprompter and have technicians queuing you with time and all that and make-up and the whole thing, no distractions in the studio. But to be outside, with airplanes flying over, the crowd assembling, the wind blowing, and, uh, a lash up with 5 or 6 cameras at different locations, not quite knowing whether it was all going to work or not, and this was the first time I’d ever done this, live. And my career was on the line. I had never been tested as to how well I could adlib, and I was really really nervous. And my s- my station was on the steps of the Lincoln memorial over on one side, and they set up a card table there, and I got down there early, and began to see the crowd coming. And I didn’t feel very good. And I began to breathe deeply, and I chewed some TUMS, and I sipped a coke, and nothing worked. So I, just before I went on the air, slipped down behind the boxwood and I, as you so inelegantly put it, [laughs]
EC: Thank you
RM: I threw up.
EC: Yeah. (laughing)
EC: You just surprised though, by what happened that day weren’t you? The turn out?
RM: Well, uh, the federal government was not equipped, had no experience in handling a, a crowd of quarter of a million. The last big crowd they had was you know, Hoover Bonus Army came into town in 1932. But they uh, they, the bars were ordered closed. They talked the Washington baseball team into delaying their evening game. There was martial law was uh, uh, initialed but not enacted. And so they were the uh, the administration, the Kennedy administration, was really nervous. And what happened was nothing. Nothing. It was 250,000 people, who came, made their statement, and left with great dignity. And it, what it did, it seems to me, that march, turned the violence of the civil rights movement into something very dignified, and very very powerful. It became a political force, before it had been a law and order issue, but now, no no no, it was quite different. And, those 250,000 people told the Congress and told the White House you really have to do something. This cannot go on. It was a powerful day.
EC: Of all the stories and events you covered in Washington, is there one really that stands out more than anything else?
RM: Well, there are two if I may.
EC: Please do.
RM: Make two. One was, the, the year later. After Kennedy’s death, the civil rights bill in 1964 came before the Senate, and was filibustered, and I covered that morning noon and night for 12 weeks. Until, for the first time, a civil rights filibuster had been broken. They tried 12 times over the years, and this was the first time it had been broken. That was a major assignment in my, um, professional career. The other, more emotional one was coverage of Robert Kennedy’s murder in Los Angeles in 1968. That was…I had gotten to know him, as a reporter gets to know a politician. We were friends in an adversarial way. But so many of us were, caught up I must say by the excitement of uh this campaign. [Eyes getting teary] And when he was shot, uh, it affected all of us, in different ways. But it affected us all emotionally because, his campaign had been so tumultuous and, so uplifting for the country. And I remember I was on the stage and Mrs. Kennedy, Ethel Kennedy, was standing nearby shaking. And I knew her from Washington, went and went and put my arm around her, her waist, and she just hugged me because she was so [chatters and stuttering sounds] like this. And just then someone behind us said something about Kennedy, and she turned and said “how dare you say anything about my husband.” And he looked up at her and said, “Ma’am I’ve been shot too.” And then she realized what an awful moment. She leaned over and kissed him. Uh, he was, just caught one of those stray bullets you see. And at that point, um, the crowd had, formed an almost impregnable knot around the, the, the Senator. And so I helped open up a little space and she finally got in to see him before he died. But, I had to fly back the next night to New York to do an hour documentary. And I remember, my memory about it, the whole incident, it was whited out. It was, such a, such a depressing moment after- and this is now, this is, John Kennedy’s been assassinated, Martin Luther King’s been assassinated, and now Robert Kennedy, all in the stretch of 4 or 5 years.
EC: Ethyl Kennedy uh, felt very strongly about you as someone that helped her get to see her husband, that final moment.
RM: Well, yeah, she’s always- we always both remember that. She had her, 80th birthday here the other day.
EC: You know you did a documentary, um, that aired in November 1979 I believe, about Teddy Kennedy. And that documentary, when Teddy Kennedy was looking to run for president against Jimmy Carter, and, it had a devastating effect on his campaign because the senator came off so badly. What was the relationship you had with the Kennedys after that?
RM: Uh, it wasn’t good [laughs]. Uh, my relation with the Senator had been not the same as it had been with Robert Kennedy or Ethel. Um, but um, we were, we were friends, just as reporters and politicians are friends. The documentary was fair I thought. But because of his inability to answer from basic questions I don’t think it did him any good when it was over. I don’t think it was responsible for his failure to win the nomination. I think, I think, he really hadn’t prepared himself properly, hadn’t asked him- hadn’t gone to the top of the mountain and asked himself the basic questions that every nominee should ask him.
EC: I remember watching that, and I remember being flabbergasted because he, he could not speak. It was almost, he could not explain why he wanted to run for president.
RM: No, that uh, that answer, interesting uh we thought, there were two interviews. One we did at the Cape, uh Massachusetts, and the other we did in his office. And after we’d done the one at the Cape, he’s very difficult, most Kennedy’s are hard to interview, they don’t like to – they don’t like surprises. And after the first interview we thought oh boy, you know, this – I don’t think we got a show. Well we’re gonna have to count on the second interview. And then the second interview was even more difficult. But once we got the film developed, and looked at it on the screen without the distractions…we realized we had a terrific show. ‘Cause we had, by design, framed him very closely [gesturing framing with hands], not a wide shot, but is that marvelous face he had, almost sculpted. And we decided ahead of time instead of asking him 25 or 30 questions with, 20 second answers, we’d ask him 10 or 12 questions and have the answers long. And so when I asked him, why do you want to be president, uh, it was obvious he hadn’t thought seriously enough about it to give me a coherent answer. So the answer just went on and on and on and didn’t make much sense at all. And, and it was that answer that convinced a lot of people that he really, he was running, too soon, too soon.
EC: You had been the number one substitute for Walter Cronkite for many years. Cronkite had decided to move on, to retire, then it came down between you and Dan Rather, as to who would become uh, the successor to Walter Cronkite, and, it wasn’t you.
RM: No, no it wasn’t.
EC: That was a tough pill to swallow.
RM: Well it was because, as you said, I had been, I had been, the regular you know year in year out substitute for Walter Cronkite, particularly during his long summer vacations. And so there was a natural, uh, assumption I guess nationally that I was to be his replacement. Certainly there was within the bureau. But about that time, uh, with Roon Arlidge now running ABC, Arlidge made a major move to hire Dan Rather. CBS didn’t want to loose him and I could see why because he’s a valuable reporter. Um, so the question came down to, which. And Bill Leonard, then president of the news division thought he could solve the problem by offering a co-anchorship, Dan in New York and me in Washington. And I declined to do that for a lot of reasons. And that left it up to Leonard now to make the decision and I think he decided that, in the long run, that Rather would be a lot easier to work with. That uh, I have, I had, uh, developed sort of a stiff neck uh, reputation.
EC: Were you a tough guy to work with?
RM: I think so. Yeah, I think probably tougher than I should’ve been. Although I’m the son of a perfectionist father and a perfectionist mother and I grew up um, wanting to get everything right. I’d always done a lot of work to prepare myself. And so my work had a, was, recognized as being accurate, and that gave me a, a reputation of being a serious journalist. As a consequence I did not much enjoy the glad handing, and the schmoozing that comes along with being an anchor man. Being an anchor man is, you cease to be a working journalist. So much of what you do is second hand, you have a lot of people working for you and you have to under the circumstances, trust the people around you, and rely on them. And I think that was one of the reasons that brought Dan Rather’s career at CBS to an end because he had been stretched, so thinly. Everybody wants a piece of the anchorman. And there’s not time, enough time in the day for the anchorman to vouch for everything. And Dan was relying on his staff and his staff let him down. And he uh…referring to the Alabama National Guard story with George Bush, that was the flawed story. That brought the end to it. But the, that was talked about. A bitter pill for me to swallow would’ve been just as bitter for him to have taken the fall for that.
EC: Looking back on it all now, and you’ve had plenty of years to look back on, how that was handled and how you made the decision basically that day when you were told that it was going to be Rather instead of you, you left. You left the building.
RM: Yeah, yeah I left, gosh I left. Uh and I remember when the secretary came, and told me that Mr. Leonard was now in the bureau and he wanted to see me. I remember walking across the newsroom floor, everybody in the bureau knew what was gonna happen, only I had not been told officially. And as I walked across the newsroom floor nobody looked at me, they were all, they didn’t want to look at me. And there wasn’t a sound as I…it reminded me in that scene in high noon. When the Sheriff, uh what’s his…Frank Miller I guess his name is…walks across, and was like taking off my CBS badge and was like throwing it off into the dust like it was a sheriffs badge. It was tough, yeah. But, to be honest with you, looking back, I think it worked out pretty well. I think I would’ve been, despite the disappointment, I think I would not have been a happy man as an anchor. Because with all the non-journalistic extra curricular stuff that you had to do.
EC: And you were a family guy.
RM: Family guy, yeah. Family guy, oh first and foremost.
EC: What do you think of television news today?
RM: Well it sure has changed hasn’t it? [Enrique: yes] Um, it’s changed from, three or four networks, broadcast networks, to with cable and, it’s what, 500 channels, 530 channels? I mean everybody in America’s got their own little niche don’t they.
EC: Yeah they have like four different remotes for everything.
RM: And uh, what’s happened of course is that…with the arrival of new media, the internet and wireless laptops and iPhones and iPods, there is a whole other world where people can get informed. So by the time people get home at 6:30 at night, they already know what’s happened. So there’s not, it’s not automatic anymore that you look at the evening news. And uh, that has, been very damaging to broadcast television news. And they, broadcast television news has almost left the field when it comes to political reporting. They still do good work, but on primary nights, everybody goes to cable. Because the audience isn’t not any longer there, for political reporting.
EC: Looking back on your long career, you had a heck of a great run. And you’ve got to cover some of the major events of our time.
RM: Well, yeah uh, that’s right, that’s right, it was a good run. It’s still is a good run. I’m still running [laughs]. No, but I mean to go from the election of John Kennedy, the assassination of Robert and Martin Luther, landing on the moon, Vietnam war, and the governments reaction to it, protests of the war, the rise of Richard Nixon, the fall of Richard Nixon, the sleazy end of Spiro Agnew, the unhappy presidency of Jimmy Carter. I don’t know of a 20 year period, in my reading of history that equals those twenty years. Perhaps the Civil War era under Abraham Lincoln would be close. But, to have been there, and, at least been in the middle of some of it, on the fringes of others, but to have just, you are at the creation.
EC: And with the first string.
RM: That’s right, with the front row [Enrique: at CBS news] and the back row, and the third row.
EC: Roger Mudd, The Place to Be, Washington, CBS, and the Glory Days of Television News, thank you for all those days.
RM: Well it’s a pleasure to be with you Enrique, thank you.
Comments
Post new comment