Roger Mudd memoir captures a radical era

"Half the trick," Bobby Kennedy confided to Roger Mudd during a campaign stop in 1968, "is to look like you're having fun." Though the TV newsman always remembered Kennedy's advice, he seldom practiced it; Mudd's demeanor as CBS News' Capitol Hill correspondent and regular substitute for Walter Cronkite remained "glowering and grim," as he admits in his new memoir. This failing partly explains why the former Ph.D. candidate with the booming baritone lost out to Dan Rather, his flashier colleague, in their decade-long duel to succeed Cronkite on the evening news.

Americans under the age of 30 may have no memory of a time when "anchorman" connoted not some buffoonish Will Ferrell creation but the nation's most trusted figure. And in those days, CBS News dominated the capital. Mudd's "The Place to Be" brilliantly captures an era when war, protests, riots, assassinations and scandals rocked America and a newly ascendant medium transmitted images of the upheaval in real time.

A D.C. native, Mudd set his course in 1953, at 25, when he finished a master's degree in history and took a job on the rewrite desk of the Richmond News Leader. Soon he leapt to the News Leader's radio station and from there to WTOP-TV, the CBS affiliate in Washington, where he caught the eye of the network's chief correspondent in the capital, the late Howard K. Smith. Recruited by Smith in 1961, Mudd made the Washington bureau his professional home for 19 years.

But "The Place to Be" is largely a tribute to Bill Small, who became bureau chief in 1962. It was Small who hired the fearsome roster of "cutthroat" TV correspondents who became household names: Rather and Mudd, Eric Sevareid, Harry Reasoner, Daniel Schorr, Fred Graham, Bob Schieffer, Bill Plante, Lesley Stahl, Ed Bradley, Connie Chung, Bernard Shaw and others.

In his acknowledgments, Mudd says "one of Washington's most successful lawyer-agents" advised him there would be no market for a journalistic memoir "unless I dished about the famous and powerful." While professing abhorrence for this imperative, Mudd, 80, obliges with more than a touch of score-settling relish. Some of the harshest words are reserved for Rather, a one-time friend who schmoozed the CBS brass and wooed the other networks to land Cronkite's job. Rather is pegged here as "a complicated, guarded, tightly wound, and driven man, whose personality quirks left him lacking the essential quality every successful anchor needs -- personal believability."

At times, Mudd's memoir suffers from a reporter's overindulgence in detail and commits the sin that would have incurred the old stickler's wrath, misreporting facts: The Watergate burglar was not "John McCord" but James; it was not September 1972 but April 1973 when Mudd's CBS colleagues scooped the competition by cornering former attorney general John Mitchell on a shuttle flight.

Mudd's anecdotes are rich, but he deserves credit for not writing simply from memory. Instead, he tracked down and interviewed 46 of his old colleagues, including Rather, to give them their say. The result is a classic of Washington journalism, a probing memoir of a career that mattered when the news mattered.