Mudd died Tuesday of complications of kidney failure at his home in McLean, Virginia. He started with CBS in 1961 and covered Congress, elections and political conventions. Mudd received a Peabody Award for his 1979 special “CBS Reports: Teddy” Mudd also did stints on PBS’s “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” and the History Channel. He wrote a memoir, “The Place To Be,” which came out in early 2008, and described the challenges and clashing egos in D.C., where he covered Congress.
Mudd anchored the “CBS Evening News” from 1966 to 1973. He lost out to Dan Rather in the competition to succeed Walter Cronkite at CBS. He was NBC’s chief Washington correspondent, co-anchored the “Nightly News” and “Meet the Press” Mudd left the “NewsHour” in 1992 to teach journalism at Princeton University. He shared in a Peabody for a 1970 CBS documentary on the military’s public relations efforts, among other awards.
Mudd is survived by his four children, as well as 14 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. He was born in Washington and was a distant relative of the doctor who treated John Wilkes Booth. Mudd worked at radio station WTOP in Washington before joining CBS News. He received an honorary doctorate from Washington and Lee University, his alma mater. He donated his 1,500 volume collection of 20th-century Southern writers to the university in 2006. Mudd and his late wife, the former E.J. Spears, had four children.
