Roger Mudd – Bio, Net Worth, Age, Death, Cause of Death, Wife, Family, Life Story, Nationality, Facts, Awards, Parents, Career, Job, Shows, Education

Roger Mudd was an American broadcast journalist. He was famous for being a correspondent and anchor for CBS News and NBC News. He is renowned for working as the primary anchor for The History Channel. He began his journalism career in Richmond, Virginia, as a reporter for The Richmond News Leader and for radio station WRNL. In his early times, he 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. He won Emmys for covering the shooting of Gov. George Wallace of Alabama in 1972 and the resignation of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew in 1973, and two more for CBS specials on the Watergate scandal. Also, he was the recipient of the Peabody Award, the Joan Shorenstein Award for Distinguished Washington Reporting, and five Emmy Awards.

Roger Mudd Death Cause 

Roger Mudd dies on 9th March 2021 at the age of 93. He was survived by 14 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. He 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 aiding and conspiring with John Wilkes Booth after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He died from complications of kidney failure at his home in McLean, Virginia. 

What is Roger Mudd Known For?

• Being a broadcast journalist who was a correspondent and anchor for CBS News and NBC News.
• For working as the primary anchor for The History Channel. 

Where did Roger Mudd grow up?

Roger Mudd was born on 9th February 1928 and he grew up in Washington D.C., the USA. His birth name was Roger Harrison Mudd. He held American nationality and his ethnic background was American-White. He lastly celebrated his 93rd birthday as of 2021. Aquarius was his zodiac sign and his religion was Christianity. About his parents, his father, John Kostka Dominic Mudd, was the son of a tobacco farmer and worked as a mapmaker 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.

Regarding his educational qualification, he attended DC Public Schools and graduated from Wilson High School in 1945. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in History from Washington and Lee University, and a Master of Arts in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1953. Moreover, he was a member of Delta Tau Delta international fraternity. He was initiated as an alumnus member of Omicron Delta Kappa at Washington and Lee in 1966. At the end of 1954, he enrolled in the University of Richmond School of Law but dropped out after one semester.  

Roger Mudd Career Timeline and Life Story

• Roger Mudd started his journalism career as a reporter for The Richmond News Leader and for radio station WRNL. 
• At the News-Leader, he worked at the rewrite desk during spring 1953 and became a summer replacement on June 15 that year. 
• The News Leader ran its first story with a Mudd byline on 19th June 1953. 
• At WRNL radio, he presented the daily noon newscast. 
• In his memoir “The Place to Be”, he 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 he failed to silence his microphone properly, an engineer intervened. 
• WRNL later gave Mudd his own daily broadcast, Virginia Headlines.
• Next, he moved to Washington, D.C. from Virginia to become a reporter with WTOP News in the late 1950s.  
• Initially, he did the 6:00 a.m. newscast for WTOP and then did local news segments on the local TV program “Potomac Panorama”.
• He hosted the first newscast at the end of the year 1956 which he wrote, WTOP’s 6:00 p.m. newscast, that included a weekly commentary piece, all without “the constraints of the wire service vocabulary”.
• Also, he produced a half-hour TV documentary in the summer of 1957. 
• In March 1959 WTOP replaced Don Richards with Mudd for its 11 p.m. newscast.
• Then, he joined CBS News on 31st May 1961. For most of his career at CBS, Mudd was a Congressional correspondent.
• He was also the anchor of the Saturday edition of ‘CBS Evening News’.
• During the Civil Rights Movement, he anchored August 28, 1963, coverage of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom for CBS. 

Source: @abtc

• CBS-TV broadcast the documentary “Case History of a Rumor” on 13th November 1963. 
• In 1964, he came to fame after he covered the two-month filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, starting in late March. Further, he covered numerous political campaigns. 
• He also covered the 1968 Presidential campaign of United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy and interviewed him at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles only minutes before Kennedy was assassinated on June 5, 1968.
• It was in the year 1971, he hosted the seminal documentary “The Selling of the Pentagon”.
• He was a candidate to succeed Walter Cronkite as anchor of the CBS Evening News in 1981. 
• He is renowned for an interview with Senator Ted Kennedy broadcast on 4th November 1979. 
• In addition to questioning Kennedy about the Chappaquiddick incident, Mudd asked, “Senator, why do you want to be President?” Kennedy’s stammering answer, which has been described as “incoherent and repetitive” and “vague, unprepared”, while the senator “twitched and squirmed” for an hour, raised serious questions about his motivation in seeking the office, and marked the beginning of the sharp decline in Kennedy’s poll numbers. Although the Kennedy family refused to permit any further interviews by Mudd, the interview helped strengthen Mudd’s reputation as a leading political journalist. He won a Peabody Award for the interview.
• He chose to leave CBS News after CBS News awarded the job to Dan Rather due to which he accepted an offer to join NBC News. 
• He then co-anchored the ‘NBC Nightly News’ with Tom Brokaw from April 1982 until September 1983.
• He was the co-moderator of the NBC “Meet the Press program” with Marvin Kalb from 1984 to 1985.
• Later, he served as the co-anchor with Connie Chung on two NBC news magazines, “American Almanac” and “1986”.
• From the year 1987 to 1993, he was an essayist and political correspondent with the MacNeil–Lehrer Newshour on PBS.
• From the year 1993 to 1996, he was a visiting professor at Princeton University and Washington and Lee University. 
• Moreover, he was also a primary anchor for over ten years with “The History Channel”, where many of his programs are still repeated in reruns. 
• In the year 2004, he retired from full-time broadcasting and remained involved, until his death, with documentaries for “The History”.

Who was Roger Mudd Wife?

Roger Mudd was a married man to his beautiful wife, EJ Mudd in 1957. Sadly, EJ died in 2011 at the age of 86. The duo had three sons and a daughter: Daniel, the former CEO of Fortress Investment Group LLC and the former CEO of Fannie Mae; the singer and songwriter Jonathan Mudd; the author Maria Mudd Ruth, and Matthew Mudd. His sexual orientation was straight. He was also 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. In addition, he was a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery. 

Source: @richmond

How much was Roger Mudd Net Worth?

Roger Mudd was a retired veteran American broadcast journalist, TV personality, and author whose net worth was estimated to have between in the range of $5 Million – $10 Million at the time of his death. On 10th December 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.” His exact career earnings and annual salary are still to get disclosed yet. He was living a modest lifestyle. His main source of wealth was from the journalism industry. 

How tall was Roger Mudd?

Roger Mudd was a handsome man with an average body build. He stood tall at the perfect height matching with his body weight. Whereas his exact body measurement is still to get disclosed yet. His hair color was salt and pepper and his eye color was brown.