Longtime correspondent, news anchor for CBS, NBC

Roger Mudd, 93, the longtime political correspondent and anchor for NBC and CBS who once stumped Sen. Edward Kennedy by simply asking why he wanted to be president, died Tuesday.

CBS News says Mudd died of complications of kidney failure at his home in McLean, Virginia.

During more than 30 years on network television, starting with CBS in 1961, Mudd covered Congress, elections and political conventions and was a frequent anchor and contributor to various specials.

His career coincided with the flowering of television news, the pre-cable, pre-internet days when the big three networks and their powerhouse ranks of reporters were the main source of news for millions of Americans.

Besides work at CBS and NBC, he did stints on PBS’ “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” and the History Channel.

When he joined Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer’s show in 1987, Mudd told The Associated Press: “I think they regard news and information and fact and opinion with a reverence and respect that really is admirable.”

He wrote a memoir, “The Place to Be,” which came out in early 2008, and described the challenges and clashing egos he encountered working in Washington, where among other things he covered Congress for CBS for 15 years.

In an April 2008 interview on the “NewsHour,” he said he “absolutely loved” keeping tabs on the nation’s 100 senators and 435 representatives, “all of them wanting to talk, great access, politics morning, noon and night, as opposed to the White House, where everything is zipped up and tightly held.”

Mudd received a George Foster Peabody Award for his November 1979 special “CBS Reports: Teddy,” which aired just days before Kennedy officially announced his attempt to challenge then-President Jimmy Carter for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination.

In the report, Mudd asked the Massachusetts senator a simple question: “Why do you want to be president?”

Kennedy was unable to give a focused answer or specify what he personally wanted to do.

“Well, I’m, uh, were I to make the announcement to run, the reasons that I would run is because I have a great belief in this country . ... We’re facing complex issues and problems in this nation at this time but we have faced similar challenges at other times . ... And I would basically feel that it’s imperative for this country to move forward, that it can’t stand still, for otherwise it moves backward.”

Mudd spent a fair amount of time in the “CBS Evening News” anchor chair, substituting for Walter Cronkite when he was off and anchoring the Saturday evening news broadcasts from 1966 to 1973.

But he lost out to Dan Rather in the competition to succeed Cronkite as the news anchor at CBS when the latter retired in 1981. Cronkite, for one, had backed Rather because he didn’t think Mudd had enough foreign experience.

It was then that Mudd jumped to NBC as its chief Washington correspondent. In addition, he co-anchored NBC’s “Nightly News” with Tom Brokaw for a year before Brokaw went solo in 1983, and for a time co-hosted “Meet the Press.”

Mudd left the “NewsHour” in 1992 to teach journalism at Princeton University.

MARTY LEDERHANDLER/AP 2001 Roger Mudd, who died Tuesday, covered Congress, elections and political conventions and was a frequent anchor and contributor to specials.