‘Washington Week’ moderator Bode dies at 83

Ken Bode, who drew on his experience in academia and Democratic Party politics during a varied career in journalism, reporting on the presidential campaign trail for NBC, making prizewinning documentaries for CNN and moderating the public affairs roundtable “Washington Week” for PBS, died June 2 at a care center in Charlotte. He was 83.

His daughters, Matilda and Josie Bode, confirmed the death but said the cause was not yet known.

Erudite but unpretentious, Bode was a savvy chronicler of the nation’s political scene. He combined the expertise of a scholar (he had a PhD in political science) and the passion of an activist (he had worked for liberal Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota) with an open, easygoing manner that friends traced to his upbringing in small-town Iowa, where his father ran a dairy and his mother kept the books.

Bode (pronounced boh-dee) liked to sprinkle his reporting with colorful details and wordplay, as when he described a Supreme Court vacancy by noting that the seat represented “oneninth of one-third of the government.” He also showed a special interest in “political rascals,” as his longtime producing partner Jim Connor put it, profiling “people who got in trouble with the law on a large or small scale,” such as a Tennessee sheriff and Philadelphia ward boss who were both convicted on corruption charges.

After launching his television career in the 1980s as a national political correspondent at NBC, Bode taught journalism at DePauw University, reported and wrote an Emmy-winning CNN documentary, “The Public Mind of George Bush” (1992), and led Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism for three years as dean, helping to grow the school’s broadcast news program.

But he was perhaps best known for moderating “Washington Week in Review,” as the long-running roundtable show was then known. Produced by the Washington-based PBS affiliate WETA, the Friday night show had acquired a reputation as a calm and thoughtful forum for discussions of public affairs under moderator Paul Duke, who led the program for two decades before Bode succeeded him in 1994.

Over the next five years, Bode sought to maintain the show’s genial spirit while adding modern touches, including remote interviews with correspondents. He was also credited with bringing more women and people of color into its roundtable discussions, which included journalists Gwen Ifill of NBC, Michel McQueen Martin of ABC and Mara Liasson of NPR.

“I think it’s human and real and probably very good that Bode isn’t like Paul Duke,” frequent panelist Charles McDowell Jr. of the Richmond TimesDispatch said in a 1994 interview with the New York Times. While Duke had an “unusual, sort of cool image,” McDowell added, Bode was “more animated … more willing to let it go to a discussion, and override the Q and A a little bit. I think a lot of people are very relieved at that, as a matter of fact.”

But Bode was edged out of the moderator’s chair in 1999, as WETA executives reportedly sought to bring more attitude and opinion to “Washington Week,” in a bid to turn the show into something like “The View” for politics. Producer Elizabeth Piersol was fired, apparently because she continued to support him, and veteran journalist Roger Wilkins resigned in protest from the station’s board.

“If that’s the direction the show is going to go, I’m the wrong moderator anyway,” Bode told The Washington Post after his ouster. “I think they’re making a mistake. We bring in people who are really covering the news to empty their notebooks and provide perspective, not to argue with each other.”