Roger Mudd Becomes Featured Speaker at the Book Festival Business Breakfast

Individual Tickets Still On Sale

(Charlottesville, VA…March. 13 ) The Virginia Festival of the Book has announced that former newsman Roger Mudd has agreed to be the featured speaker at the Festival’s March 26 Business Breakfast, replacing Eric Abrahamson, who had to drop out due to a schedule conflict. “We are thrilled to have someone of Mudd’s stature speaking at the breakfast,” said Susan Coleman, Director of the VFH Center for the Book, which produces the Festival. Individual tickets remain available, although tables of ten seats have sold out.

Mudd was the documentary host and correspondent for The History Channel from 1995 until he retired in 2004. Between 1961 to 1992, he was a Washington correspondent for CBS News, NBC News and the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour on PBS. He won the George Foster Peabody award for "The Selling of the Pentagon" in 1970 and for "Teddy" in 1979 and the Barone Award for Distinguished Washington Reporting in 1990.

Business Breakfast attendees will be among the first to hear Mudd talk about his memoir, The Place to Be, due to be released the end of March. As one of the leading figures in broadcast news, in his book Mudd looks back with wit and wisdom on the period in the 1960s and 70s when CBS' Washington bureau was instrumental in setting the agenda at home and abroad on issues like Vietnam, civil rights and Watergate.

Roger Mudd joined CBS in 1961, and as the congressional correspondent, became a star covering the historic Senate filibuster debate over the 1964 Civil Right Act. Mudd was one of half a dozen major figures in the stable of CBS News broadcasters at time when the network's standing as a provider of news was at its peak. In The Place to Be, Mudd tells of how the bureau worked: the rivalries, the egos, the pride, the competition, the ambitions and the gathering frustrations of conveying the world to a national television audience in 30 minutes minus commercials. It is the story of a unique TV news bureau, unmatched in its quality, dedication and professionalism, that will highlight what TV journalism was once like and what’s missing today.Between 1992 and 1996, he was a visiting professor of politics and the press at Princeton University and at Washington & Lee University.

A former member of the board of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Mudd now is on the board of the Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges and the National Portrait Gallery, the advisory boards of the Eudora Welty Foundation and the Jepson School of Leadership at the University of Richmond.

Mudd graduated from Washington & Lee University in 1950 and from the University of North Carolina in 1953 with a degree in history. He enlisted in the US Army in 1945 and served with the 2nd Armored Division.

Mudd, born in Washington, D.C., is married to the former E. J. Spears of Richmond, Virginia. They have four children, eleven grandchildren and have lived in McLean, Virginia for 35 years.

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Roger Mudd Becomes Featured Speaker at the Book Festival Business Breakfast

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