High school of science and yale university. In 1960 after he completed his military service he became a reporter for the New York Herald tribune and in 1962 he was assigned to its washington bureau. In 1963 he became the Herald Tribunes chief congressional corps spon dentd, having grown up in new york city and having read the New York Herald tribune, i always lamented when it folded as a newspaper, went out of business in 1966. But his career continued. He worked for newsweek, he reported for the Washington Post, he then came up here to capitol hill where he worked for senator hugh scott, the Senate Republican leader, he was a press secretary for senator jabets, then he went back to journalism. He went to the National Journal and also for cox newspapers where he was a column list. More recently were familiar with him because he was the managing editor of t hill newspaper and in 2006 he joined politico. So thats quite a resume over time. And our other guest today is roger mudd who was born right here in washington, d. C. And graduated from washington and Lee University and took a masters degree at the university of North Carolina in history and he was studying the relationship of the press with fdrs new deal. And at that point he thought he should get experience in seeing what the press was like so he took a summer job with a num, the Richmond News leader and it happened the Richmond News leader owned a Radio Station called wrnj across the street and that station needed a news director and so instead of going on for his ph. D. In history as he planned he planned to become a broadcast news journalist. He came to washington, d. C. In 1960 for wtop, that was both radio and television. Informs the same building with the cbs news and so he moved to the National News in 1961. Though some of you who are old enough may remember that in 1961 the National News was only 15 minutes and that it wasnt until 1963 that it went to the standard half hour program. In the subsequent years, he became a regular on cbs. He was their cbs senate reporter. He was covering political campaigns. He was anchoring wherever Walter Cronkite was away. He was a regular feature on cbs evening news. In 1980, cbs had the equivalent of the war of the roses and he went to nbc and then to pbs and many of you are much more familiar of him in recent years as a host on the History Channel on many of their programs. Hes also the author of a wonderful memoir that i recommend very highly called a place to be washington, cbs, and the glory days of Television News which has a lot of stories about covering the senate and covering in particular the Civil Rights Act of 1964. So andy and roger i want to welcome you both and thank you for being here today. You were both members of something called the cloture club and i wondered if you could tell me about what the cloture club was and how you found yourself members of it back in 1964 . Thank you for that kind introduction. We inconvenient it hvented the. It did not exist until it rose phoenix like from the ashes. But the problem was that it was a filibuster and nothing was happening except a lot of speeches. And we wanted to make news now that didnt mean we created news or made it up but we were like bees going to flowers, flowers were senator russell, senator dirksen, senator humphrey, majority leader mansfield and others and we went around and asked them questions and made comments and said, hey, majority leader said x, what do you any and at the end of the day roger had a pretty good story for cbs news and i had something to write for the Herald Tribune. So that was the nature of the cloture club. There were five of us roger, myself, peter compa unfortunately and Ned Kenworthy of the New York Times. Peter was the Senate Correspondent for the baltimore sun. Ned ken johnworthy of the New York Times and John Haverhill of the Los Angeles Times we created and ran, as it were, the cloture club. Everybodys dead now except andy and me. [ laughter ] and were headed there. Including dirksen and mansfield and all those names. We travelled in a pack but journalism does prohibit you to a certain extent sharing stuff. So we tried to keep independent of each other but the press conference the senator would say oh, god, here they come, the cloture club. But that was it was interesting that not every news outlet, not every newspaper, had a full time reporter assigned to cover the filibuster and the civil rights bill. There was we didnt have anybody, say, from the Washington Post with us regularly. Bob robert all bright was assigned to the story but we never saw him and big newspapers, chicago tribune, atlanta constitution, st. Louis postditch pat st. Lou post dispatch, they didnt think the story deserved zone coverage which was which the cloture club was doing but it was my first introduction to covering something that important day in and day out and i learned as much about the senate and the vanity of the senate and the dependence on the Staff Members and how some senators were pretty stupid, some were very bright and in between there were a lot of senators. But it was an education for me. If youre looking for a conspiracy theory, which i love, as a 28yearold reporter who is getting page one bilines everyday in the New York Herald tribune. So think about what the Herald Tribune was. It was competing the times but it was basically a liberal republican newspaper. And the owner was a guy named john whitney, a friend of president eisenhower, former ambassador at the court of st. James in london and very much interested in seeing this legislation succeed. He was married to i think her name was haley and her sister was married to a head of cbs bill paly. And roger stood out among the three networks, there were only three then, as getting a lot of airtime. We can go into that later. And i wonder now 50 years later whether the paley sisters had something to do with having all of this happen. What was i going to had . The problem is i had a thought and ive forgotten it. I stood out not because of anything i had done special, i was just the only one. I had no competition. Three networks, abc was kind of a weak sister then and nbc over at cbs we always called nbc the National Biscuit company. [ laughter ] we regarded nbc as they sat warned leather patches on their elbows and smoked their pipes and did wonderful stylish stories the second day but they were bad losers on the first day and if in your opinion the news business, you ought to do anyway. One ive been up a week or two, road down on the elevator with Bob Mccormick who was the nbc correspondent on the hill and i overheard him sniffing about cbs coverage. He said our people arent interested in that. So i had no competition. Thats why the prominence. I was going to ask you, what was the challenges for a Tv Correspondent to cover the senate in the 1960s . In particular the civil rights but just in general. How easy or hard was it far Tv Correspondent . Well, everything the main stuff was behinded closed doors, as you can imagine. Cameras were not welcome except at certain places. Cameras didnt get into the house until 1979 and not into the senate until 1986 i think it was. And i thought when cameras finally got into the chambers the world of political reporting would really, really change because for the first time the public would be able to sit in and watch what happens on the floor. Well, as you know, not a lot happens on the floor. [ laughter ] so as so it was difficult just to know where to go with the camera. You couldnt go lots of places. You couldnt go into the chamber, you had to wait for the sergeant at arms and stake out a place and then youve have had v to grab them as they came out and interview them. So it was hard work and most times you came up empty handed because they didnt want to give away what was going on behind closed doors until they get nailed down. The changes and amendments to title 9, title 6, title 2. If i could add to that, my clear recollection is that roger is an expert in what the trade calls an establishment shock. In other words, he would go outside the capitol but stand in the place where the viewer would know where he was in front of the senate or on the capitol steps. So the day the crunch came, which i think was in late june of 64, senator russell made a point that when roger was going to cover the vote, which was the crucial vote, the 67 that ended the 84day filibuster he couldnt do it on the capitol grounds. My recollection is that they kicked you off and you had to go across the street. Am i right on that . Well, you were kind of right, andy. The first week i broadcast from the actual steps of the senate and nameless other senators got the bill small, my boss and bureau chief and said we cant have that. So i was moved across, still on capitol grounds, just across the street where the park is, where the retaining wall is and thats where i set up. And i remember about the second week i came down the steps to do the 9 00 feed for the Morning Television show and there was a crowd of tourists waiting for me to get there and id never [ laughter ] id never id never been in a crowd like that. I didnt know what they were going to do. Whether we were going to hold up signs or wave or anything. They didnt they just stood there. Didnt make a sound, didnt deserve anybody. And didnt disturb anybody. Then after i finished they came up, can you sign my guidebook . [ laughter ] so, andy, it was before the vote that i was moved across the street and the day of the vote we had a big, big the Art Department of cbs set up an easel, a chart of all the senators and their names. And thats how we did the last counting. Well, this was one of the longest debates that took place in the history of the senate and i went back and was reading some of your stories from the Herald Tribune about it and in march of 1964 you started one of your stories the talk begins. All it took to get the civil rights debate going was a twoweek discussion about whether or not to debate it. [ laughter ] and that was just to get it to the floor. So that raises the question. This was a story that just dragged out for months. What were the complications of keeping that story on the front pages of the Herald Tribune . Good question. Well, there were two filibusters. There was a mini filibuster to decide whether or not to send the bill to the Judiciary Committee which was then headed by James Eastland of michigan and it would have got there or to use some complicated formula to get it directly to the floor which was the strategy that senator mansfield and senator humphrey decided on. So that was a debatable matter and they debated that for a couple of weeks and they finally brought it to the floor and then they had, i believe i historians in the room, its still the longest single filibuster in senate history. 84 days. As we said earlier, it was a stretch to try to write about it. One day i wrote senator long, who came back and talked about the part of the bill where i think it was title vii about employment that they had to have female priests or something and so and so i wrote for the Herald Tribune the next day, you could just about get away with this, senator long, who had dined well, but not necessarily wisely. [ laughter ] went off on this then i wrote about it. I also had a great advantage, i must say, over the New York Times because it was so arcane what was emotion on the floor and the previous motion and so on. And the Herald Tribune was very good about that because i would just write a parliamentary hassle ensued. [ laughter ] and that was the end of it. But the times, which was the paper of record, had to explain how it happened. There was a slogan up here that reporters love congress because theres always a story in congress but their editors hate congress because so much of the story is timetable. The bill moved from the subcommittee to the full committee. You had to report not only once a day but many times a day during a story. How did that come about that you were on the steps for multiple sessions everyday . How did you ever find enough to say each of those times . I was assigned by the newly arrived president of cbs news was a volcanic man named fred friendly. And he thought the whole issue of civil rights deserved total dawntomidnight coverage. So he said heres the plan, youre going to do a report on the morning news to Television Morning news, noon news, midafternoon news, Cronkite News and good night news and youre going to do a report on every other hourly radio broadcast everyday until we finish. And i said, youre kidding . I said, i mean that sounds like a flagpole sitting stunt. He said no, no, no, this is serious. Were serious. And so i said okay. So it became up to me to make it sound interesting when 95 of the story was not interesting because as andy said, it was a parliamentary hassle. So i started out just wandering around getting to know people, getting to know the staff, the senators, the south southern senators did not trust me. Because they thought i was working for a big liberal network which wanted to cut the south back to stature and it was not until they realized after a week that i was not pulling my punches. I was doing both sides and the first day we broadcast i had humphrey out. I made sure before i ended the tomorrow night were going to have Richard Russell. So it was very balanced and so finally the southerners began to trust me and i would begin to get calls from their press secretary. Do you want to come over and meet with alan eleanor . One thing we could do, don, to keep the story going, is doing profiles of the key actors, senator dirksen, senator keek l, i mentioned majority leader mansfield and of course wed always go up to the white house and try to get a feed or feel from larry obrien or even the president who was accessible on this story but one day i went to see james o. Eastland figuring as my colleague that they required some coverage. By the way, over 84 days it became andy but it was always with senator russell and mr. Glass invariably. So i went to see the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. I said id like to introduce myself, im the Congressional Correspondent with the New York Herald tribune, im sure you know. He kept nodding, a big flag of mississippi here and an American Flag and was kind of nodding, not saying much. Then after about five minutes of a monologue on my part he said he had a cigar. He took a cigar out of his mouth and said sonny, you stick around here for 20 years and maybe youll understand how this place works. [ laughter ] that was the interview. Later we became more friendly and he invited me for a weekend to his plantation in Sunflower County and had a great time a so things change. I dont think i ever new or covered a senator as interesting as Richard Russell. He was publicly he was a very remote, dignified man. Privately he was as generous as a friend as you could have. It took him a year before he called me roger and he never called me rojjer in public. It was always private. I would go down to georgia on occasion on political trips and i would go see him before i wind to tell him i was going and hed give me the names and phone numbers of people i ought to check to see how he was and when i got back id get a call come see me, tell me what you found out. And he was always generous in that way. He told me before the filibuster began in so many words that there wasnt anything else he could do. He knew he was beaten i think before it started. And i asked him, is there nothing you can offer americas black population . And he said all i can offer is hope that we can get through this difficult period. And that told me that he knew he was going to get defeated. And i thought the main conflict was not between dirksen and humphrey versus russell as it was between humphrey and dirksen, whether those two leaders could krooft a bill that would pull along enough republicans to so they could break the fill buster. My take on it was a little different. I always thought a the big 17 whose picture is over there, including john tower and robert byrd of West Virginia not always honorary. Not all the time and then there were also spies, the two spies were fulbright and smathers who were going to these southern meetings southern delegations, southern caucus, whatever they called it, and leaking stuff to humphrey and we werent allowed to write that but my feeling and i wrote at the time was there there was a rope a dope strategy, that there was a hope thats the right worth that the country which was very much united on the idea that this, as dirksen once put it, an idea whose time has come, would turn because there would be a summer of violence by what were then called negroes and the country would then lose interest in the bill. And so i think that was the reason that this thing was being stretched out. Hoping that something would happen to change the chemistry. I thought that final