A good day for a good book

A picture of Roger Mudd is on the cover of his 2008 book, "The Place to Be" (detail).

Snow fell on Richmond for most of this day after Christmas. It was a good time for a fire in the fireplace, a glass of eggnog and a good book. My choice was TV journalist Roger Mudd's "The Place to Be: Washington, CBS, and the Glory Days of Television News."

CBS News was really the place to be during the event-packed 1960s and 70s. I have long admired Mudd, whose career at CBS roughly coincided with mine at WTVR News. At WTVR, I met Mudd a few times when his assignments brought him to Richmond. Later, I ran into him occasionally at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. I wound up having lunch with him one day when a crowded museum Café meant we had to share a table. (Mudd was a trustee of the Virginia Historical Society, the museum's neighbor. VMFA had a cafeteria; VHS did not.)

Mudd's book is a great read. He writes well, and the stories he tells of the heyday of network news are fascinating.

My favorite Mudd anecdote is one that will resonate with those who lived through the 1970s. It reveals so much about Richard Nixon, the president we young people loved to hate in those days. It happened at an annual meeting of the Radio-Television Correspondents Association. Mudd, who was the group's president at the time, was seated next to the president as singer Diana Ross performed after dinner.

Mudd wrote, "Believe it or not, the president turned to me during one of her songs and said, 'They really do have a sense of rhythm, don't they?'"

"The Place to Be" is an interesting look back at two turbulent decades in Washington politics and journalism. Only the need to stoke the fire and warm up a ham biscuit for lunch tore me away from it today.