Kennedy said he agreed to be interviewed by Mudd as a personal favor to help him in the competition to succeed Walter Cronkite. He accuses Mudd of misrepresenting what he was going to ask him and blindsiding him with personal questions.

Mudd told POLITICO that Kennedy’s description of the circumstances surrounding the interview, recounted in “True Compass,” his posthumous memoir, was “fantasy.”

By Kennedy’s account, Mudd originally told him he wanted to interview his mother and when that wasn’t possible said he would only ask the senator about his relationship with Cape Cod. Instead, Mudd posed difficult questions about Chappaquiddick and his personal life, for which Kennedy recalls being totally unprepared.

Worried that the initial interview had been ”a disaster,” Kennedy asked Mudd for “another crack at it.” At that session, done in Washington, Mudd famously asked him why he wanted to be president. Kennedy wrote that he did not want to announce his candidacy this way and hesitated in answering the question in what proved to be an indelible image.

The interviews were spliced together and ran in an hour-long special called “Teddy” on CBS on November 4, 1979, crippling the Massachusetts senator’s challenge of President Jimmy Carter for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination before it even began. Carter went on to defeat him in the primaries and Kennedy never ran for president again.

Kennedy, who died August 25, said he agreed to talk to Mudd, a social acquaintance of his and friend of Robert and Ethel Kennedy, because Mudd had pleaded with him that he needed to land a big “get” to help in his battle with Dan Rather over who would succeed Cronkite as anchor of the CBS Evening News.

The former senator wrote in “True Compass” that Mudd approached him in June of 1979 following a reception for the president of Mexico at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. “As I walked out of the hotel at about 10 p.m., Roger approached me and said – I cannot recall the words verbatim – ‘I’m in this contest with Dan Rather for the anchor position at CBS News, and I’d love to get an interview for your mother.”

Mudd, now 81 and speaking cautiously but firmly to make his side known without, as he put it, getting “in a match with a man who’s no longer with us,” said that not only did such a conversation never take place, but that Kennedy’s entire account of the circumstances surrounding the interview is a fabrication.

“The whole scenario that he lays out is a complete fiction,” Mudd says. “There are no pieces of the truth in it. It’s almost beyond preposterous.”

“There was never any mention, never any proposal or any idea to interview Rose Kennedy,” he said. “The idea that I would’ve thought that an interview with Rose Kennedy would have won me the footrace for Cronkite’s seat just stretches credulity. Her name never came up.”

Rose Kennedy, then 89, made few public appearances, and as her son noted in his book, largely avoided interviews. Kennedy wrote that he was initially resistant to having his mother interviewed – but wrote that Mudd continued the pressure.“It would make a big, big difference if I could ever do that interview down at Cape Cod,” Kennedy recalled Mudd saying.

As Kennedy tells it in his book, his mother became ill and was not available for the interview. But after telling this to Mudd, Kennedy wrote that the newsman insisted on still coming down to Hyannisport to do an interview with him about his connection to the sea and Cape Cod.

“The agreement, as I’d understood it, was that our topic was to be the sea, and the connections between the Cape and the Kennedy family,” Kennedy writes, adding that the first 40 minutes of the conversation were about just that.

But Mudd says those topics never even came up.“I have a transcript of the original interview and there’s not a single mention in there of the sea, of the Kennedy relationship to the sea, of his love for sailing,” Mudd says.

To prove his point, the newsman reads back the first question he asked: “What’s your definition of Camelot?”
In his own memoir about a life spent in the TV news business, “The Place to Be,” Mudd makes no mention of Kennedy’s mother and recalls that the interview with the senator originated with CBS News president Bill Leonard. The news executive “thought an hour on Kennedy was needed because he would be a major player during the campaign year, whether he ran or not,” Mudd writes.

Tom Southwick, Kennedy’s press secretary at the time, said he feels that Mudd “sandbagged” Kennedy. He recalls CBS explaining that they wanted to come to Hyannisport because they needed film of Kennedy on the Cape and that the late-September weekend when the session took place was the last opportunity to do so that season.

“The agreement was that he would go down to Hyannisport and take some pictures of Sen. Kennedy walking the beach,” said Southwick. “The understanding was that he was just going to be pictured.”

Southwick said that as a result he didn’t even go to Hyannisport. “I sat in on every interview the entire time I was there. That was the policy. But this wasn’t supposed to be an interview.”

Southwick said he can still “vividly” recall the unhappy phone call he got from the senator after the session ended.

“’Tom, this thing was a complete disaster,’” Southwick recounts Kennedy saying “It was an ambush and that’s in fact what happened.”

Robert Shrum, a longtime Kennedy adviser who worked on the senator’s 1980 presidential run, recounts hearing the senator’s version of the story not long after the session took place.

“Kennedy told me the same story that’s in the memoir,” Shrum says, recalling a conversation he had with his candidate in 1980 about the famous interview. “He thought it was going to be focused on the family.”

Jonathan Karp, Kennedy’s editor, says that the senator had precise memories about the interview."I definitely queried Sen. Kennedy on it,” Karp say. “We asked, ‘are you sure about this? These are very specific facts.’ We went back twice on it through two drafts. Both times he maintained that this was the way it was.”

Southwick, now an executive at the Starz premium television company, makes clear that three decades later he still feels strongly about what happened. “Mudd sandbagged us and distorted the truth to create a piece that he thought would give him a leg up in the campaign against Dan Rather for Cronkite’s job,” he said.

However, Southwick said he had “no clear recollection of the Rose Kennedy part of the story. “It seems unlikely as I don’t recall Rose giving any interview at all while I worked for Kennedy.”

He said that he recalls first having discussions with CBS in the spring of 1979, but it was about an interview with the senator.

And, Southwick said, Kennedy never mentioned to him that he thought he was doing Mudd a personal favor by agreeing to the interview.

Again, Mudd has different recollections of that September weekend.

“I don’t want to call Tom a liar and I won’t, but that is also a complete fiction,” Mudd says of Southwick’s contention that there was to be no interview that day on the Cape.

Mudd points out that even Kennedy admits in the book that he agreed to some form of an interview.

Where Mudd and Southwick agree – raising questions about Kennedy’s claim that the interview was to be with his mother – is on the fact that CBS spent weeks trailing the senator in Washington and in his home state, including on a family camping trip, to get footage for the eventual package. “If we had been planning to do an interview with Rose Kennedy, why on earth would we have spent all the time and money shooting film of him?” asks Mudd.

Southwick recalls the push-and-pull negotiations with the network in which the senator’s office finally, and grudgingly, allowed CBS to film Kennedy, his children and nieces and nephews camping.

Mudd has no explanation for the sharply differing accounts of the autumn of 1979. “For me – because I came to admire him immensely as a senator – it’s really rather sad that he somehow embraced this fantasy in his final years of his life,” he said.

Mudd added that never in the decades following it, while both worked in Washington, did Kennedy complain about how the interview came to pass. But he remembers Kennedy bringing up the interview in jest while speaking at the Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner in 1981. And Mudd said that after he was pushed out of NBC News, where he worked following CBS’s decision to tap Rather for Cronkite’s slot, he got a nice call from Kennedy, saying “Hang in there.”

Other members of the Kennedy family were not so forgiving, Mudd wrote in his book. “The broadcast brought all communications from and invitations to Ethel Kennedy and Hickory Hill to an abrupt halt,” he wrote, after recounting how he threw dinner parties at his suburban Washington home for Robert and Ethel Kennedy and dined out with the couple in 1967 after they watched an RFK documentary together that Mudd had made.

Kennedy, in his book, concedes that he wasn’t prepared for what would eventually become a famous part of political lore.

“I should have had my antennae up,” he writes. “In retrospect, it is almost inconceivable to me that I did not.”