I've never understood the hero worship surrounding longtime -- and long dead -- CBS radio and television commentator Eric Sevareid.

Granted, Sevareid, who died in 1992, looked like a 1960s-era pundit: tall, deep-voiced and unsmiling. His commentaries, however, always seemed too carefully balanced; his conclusions too tentative. In my memory of his CBS Evening News broadcasts, he would too often conclude with some version of "Time alone will tell ..."

		"THE PLACE TO BE: WASHINGTON, CBS AND THE GLORY DAYS OF TELEVISION NEWS" By Roger Mudd PublicAffairs ($27.95)

While respectful of Sevareid's work, CBS reporter and anchor Roger Mudd has some good-natured fun with his lugubrious colleague in his memoir. While he lists four rules for dealing with Sevareid, they can be summed up in four words: "Never talk to Eric."

Mudd describes how his family would ignore his regular appearances on TV, but all would fall silent whenever Walter Cronkite "said the magic words, 'Eric Sevareid has some thoughts ...' "

Mudd has written a good-natured book about reporting and broadcasting in Washington in the 1950s, '60s and '70s. His autobiography is full of funny, illuminating, sometimes embarrassing anecdotes about himself and the other ambitious journalists he worked with at CBS News.

Many of them, like Dan Rather, Daniel Schorr and Ed Bradley, became better known than almost all of the people they covered.

Mudd may be best remembered for asking Sen. Edward Kennedy in 1979 why he wanted to be president. Mudd writes that he had posed it as a softball question during the making of a TV documentary for CBS. To his astonishment, the senator stumbled to find a compelling answer.

As Hillary Rodham Clinton knows and Barack Obama continues to discover, politics ain't beanbag. Mudd describes the ultimately unsuccessful maneuvering by Kennedy brother-in-law Steve Smith to keep Mudd's work off the air.

"Teddy" finally ran in prime time just a few days before Kennedy formally announced his candidacy. Mudd won a Peabody Award; Kennedy fared less well.

Facing what was in any case an uphill battle, he lost the 1980 fight for the Democratic nomination to incumbent President Jimmy Carter. That win was short lived; Carter lost to Ronald Reagan in the November election.

Soon after "Teddy" aired, Mudd faced his own professional crisis. Angry and disappointed when Rather replaced Cronkite as the anchor of the evening news, he left CBS for NBC.

He briefly served as co-anchor of the nightly news with Tom Brokaw and moderated "Meet the Press." He later joined the "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour" on PBS, finally moving to the History Channel where he became the host and off-screen voice for hundreds of documentaries.

But Mudd writes that his heart remained with what was long called the "Tiffany Network."

"There was always a little hitch, perhaps a slight choke, in saying, 'I'm Roger Mudd, NBC News, Washington,' " he writes. "I had never truly ceased being a CBS man."