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Contact Info
Home Town Waco, Texas
Last Address Valence d'Albigeois, France
Date of Passing Oct 13, 1992
Location of Interment Arlington National Cemetery (VLM) - Arlington, Virginia
Hughes Rudd, the puckish, curmudgeonly newscaster who once incurred the wrath of thousands of Midwesterners by describing Detroit as "Cleveland without the glitter," died Tuesday in a French hospital.
Officials at CBS, where Rudd worked for 20 years before moving to ABC in 1979, said the 71-year-old Rudd died in Toulouse of complications following an aneurysm of the aorta.
Over the years he had lived in a small village outside Toulouse in southern France and since his retirement in 1986 spent most of his time there.
The acerbic Rudd had a reputation for outspokenness whether he was covering a national political convention or discussing his own profession, which he once called a "comic strip medium."
"Any complicated or serious subject can't be explained on TV," he said in his raspy twang at a 1980 meeting of Texas broadcasters.
ABC colleague Ted Koppel once described the sardonic two-minute news commentaries that Rudd used to conclude his daily newscasts as "evenhanded malice."
In New York in 1980 for the Democratic National Convention, Rudd, on ABC's "World News Tonight," picked out a few of the various cities that had played host to the presidential nominating process. After dismissing Detroit and Cleveland in a single sentence, he showed a typically Ruddian film clip. It was of Manhattan--its strip joints, sleeping bums and filthy streets.
"You can find anything you want here," allowed Rudd--who prided himself on being an exception to the fashionably coiffed anchormen who were beginning to dominate the industry. "Just pray that it doesn't find you first."
The clip ended with a dog paying homage to a lamppost.
Rudd, who quit the University of Missouri after three years to become an artillery spotter flying Piper Cubs in World War II, began his journalism career with stints at several newspapers, including the Kansas City Star, the Minneapolis Tribune and the Rock Springs Daily Rocket and Sunday Miner in Wyoming.
In a 1975 interview with the Associated Press, Rudd said he always knew he wanted to be a journalist. His first job was as a copy boy at a newspaper in his hometown of Wichita, Kan.
He began his broadcasting career with CBS as a news writer in 1959. He held a number of foreign assignments during his CBS years, including stops in Moscow, Africa, the Middle East and Vietnam, and anchored the "CBS Morning News" from 1973 to 1977.
He lost his morning anchor job, he told an interviewer, because "they wanted a younger man."
He was a contributing correspondent at ABC. His reports appeared on "World News Tonight," "20/20" and other ABC news programs.
Rudd devoted nearly as much time to writing as to broadcasting.
He had received a fellowship to study creative writing at Stanford University in the 1950s and subsequently wrote stories for Harper's, Esquire, American Magazine, Paris Review, the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines. In 1965 he wrote a book, "My Escape From the CIA and Other Improbable Events." It was a collection of essays that had at best a tangential relationship to its title.
For four months in 1973, Rudd and Sally Quinn, a Washington Post columnist who was making her television news debut, co-anchored the "CBS Morning News."
But the chemistry between the hard-edged reporter and the former social columnist did not work, and Quinn was gone after four months.
But they remained friends, and in 1979, writing again for the Post, Quinn interviewed her TV mentor. Rudd had just joined ABC and was reminiscing about his career--still dreaming, he said, of writing once more for a newspaper.
World War II killed more people, involved more nations, and cost more money than any other war in history. Altogether, 70 million people served in the armed forces during the war, and 17 million combatants died. Civilian deaths were ever greater. At least 19 million Soviet civilians, 10 million Chinese, and 6 million European Jews lost their lives during the war.
World War II was truly a global war. Some 70 nations took part in the conflict, and fighting took place on the continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe, as well as on the high seas. Entire societies participated as soldiers or as war workers, while others were persecuted as victims of occupation and mass murder.
World War II cost the United States a million causalities and nearly 400,000 deaths. In both domestic and foreign affairs, its consequences were far-reaching. It ended the Depression, brought millions of married women into the workforce, initiated sweeping changes in the lives of the nation's minority groups, and dramatically expanded government's presence in American life.
The War at Home & Abroad
On September 1, 1939, World War II started when Germany invaded Poland. By November 1942, the Axis powers controlled territory from Norway to North Africa and from France to the Soviet Union. After defeating the Axis in North Africa in May 1941, the United States and its Allies invaded Sicily in July 1943 and forced Italy to surrender in September. On D-Day, June 6, 1944, the Allies landed in Northern France. In December, a German counteroffensive (the Battle of the Bulge) failed. Germany surrendered in May 1945.
The United States entered the war following a surprise attack by Japan on the U.S. Pacific fleet in Hawaii. The United States and its Allies halted Japanese expansion at the Battle of Midway in June 1942 and in other campaigns in the South Pacific. From 1943 to August 1945, the Allies hopped from island to island across the Central Pacific and also battled the Japanese in China, Burma, and India. Japan agreed to surrender on August 14, 1945 after the United States dropped the first atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Consequences:
1. The war ended Depression unemployment and dramatically expanded government's presence in American life. It led the federal government to create a War Production Board to oversee conversion to a wartime economy and the Office of Price Administration to set prices on many items and to supervise a rationing system.
2. During the war, African Americans, women, and Mexican Americans founded new opportunities in industry. But Japanese Americans living on the Pacific coast were relocated from their homes and placed in internment camps.
The Dawn of the Atomic Age
In 1939, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, warning him that the Nazis might be able to build an atomic bomb. On December 2, 1942, Enrico Fermi, an Italian refugee, produced the first self-sustained, controlled nuclear chain reaction in Chicago.
To ensure that the United States developed a bomb before Nazi Germany did, the federal government started the secret $2 billion Manhattan Project. On July 16, 1945, in the New Mexico desert near Alamogordo, the Manhattan Project's scientists exploded the first atomic bomb.
It was during the Potsdam negotiations that President Harry Truman learned that American scientists had tested the first atomic bomb. On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress, released an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan. Between 80,000 and 140,000 people were killed or fatally wounded. Three days later, a second bomb fell on Nagasaki. About 35,000 people were killed. The following day Japan sued for peace.
President Truman's defenders argued that the bombs ended the war quickly, avoiding the necessity of a costly invasion and the probable loss of tens of thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives. His critics argued that the war might have ended even without the atomic bombings. They maintained that the Japanese economy would have been strangled by a continued naval blockade, and that Japan could have been forced to surrender by conventional firebombing or by a demonstration of the atomic bomb's power.
The unleashing of nuclear power during World War II generated hope of a cheap and abundant source of energy, but it also produced anxiety among large numbers of people in the United States and around the world.
