DAVID BRINKLEY

FILE - In this Aug. 6, 2001, file photo, veteran journalist Roger Mudd tapes a segment for the History Channel at CBS studios in New York. Mudd, the longtime political correspondent and anchor for NBC and CBS who once stumped Sen. Edward Kennedy by simply asking why he wanted to be president, died Tuesday, March 9, 2021. CBS News says Mudd died Tuesday of complications of kidney failure at his home in McLean, Virginia. Besides work at CBS and NBC, he did stints on PBS’s “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” and the History Channel. It was then that Mudd jumped to NBC as its chief Washington correspondent.

Crowds of people gathered shoulder to shoulder on the White House South Lawn. Instead, he flouted his own government’s guidelines and helped create a false sense of invulnerability in the White House, an approach that has now failed him as it did a nation where more than 200,000 people have died. And their use, while technically required, wasn’t enforced in the White House either. Even in the hours after the president’s diagnosis, senior White House staff, including chief of staff Mark Meadows and economic adviser Larry Kudlow, walked around the White House complex without wearing masks. The White House, even now, says the face coverings are a matter of “personal choice” for most staffers.