credit: Mr. Mankiewicz in 2011. Credit Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images

1. From: The Washington Post, October 23, 2014

2. From: New York Times, Oct. 24, 2014

Frank Mankiewicz, political and media insider, dies at 90

Frank Mankiewicz, who came from a family of Hollywood luminaries but forged his own path in Washington politics and media, serving as a top aide to presidential candidates Robert F. Kennedy and George S. McGovern, as an ambitious president of National Public Radio and as a rainmaker at a prominent public relations firm, died Oct. 23 at a Washington hospital. He was 90.

The cause was a heart attack, said Adam Clymer, a longtime friend.

Mr. Mankiewicz (pronounced MAN-ka-witz) was a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge and, in a career spanning six decades, a lawyer, journalist, author, congressional candidate and player in liberal Democratic politics.

“I know everyone in Washington, and half of them owe me something,” Mr. Mankiewicz once quipped. “The other half I owe.”

As Kennedy’s press secretary in 1968, he played his most public role as the campaign official who solemnly announced the news of the candidate’s assassination that June.

The balding and beefy Mr. Mankiewicz was admired on the hustings for his acerbic wit, usually doled out between puffs on his Kool cigarettes.

Reporters once queried him about two women who visited the Kennedy estate in McLean, Va., and were bitten by Brumus, the candidate’s Newfoundland.

“I only wish to point out,” Mr. Mankiewicz said, “that of all the women’s legs at Hickory Hill today, less than one-half of 1 percent were bitten.”

His smart-aleck remarks endeared him to the press corps, which regarded him, if only by pedigree, as one of its own.

His father, Herman, was a onetime theater critic for the New Yorker magazine and a member of the celebrated Algonquin Round Table social set in New York, which included Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley. Herman Mankiewicz went on to write the Oscar-winning screenplay for the 1941 film “Citizen Kane,” with director Orson Welles sharing the writing credit. A few years later, Herman’s younger brother Joseph Mankiewicz won Oscars for writing and directing “All About Eve” and “A Letter to Three Wives.”

Frank Mankiewicz grew up in Beverly Hills at the knee of family intimates including F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Greta Garbo and the Marx Brothers, whose early film comedies Herman Mankiewicz helped produce. Harpo Marx put in regular appearances at Mankiewicz family Seders. “He would pick up the Paschal lamb bone and lead a parade around the table,” Mr. Mankiewicz recalled.

Mr. Mankiewicz said he avoided the film industry after watching it embitter his father, an alcoholic who despised the movie colony but found the money too good to refuse. Instead, Frank Mankiewicz received degrees in journalism and law and had a flourishing legal practice in Hollywood by the mid-1950s.

The 1960 presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy kindled his idealism, and Mr. Mankiewicz’s campaign work bore fruit when he was offered his pick of jobs in the new administration.

As he told People magazine, he was vacationing with his family at California’s Squaw Valley ski resort when he found a note from a park ranger tacked to his hotel room door: “Mr. Mankiewicz, call Secretary of Defense McNamara, or Sargent Shriver at the Peace Corps, or your mother.”

He became Peace Corps director in Peru — a position that halved his $28,000 legal salary — and over time rose to chief of Latin American programs for the volunteer organization. He met Robert Kennedy in 1965 while briefing the senator from New York before a trip to the region. Mr. Mankiewicz became his press secretary, a role that carried over to Kennedy’s 1968 run for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Mr. Mankiewicz was at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, when Kennedy finished addressing supporters in the hotel ballroom and was exiting through the kitchen to avoid crowds. Mr. Mankiewicz said he had fallen some paces behind the candidate to help Ethel Kennedy, the senator’s pregnant wife, when he suddenly heard a popping sound. “I thought it was firecrackers,” he said, “until I heard the screams.” It fell to Mr. Mankiewicz to publicly announce Kennedy’s death the next day.

Mr. Mankiewicz spent the next several years writing a syndicated political column with Tom Braden, who later helped start the CNN program “Crossfire,” and appearing as a television commentator.

In 1972, Mr. Mankiewicz became a senior political adviser to McGovern, a liberal, antiwar Democratic senator from South Dakota. With campaign manager Gary Hart, a future U.S. senator, he helped engineer hard-fought victories in the presidential primaries. Mr. Mankiewicz’s portfolio also included handling the media.

During the Wisconsin primary, he dashed off a riposte that his boss used against John V. Lindsay, the patrician New York mayor: “He is the only populist in history who plays squash at the Yale Club.”

When another rival Democratic candidate, Edmund S. Muskie, continued to receive support after losing the Wisconsin primary, Mr. Mankiewicz observed, “That’s the first time I ever heard of rats climbing aboard a sinking ship.”

In the general election, McGovern lost to President Richard M. Nixon in a landslide. A major factor in the defeat was the revelation in news accounts that McGovern’s first choice as running mate — Sen. Thomas Eagleton (Mo.) — had once been hospitalized for depression and had received electroshock therapy.

Mr. Mankiewicz blamed himself for failing to vet Eagleton more thoroughly and for not advising McGovern, despite the widely perceived stigma of mental illness, to drop him more quickly. Shriver ultimately was chosen to fill out the ticket.

“I think the reactions to [Eagleton’s] severe illness were fair,” Mr. Mankiewicz said in a 2012 interview with the Web site Reddit. “I think McGovern’s essential decency delayed that decision.”

After a failed bid for a House seat in the Maryland suburbs, Mr. Mankiewicz took over National Public Radio in 1977. The outfit was so obscure at the time that he had never listened to a broadcast, he said, and his mandate was to use his political connections and publicity skill to raise the organization’s profile.

During his six years at the helm, the NPR news department more than doubled and listenership nearly tripled. He helped start the popular program “Morning Edition” in 1979; opened the first overseas bureau, in London; and used his access to top Democratic lawmakers such as Senate Majority Leader Robert C. Byrd (W.Va.) to obtain gavel-to-gavel radio coverage of important hearings.

Such initiatives brought the network prestige and acclaim, but NPR couldn’t keep pace financially with the aggressive growth. Meanwhile, the Reagan administration moved in the early 1980s to cut public broadcasting funding, spurring Mr. Mankiewicz to make a then-startling push for commercial underwriting.

Mr. Mankiewicz’s tenure ended with a $5.8 million deficit, which nearly pushed NPR into bankruptcy before the Corporation for Public Broadcasting granted a last-minute funding reprieve.

The crisis, which gradually lifted, resulted in the decentralization of future funding, with local stations receiving more money and greater control over programming. Mr. Mankiewicz had fervent supporters and detractors, but he was generally credited with helping to transform the network into a vastly more influential news operation.

“On the whole, he was essential to shaping what NPR became,” said Michael P. McCauley, the author of “NPR: The Trials and Triumphs of National Public Radio,” published in 2005. “But it was a very painful chapter, and he let his ego take over and spent money hand over fist.”

For the past three decades, Mr. Mankiewicz worked in public relations, first with Gray & Co. and then as vice chairman of Hill & Knowlton, where clients included the Church of Scientology, the tobacco industry and the country of Kuwait leading up to the Persian Gulf War.

Frank Fabian Mankiewicz was born May 16, 1924, in New York. After Army service in World War II, he graduated in 1947 from UCLA and the next year received a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. He obtained a law degree in 1955 from the University of California at Berkeley.

His first marriage, to Holly Jolley, ended in divorce. In 1988, he wed novelist Patricia O’Brien of Washington, who survives, along with two sons from his first marriage, Josh Mankiewicz of Beverly Hills, a correspondent for “Dateline NBC,” and Ben Mankiewicz of Santa Monica, Calif., a host on the Turner Classic Movies cable channel; a brother, Donald Mankiewicz, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter; four stepdaughters, Marianna Koval of Brooklyn, Margaret Koval of London, Maureen Koval of Bainbridge Island, Wash., and Monica Krider of Atlanta; and nine grandchildren.

Mr. Mankiewicz, who recently completed a memoir, wrote two scathing books about Nixon, co-edited a series of interviews with Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and co-authored with Joel Swerdlow “Remote Control: Television and the Manipulation of American Life,” published in 1978.

In a city where the politically ambitious often let power brokers have the last laugh, “Frank the Mank,” as friends dubbed him, was comfortable one-upping them.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) once recalled the time when his brother Robert brought his newborn son to the Senate office and introduced the infant to Mr. Mankiewicz, who also had recently become a father.

“Bobby went over to Frank’s desk, held up the baby and said, ‘Frank, say hello to Dougie. He’s just finished reading Camus.’ Frank laughed, and without missing a beat he said, ‘Senator, that’s fabulous. You and Dougie have to meet Ben. He’s just finished reading the complete works of Shakespeare.’ And he continued, ‘And next week, he’s going to read it all again right-side up.’ ”

Photo

Frank Mankiewicz, left, and Gary Hart when they were both working on George S. McGovern’s 1972 election campaign. Credit George Tames/The New York Times

Frank Mankiewicz, a writer and Democratic political strategist who was Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s press secretary, directed Senator George S. McGovern’s losing 1972 presidential campaign and for six years was the president of National Public Radio, died on Thursday in Washington. He was 90.

The cause was heart failure, said Adam Clymer, a family spokesman, who is a former reporter for The New York Times. Mr. Mankiewicz, who lived in Washington, died in a hospital, where he had been treated for heart and lung problems, Mr. Clymer said.

A scion of Hollywood, the son of Herman J. Mankiewicz, who wrote “Citizen Kane,” and the nephew of Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who directed “All About Eve,” Mr. Mankiewicz grew up with an Algonquin West round table in his Beverly Hills home, regaled by movie stars and famous writers.

He became a journalist and lawyer and, inspired by the Kennedys, went to Washington at the dawn of the New Frontier and took an executive position at the Peace Corps, full of idealistic hopes. What he encountered were assassinations, the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandals.

His face became familiar to the nation in 1968 as a spokesman for Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign for the White House, conveying the euphoria over the senator’s triumph in the California Democratic primary and then, within hours, grimly announcing Mr. Kennedy’s death by an assassin’s bullets in Los Angeles.

Four years later, joining a ragtag crew of eager young faces from Massachusetts and South Dakota, Mr. Mankiewicz coordinated Mr. McGovern’s all-but-hopeless presidential campaign, laced with moral outrage against the war, undermined by the selection of a running mate with a history of nervous disorders, and ultimately flattened under President Richard M. Nixon’s re-election steamroller.

As Watergate investigators exposed dirty tricks by White House operatives in the campaign, Mr. Nixon resigned and Mr. Mankiewicz — his name high on the president’s “enemies list” — wrote “Perfectly Clear: Nixon from Whittier to Watergate” (1973) and “U.S. v. Richard M. Nixon: The Final Crisis” (1975). He also became a syndicated columnist and a television news commentator.

From 1977 to 1983, Mr. Mankiewicz was president of NPR, the federally financed radio network of news, public affairs and cultural programming for much of America. He created programs and strengthened news operations. He also enlarged the staff, widened NPR’s reach to 281 noncommercial stations and doubled the audience to eight million listeners.

But his fund-raising efforts fell short in a national recession, and he resigned facing a $9 million deficit, about a third of NPR’s $26 million budget.

Mr. Mankiewicz then became executive vice president of Gray & Co., a public relations and lobbying firm. It was later acquired by Hill & Knowlton, and Mr. Mankiewicz became a vice chairman.

Frank Fabian Mankiewicz was born in Manhattan on May 16, 1924, one of three children of Herman and Sara Aaronson Mankiewicz. His father, early on a drama critic for The New York Times and The New Yorker, began his celebrated Hollywood career in 1926. The household was awhirl with the famous: Regulars included F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, the Marx Brothers, Greta Garbo, James Thurber, Margaret Sullavan, Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles.

“They got serious about things that didn’t matter to me, such as clothes and how much money you made,” Mr. Mankiewicz said of his parents in a People magazine interview in 1982. “That kept me out of the movie business.”

He attended Haverford College in Pennsylvania for a year, then joined the Army infantry in World War II and saw combat at the Battle of the Bulge. After the war he resumed his studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, graduating in 1947, then earned a master’s degree in journalism the next year from Columbia University and found newspaper work in the Los Angeles area.

Mr. Mankiewicz married Holly Jolley in 1952 and had two sons with her. The marriage ended in divorce. In 1988, he married the novelist Patricia O’Brien.

Ms. O’Brien survives him, as do his sons, Joshua, a correspondent for NBC News, and Benjamin, a host of Turner Classic Movies; an older brother, Donald Mankiewicz, a novelist and screenwriter; four stepdaughters, Marianna, Margaret and Maureen Koval and Monica Krider; a 1-year-old granddaughter; and eight stepgrandchildren.

In 1955, Mr. Mankiewicz earned a law degree at the University of California, Berkeley, then practiced in Beverly Hills. He campaigned for John F. Kennedy in 1960 and then joined the new administration. Fluent in Spanish, he was director of the Peace Corps in Peru from 1962 to 1964, then directed Peace Corps operations in Latin America.

Close to R. Sargent Shriver, the Peace Corps director and a Kennedy brother-in-law, Mr. Mankiewicz joined the circle of Kennedy advisers after the president’s assassination. Robert Kennedy, who resigned as the country’s attorney general and won a Senate seat from New York in 1964, made him his press secretary in 1966.

For an America divided over the Vietnam War, Mr. Mankiewicz articulated the senator’s split with President Lyndon B. Johnson, and after Mr. Kennedy began his run for the presidency in March 1968, Mr. Mankiewicz became prominent speaking for the notoriously shy Democratic front-runner. It seemed that both men might be destined for the White House after Mr. Kennedy won the California primary on June 4.

But the dream shattered minutes after Mr. Kennedy’s midnight victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel. Mortally wounded, Mr. Kennedy died 26 hours after being shot. Mr. Mankiewicz, who briefed the press around the clock, was haggard as he announced Mr. Kennedy’s death.

Mr. Mankiewicz went on to write a Washington-based syndicated column with Tom Braden in 1968 and ’69.

Directing the 1972 McGovern campaign, Mr. Mankiewicz strategized early primary successes. But he was partly to blame for the selection of Senator Thomas F. Eagleton of Missouri as running mate. In a crucial interview, he failed to discover that Mr. Eagleton had been treated for nervous exhaustion and depression and had received electroshock therapy. The senator’s medical history caused a furor when it became public, and within days of his selection Mr. Eagleton withdrew, leaving the campaign irreparably damaged. Mr. McGovern settled on Mr. Shriver as a replacement.

Even before the election, Watergate skulduggery began to emerge. Mr. Mankiewicz cited “a clandestine campaign of bribery and espionage and sabotage financed with secret Nixon campaign funds.” But Mr. McGovern, a flat-toned campaigner, won only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.

In a 2009 article in The Washington Post, Mr. Mankiewicz said his first choice for vice president had been the CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, though the idea was quickly rejected by the campaign. He speculated that a McGovern-Cronkite ticket “might well have won that 1972 election, or at least have made it close.”