Frank Mankiewicz, press aide to Robert F. Kennedy, dies at 90

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

The cause was heart failure, said Adam Clymer, a former New York Times reporter who is the spokesman for the family. Mankiewicz had been in the hospital’s intensive care unit for more than three weeks receiving treatment for heart and lung problems, 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,” he grew up with an Algonquin West round table in his Beverly Hills household, regaled by movie stars, famous writers and comedians like the Marx Brothers.

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 he articulated Robert Kennedy’s campaign for the White House, conveyed whirlwind euphoria over the senator’s triumph in the California primary and then, within hours, grimly announced 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, Mankiewicz coordinated 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, Nixon resigned and 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, Mankiewicz was president of NPR, the federally financed 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 8 million listeners.

But his fundraising efforts fell short in a national recession, and he resigned facing a $9 million deficit, about a third of the $26 million budget. He accepted partial blame, saying estimates of private contributions and federal financing had been too optimistic. NPR survived by cutting programs and dismissing 140 employees.

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

Frank Fabian Mankiewicz was born in New York City on May 16, 1924, one of three children of Herman and Sara Aaronson Mankiewicz. His father was a drama critic for The New York Times and The New Yorker who began his celebrated Hollywood career in 1926. The household was a whirl whose regulars included F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, the Marx Brothers, Greta Garbo, James Thurber, Margaret Sullivan, 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,” Mankiewicz told People magazine in 1982. “That kept me out of the movie business.”

He attended Haverford College for a year, but his studies were interrupted by World War II service in the Army infantry in Europe, including combat in the Battle of the Bulge. He graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1947, earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1948, then worked for newspapers in the Los Angeles area.

In 1952, he married Holly Jolley. They had two sons, Joshua and Benjamin, and were divorced. In 1988, he married novelist Patricia O’Brien. O’Brien survives him, as do his two sons and a 1-year-old granddaughter.In 1955, he earned a law degree at the University of California, Berkeley, then practiced in Beverly Hills. In 1960, he campaigned for John F. Kennedy, then joined the new administration. Fluent in Spanish, he was director of the Peace Corps in Peru from 1962 to 1964, then for two years directed Peace Corps operations in Latin America.

Close to R. Sargent Shriver, the Peace Corps director and a Kennedy brother-in-law, 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, named him as his press secretary in 1966.

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

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

In 1968 and 1969, Mankiewicz and Tom Braden wrote a Washington-based syndicated political column.

Directing the 1972 McGovern campaign, Mankiewicz strategized early primary successes. But he was partly to blame for the disastrous selection of Sen. Thomas F. Eagleton of Missouri as running mate. In a crucial interview, he failed to discover that Eagleton had been treated for nervous exhaustion and depression and received electroshock therapy. Days after his selection, Eagleton withdrew, leaving the campaign irreparably damaged. McGovern settled on Shriver as a replacement.

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

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

This story was originally published October 24, 2014 at 4:07 AM.