RFK, McGovern aide Frank Mankiewicz dies at 90

Frank Mankiewicz, the son of a Hollywood legend who made his mark in the grittier worlds of Democratic politics and broadcast media, serving as press secretary to Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, presidential campaign manager for Sen. George McGovern and chief of National Public Radio during its bumpy rise to prominence, died Thursday at a hospital in Washington, D.C. He was 90.

NBC News correspondent Josh Mankiewicz said his father had been hospitalized with lung problems and died of heart failure.

Mankiewicz was the son of Herman Mankiewicz, the Oscar-winning screenwriter behind “Citizen Kane,” and nephew of Joseph Mankiewicz, who wrote and directed “All About Eve.” Growing up in Beverly Hills, he shared the family table with luminaries such as F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, the Marx Brothers, Greta Garbo and Orson Welles, but the conversation “was always about politics,” his son said.

So it was no surprise that Frank was eventually drawn to it and became a consummate Washington insider.

“I know everyone in Washington, and half of them owe me something. The other half I owe,” he told People magazine in 1982.

Although he ran for office twice – once in California and later in Maryland, losing both times – his widest public exposure came in 1968, when he appeared before millions of television viewers as the grim-faced man delivering updates on the condition of Sen. Kennedy after he was shot by Sirhan Sirhan at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. And it was Mankiewicz who announced, at 2 a.m. on June 6, that the senator had died.

“I have a short announcement to read which I will read at this time. Sen. Robert Francis Kennedy died at 1:44 a.m. today, June 6, 1968. … He was 42 years old,” Mankiewicz said.

Later he would describe his work for the Democrat from New York as “the shaping influence in my adult life.”

He went on to run McGovern’s disastrous campaign against President Richard Nixon, who later put Mankiewicz on his “enemies list.”

In the infamous Watergate tapes, Nixon is heard agreeing when chief of staff Alexander Haig calls Mankiewicz “a known revolutionary.” “Of course,” Nixon replied. “The McGovernites. The McGovernites.”

Years later, Mankiewicz, as vice chairman of the lobbying and public relations business Hill & Knowlton, had an office in the Watergate complex.