WASHINGTON – The memoir of the late Frank Mankiewicz, “So As I Was Saying,” has recently hit the bookstores. In his 90 years he was an avid baseball fan, and in the game’s jargon he could have been cast as a utility infielder of the first order.

Son of Herman Mankiewicz, Academy Award-winning screenwriter of “Citizen Kane,” Frank eschewed the Hollywood track in favor of his own CV.

That included: Army infantryman in the Battle of the Bulge, Los Angeles lawyer, Democratic activist, Peace Corps director in Peru; Sen. Robert Kennedy’s press secretary in his ill-fated 1968 presidential campaign. Later he was a newspaper columnist, CEO of NPR and public relations executive.

In 1972, Frank was chief press and political adviser to Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern. As such, he was a central figure in the episode that doomed McGovern’s bid – the forced resignation of vice-presidential nominee Sen. Tom Eagleton of Missouri when it became known that Eagleton had undergone electroshock treatments for mental illness.

Just prior to picking Eagleton, McGovern instructed Frank to “check Eagleton out” on whether there was anything in his past that might cause trouble for the Democratic ticket. Frank wrote in the memoir that when he asked Eagleton, “he replied strongly in the negative.” So the nomination went forward, and upon the disclosure, Eagleton had to step aside, triggering a politically damaging quest for a replacement, after which Kennedy in-law Sargent Shriver was finally chosen.

Mankiewicz wrote that Eagleton had minimized the seriousness of his illness, but that hospital records revealed the official diagnosis had been “paranoid schizophrenia, with suicidal tendencies.” Frank wrote that when he grilled Eagleton about his medical record, the senator was “always a bit too clever with his deceit about his history.”

Never an elected official on the national level, Frank is probably best remembered as the press secretary who in 1968 informed the world of the death of presidential candidate Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles. Only six weeks earlier, Frank had accompanied Kennedy to a rally in an African-American section of Indianapolis. Learning that Martin Luther King had been shot in Memphis, they discussed what the senator would say. Kennedy asked him to jot down “some notes I can use” and Frank said he would do so on the press bus, and get them to RFK on arrival at the rally site.

But the bus got delayed and arrived only as Kennedy started to speak. Informed that King had just died and that the crowd didn’t yet know of it, the senator without Frank’s promised notes proceeded to deliver perhaps the most poignant extemporaneous remarks ever made at a political rally.

As Frank listened in awe, his boss said simply: “I have some very sad news for all of you and, I think, sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.”

Amid numbed cries and anguish, Kennedy briefly eulogized King and then offered: “For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.”

Kennedy then quoted verbatim from Aeschylus: “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” He concluded: “Let’s dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savagenesss of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and our people.”

Frank wrote later that RFK’s off-the-cuff remarks were “entirely spontaneous,” that they came “from within Robert Kennedy” and included “almost none of what we had discussed (earlier).” In so saying, Frank rendered a final tribute to his boss and made his goodbye to Martin Luther King all the more remarkable.

Editor’s note: Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,” published by Smithsonian Books. You can respond to this column at juleswitcover@comcast.net.