About eight years ago, I attended a press conference at which David Brinkley spoke about "Washington Goes to War," his book about being a young journalist in our nation's capital in the early '40s.
He stepped gingerly onto the platform and said, "I'll say a few words and then entertain your questions. When you ask them, I'll dissemble. After almost 50 years in Washington, I'm very good at that."Of course, Brinkley didn't dissemble. But when asked a question, he didn't say much. That's his hallmark. He's the TV announcer who became famous because he never said much.
Now he's out with another book, "David Brinkley: A Memoir," and for the most part it's a real pleasure for the same reasons Brinkley has been a pleasure to watch on TV for almost a half century: a wealth of knowledge, nimble writing, a sardonic wit.
For my money, his observations about growing up in Wilmington, N.C., ranks right up there with the best of memoirs. The Brinkley family, he says, has lived in the neighborhood since the American Revolution. And until he was a kid, there was even a town named after them. Brinkleys.
But Brinkleys wanted to hook up when electricity came to Wilmington, so their high school could play basketball games at night. Wilmington said forget it, the little town is too far from the city's center. So Brinkleys installed a Delco home generator in the high school and everything worked out just fine. And they changed the name of the town to Delco. (I confirmed that in my ZIP code book.)
Brinkley came from an eccentric family and so he has some Southern gothic fun and sadness with their pecadilloes and then he's off to the Army and later Washington, D.C.
Much of the book is made up of what happened between then and now, and if you know anything about politics, you might be a tad disappointed, except for the gossip - like Estes Kefauver's womanizing on the campaign trail and the fact that Brinkley's own sister was Joseph McCarthy's private secretary and shared some of the witch-hunter's secrets with her younger brother.
The Wilmington city librarian saw something in young David and taught him how to write. Her strictures have stuck with him all these years. Here he is on President Eisenhower's manner of speech: "His ad-libbed sentences bounced around like Dodgem cars at a carnival, bumper cars that bounced off one wall, swung around, hit another wall and another car and then bounced somewhere else and wound up - as Eisenhower's sentences did - in the middle of nowhere." The book bristles with such lines.
And the inside stuff on broadcast journalism is wonderful. H.V. Kaltenborn, says Brinkley, wasn't very bright, was often wrong, but always sounded right because of his stentorian delivery.
John Cameron Swayze wasn't much of a journalist, according to Brinkley, but he was tapped to be the first anchor at NBC because the early teleprompters were useless and Swayze was the only guy in the newsroom who could memorize the news scripts.
Of course, Brinkley and Chet Huntley would soon take over and make history by agreeing not to verbally describe what was already on the screen. About their success, Brinkley is disarmingly modest, as he is about all of his achievements.
The book is oddly repetitious, given Brinkley's reputation for careful husbanding of his word-hoard and jumps back and forth in time in an almost stream of consciousness manner, which at times is touching (as when he drops his lecture on the need for a flat income tax) to helplessly rail at his ancestral home being torn down in Wilmington and at other times merely exasperating.
But on the whole, it's a fine book to curl up with as winter approaches, told in such a way you can almost hear Brinkley speaking to you in a voice that won't soon be forgotten.