On a recent morning at his quiet office in the Washington bureau of ABC News, David Brinkley looked and sounded - as he often does on his Sunday-morning program, "This Week With David Brinkley" - like a man who had been woken too early.
With his heavy-lidded eyes and laconic, halting manner of speaking, which distinguished him when he was a co-host of the groundbreaking "Huntley-Brinkley Report" in the 1950s and 1960s, Brinkley has always seemed unusually sedate for a television newsman.Now, at the age of 76, he seems more so: his shoulders slouch a bit, his soft-featured face is smaller and more drawn, and his voice, no doubt affected by lung surgery last year, is sometimes weak.
But given an opportunity, Brinkley can still rail against Washington with considerable vigor. Asked about Tuesday's presidential election, he quickly launched into an assault on the process of nominating candidates: "It has completely broken down," he said.
Later, he groused about government spending, and characterized Congress as "a fractious, self-centered, arrogant bunch." And he said that he regarded President Clinton - who has granted him the first post-Election Day interview, on Friday, two days before Brinkley steps down as host of "This Week" - as "a classic politician." (That's no praise, coming from Brinkley.)
Though Brinkley can seem like a bit of a curmudgeon these days, his trademark skepticism and succinct candor have long been appreciated, and will assuredly be missed, by viewers who have been watching him for the last 40 years, first on "Huntley-Brinkley," then as an "NBC Nightly News" anchor with John Chancellor and finally as host of "This Week," which he helped begin in 1981.
After next week's program, which will include the interview with the president, Brinkley will relinquish the role of host to two of the program's longtime panelists, Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts. Although he will continue to contribute commentary, the title of the program is expected to become simply "This Week."
With Brinkley at the helm, the program's blend of political news, commentary and sometimes quarrelsome debate established it as both a ratings leader and a trend setter on Sunday mornings, inspiring a wave of similar pundit chat programs over the years.
Tim Russert, the host of NBC's "Meet the Press," which has recently been challenging the ratings supremacy of "This Week," said of his competitor, "David Brinkley redefined Sunday-morning TV."
Almost everyone involved with Sunday-morning television is wondering how its competitive landscape will change after Brinkley's semiretirement.
"I think we can have a successful show without David, but at the same time there's no doubt that we're losing the linchpin," said Donaldson. "I've always maintained that David Brinkley is the principal draw of the broadcast, because viewers trust him and feel comfortable with him."
The president of ABC News, Roone Arledge, acknowledges that "there is the possibility that we'll lose viewers." But he hopes that he can soften the blow by keeping Brinkley at least partly involved in the program. "I was determined that we not do what CBS did with Walter Cronkite, which was to have him just suddenly go away," he said.
In any case, Arledge, who lured Brinkley away from NBC 15 years ago by offering him the host slot on "This Week," insists that a change in Brinkley's status was inevitable.
Brinkley had been talking about scaling back his involvement in the program, indicating that he wanted that to happen sometime after the 1996 election. At the same time, Arledge felt that the program, which was his creation, needed to be "freshened up," he said.
"Everybody has copied our format over the years," he said, "and now we need to take the next step forward."
No doubt adding to the pressure for change has been the rise in the ratings of "Meet the Press." In recent weeks, and for the first time consistently, that program has been drawing more viewers than "This Week."
" `Meet the Press' is now perceived to be the hotter show of the two," said Andrew Tyndall, who reports on the television news business for The Tyndall Report, an industry newsletter.
But Arledge asserts that the decision to change hosts was not influenced by the ratings pressures. "If we were worried about ratings, we would have tried to keep David here longer," he said. Rather, he said, the move was made in response to Brinkley's wishes and also grew out of Arledge's concern about Brinkley's health.
Though Brinkley returned to the program soon after his operation, he has seemed at times to be moving a step slower than his feisty round-table partners. "David had a serious operation, and while I think he was able to come back, I've noticed an energy level drop-off," Donaldson said.
Tyndall said he believed that Brinkley's on-air performance had clearly fallen off: "He always had that laconic style, but in the last year he has begun to look tired."
ABC News insiders also note that Brinkley's familiar skepticism has lately sometimes veered toward crankiness. "There's been more of a tendency to say, `They're all a bunch of crooks on Capitol Hill,' though I don't think he really feels that way," said one person at the network.
For his part, Brinkley insists that he is feeling quite well these days, his frail appearance notwithstanding. "I probably can't run as fast or lift as much as I used to, but this job requires no heavy lifting," he said.
Of the decision to scale back his role on "This Week," Brinkley said: "I've done this for a long time and now I want to do something different. That's all." Brinkley is interested in producing documentaries about history and culture, and ABC News has already signed him up to do a couple.
As for his skepticism about politics, and any crankiness thereof, Brinkley said: "As long as I've known anything about politics, I've been skeptical. And it has evolved. The more I saw, the more skeptical I became."
As he wrote last year in his best-selling memoir "David Brinkley," he became immersed in politics early in his career, when he left his home state, North Carolina, to take a job as White House correspondent with NBC News.
In 1956, he and Chet Huntley began doing their influential nightly news broadcast, which ran for 14 years, with Brinkley reporting from Washington and Huntley from New York.
Brinkley achieved a number of "firsts" during his years at NBC, including writing and serving as host for the first television news magazine, "David Brinkley's Journal," in the 1960s. But some of his finest moments involved the coverage of politics by "The Huntley-Brinkley Report," particularly its live reporting from the party conventions, beginning in 1956.
By 1964, the program's coverage of the Democratic convention drew a remarkable 84 percent share of the viewers. President Clinton has said that the Huntley-Brinkley coverage of the conventions piqued his early interest in politics.
"David Brinkley created a whole generation of political junkies," said the ABC News political analyst Jeff Greenfield.
Brinkley did that in part by bringing a more casual, impressionistic tone to his discussion of politics, as he shared observations and anecdotes, often humorous, with viewers. "He appreciated the human side of politics, and got a chuckle out of it," Greenfield said. "He treated politics in the manner H.L. Mencken did, as a great spectator sport."
Donaldson said Brinkley was also "able to cut through the fog and explain the essence of an issue in a way that everybody could understand." And Brinkley's unusual, low-key manner of speaking also sets him apart from more aggressive commentators.
(When Brinkley speaks, particular words in each sentence are singled out for emphasis; because of this, Donaldson observed, "David and I can say exactly the same thing, but when he says it, it just sounds more interesting.")
Brinkley was often dissatisfied with what he saw in Washington, but he remained unfailingly polite. "One of the things that stands out about David is that he's so civil to everyone," said Arledge. When Brinkley has chided politicians and government bureaucrats - as he has done most Sundays on "This Week" - he has usually done it gently, and wryly.
On one program, Brinkley reported on large batches of mail that the Postal Service had failed to deliver in Washington, and he speculated that the misplaced mail might have included a letter from President Clinton asking Congress to enact Clinton's earlier promise to cut taxes for the middle class. "That certainly got lost somewhere," Brinkley noted.
Though he has waded in Washington politics for 50 years, Brinkley has tended to distance himself from most politicians. There are no pictures of presidents on his office walls, though he has known all of them since Roosevelt. Instead, the office is decorated with a few family snapshots and a picture of a mansion that was next door to his boyhood home in Wilmington, N.C., where Brinkley began his journalism career as a teenage writer for The Wilmington Morning Star.
Aside from Winston Churchill, whom he admired greatly, Brinkley seems to have few fond memories of the politicians he has known. He was regarded as an enemy by President Richard M. Nixon, though Brinkley says he is not sure why.
"I think he figured, wrongly, that I was part of the Washington liberal establishment," he said. The presidential campaign of Sen. Barry Goldwater in 1964 also viewed him as a foe, he says. "The Goldwater people were constantly following me into elevators and threatening me with bodily harm," Brinkley recalled, with a smile.
Brinkley is not given to nostalgia. Speaking of Huntley, who died in 1974, Brinkley said: "We weren't really close. He was always in New York, and I was always in Washington."
And Brinkley explained the enormous success of "The Huntley-Brinkley Report" - which, according to one 1960s survey, made its anchors more famous than the Beatles - in this way: "I wrote pretty well, and Huntley looked good and had a great voice."
While many Americans who watched television in the 1950s and 60s fondly recall the way he and Huntley used to personally bid each other good night on the air, Brinkley has always thought the famous nightly sign-off, which was the idea of network producers, was "silly and inappropriate."
Not surprising, Brinkley is expected to do nothing very sentimental next Sunday on his final broadcast as host of "This Week." And though Tuesday's election will probably be the last he covers as full-time network newsman - he'll provide commentary during the evening - he seems, like many Americans, a little bored by this particular contest.
"I like surprises, and so far there haven't been many this time," he said, contrasting this election to the one in 1960 that kept Brinkley and Huntley on the air awaiting a winner all night and halfway into the following day. "This one seems to be cut and dried," he said. "This is a pretty quiet time in American history, with no wars, no recession, no divisive bloodthirsty issues. That's good, but it doesn't make for very exciting politics."
Regarding the future of "This Week," Brinkley says he will leave it to Arledge and others to decide which new directions the program should move in. Arledge says that the program will probably begin to broaden its focus beyond Washington politics and that various format and personnel changes are still being worked out.
Brinkley, too, is expected to broaden his focus beyond the Beltway. In addition to producing historical documentaries, he plans to write books (his third, "Everyone Is Entitled to My Opinion," was published last month) and travel with his wife, Susan.
And now that he no longer has to be at the ABC News studios every Sunday morning, he also plans to begin sleeping in on weekends. "It's painful rolling out of bed at 5 in the morning on Sundays," he said. "I won't miss it."