I CAN'T REMEMBER when I've enjoyed reading a book any more than I did "David Brinkley: A Memoir" (Knopf, 273 pp., 1995, $25.00). I think anyone who has followed the prestigious journalist on NBC's popular "The Huntley-Brinkley Report" or ABC's current "This Week with David Brinkley" will find this memoir delightful. It is filled with the sardonic wit and distinctive North Carolina cadences for which Brinkley is famous. Ever since he began his career in radio in 1943, he has been characterized as a professional talker who doesn't believe in talking too much.
In his memoir, he uses those skills to talk about the people he covered during a fascinating 50 years. Remembering early radio, he notes that many who covered the news read it "wrongly," thus changing the meaning, in fact missing the point by reading a sentence with the wrong emphasis."The right emphasis is crucial," he says, "because I believe the ear is the poorest of all ways to absorb information."
Television means "distant vision," he says, and the word has always been mispronounced, with the emphasis on the word TELE instead of VISION. NBC's first TV news anchor, John Cameron Swayze, hosted "Camel News Caravan," with a burning cigarette visible "at his elbow." He was chosen because he had "one talent previously not recognized as valuable - the ability to memorize news copy and recite it back to the camera in letter-perfect order and without needing a prompter."
Brinkley recalls many of the great political figures, like Britain's Winston Churchill, who astonished journalists by writing his own speeches. Brinkley says, "Churchill's use of the English language seemed to have come pure and pristine and from the King James Version of the Holy Bible, its sentences written in A.D. 1611 and still standing like stone arches so perfectly built and delicately balanced that removing one stone, or one word, would cause them to collapse."
If New York's governor, Tom Dewey, who ran for president in 1948, had a "notably mellifluous speaking voice" reminiscent of "a cello quartet," Robert Taft's "was rusty hinges on a henhouse door."
Franklin D. Roosevelt was "a social snob" who berated reporters for being so poorly educated "they could not possibly report accurately and fairly the activities of their president, a C student at Harvard." Although FDR saw Truman as "a routine, uninteresting politician from the Midwest," Truman was, in Brinkley's opinion, a better politician than Roosevelt. And while FDR's "folkiness" was a put on, Truman's was genuine.
Brinkley makes fun of Eisenhower's performance in televised press conferences, as he uttered "sentences that 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, with nobody quite sure what he said." In contrast, John F. Kennedy "dealt with any question, any at all, a new experience for the reporters, and we loved it."
Although Brinkley considered Barry Goldwater politically extreme, he liked him personally. "There was little or no meanness in him. On the contrary, there was a real friendliness and generosity in him and he was always good company when he was not surrounded by those of his followers who behaved like political banshees."
Nelson Rockefeller had a tough time answering questions, says Brinkley, because he was dys-lex-ic. Then there was Lyndon Johnson, who was not a Brinkley fa-vor-ite, but who took such a liking to Brinkley that one day he sent a helicopter unannounced to pick up him and his wife from a picnic in Maryland and take them to spend the night at Camp David. After that, he persisted in calling him at midnight from the White House and saying, "Bird and I are sitting around here in the upstairs quarters having a drink. Why don't you come on down here and join us?"
Sometimes, he did.
Interestingly enough, Brinkley was hated enough by the manager of an NBC affiliated station in North Carolina that the manager hired a man named Jesse Helms to go on the air after Brinkley and "answer Brinkley's lies." The assignment gave Helms so much unexpected popularity that he ran for the U.S. Senate from North Carolina - and won.
Brinkley says it was NBC News president Rueven Frank's idea that "The Huntley-Brinkley Report" close with what became the trademark, "Good night, David" (from Huntley) and "Good night, Chet" (from Brinkley).
Brinkley hated it, but he knew it was working when people on the street greeted him with "Good night, David" - and they still do. He says many people mixed up Huntley and Brinkley in person. One woman approached him at an airport and said, "Aren't you Chet Huntley?" Brinkley said "Yes," because it was just easier not to argue in those cases - and she said, "Well, I like you on the news, but I can't stand that idiot Brinkley."
He attributes the news program's huge success to its newness and the relative lack of competition. "I wrote pretty well, and Huntley looked good and had a great voice." Believe me, at the age of 75, Brinkley still writes very well indeed.