This epoch with . . .

A 1960's ditty, sung to the tune of "Love and Marriage," went this way:

Huntley-Brinkley, Huntley-Brinkley
One is gloomy and the other is twinkley

David Brinkley was the twinkley one, but he neglects to mention that wry tribute in his autobiography, a ripping tale of a life in journalism that spans the entire history of television news -- a record of longevity that no other TV newsperson now working can come close to matching. Most television news watchers under the age of thirty (and there are a few) know Brinkley only as the host of a Sunday morning political chat show on the ABC network, but like a North Atlantic iceberg, that job description conceals the great bulk of his contribution to American journalism since World War II and continuing into the present -- and (we hope) into the indeterminate future.

For eleven years (1956-1967), the unlikely pairing of Chet Huntley -- a rugged Montanan who sometimes seemed more interested in cattle than the news -- and David Brinkley dominated the TV evening news scene, as well as the coverage of primaries, political conventions, and election nights. Unaccountably, their chemistry on NBC produced ratings gold, although neither ever seemed entirely comfortable being yoked to the other: Huntley in New York, Brinkley in Washington, and the famous sign-off ("Good night, Chet." "Good night, David") which entered the language and remains a shibboleth even for people who can't remember its origins. Both hated it. Huntley thought it made them sound like sissies and Brinkley considered it artificial, contrived and silly. Nonetheless, to this day, people shout after Brinkley in the street: "Good night, David!" (Huntley died in 1974.)

So potent was the Huntley-Brinkley synergy that after the 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco, CBS in a panic ejected Walter Cronkite from his anchor seat and replaced him with their own dynamic duo (Robert Trout and Roger Mudd), a team that fared even worse in the ratings war against the surging NBC News. During the Democratic conclave in Atlantic City that year, the Huntley-Brinkley coverage at one point earned an astonishing 84 percent of the tuned-in audience, perhaps the highest share in television history.

 Brinkley had leaped to TV news prominence thanks partly to a review of his performance at the 1956 Democratic convention in Chicago by New York Times critic Jack Gould. Wrote the Timesman:

 A quiet southerner with a dry wit and a heaven-sent appreciation of brevity has stolen the television limelight this week. . . . Mr. Brinkley quite possibly could be the forerunner of a new school of television commentator; he is not an earnest Voice of Authority imparting the final word to the unwashed of videoland. Instead of the pear-shaped tones he has just a trace of a soft North Carolina drawl. . . . Mr. Brinkley's extraordinary accomplishment has been not to talk too much. . . . He has a knack for the succinct phrase that sums up the situation. . . . It is Mr. Brinkley's humor, however, that is attracting audiences. It is on the dry side and rooted in a sense of relaxed detachment from all the political and electronic turmoil around him. . . . The sudden rise of Mr. Brinkley and the introduction of Mr. Huntley . . . is the first real change in the network news situation in a long while. This convention marks the first time the Columbia Broadcasting System, with such established stars as Edward R. Murr and Eric Sevareid, has had real competition from NBC. . . .

 That began the glory days of NBC News. A few months after the convention, the newly minted Huntley-Brinkley Report went on the air. (Reuven Frank, its producer, later called that first broadcast on October 29, 1956, "the worst evening news program in the history of American network television." It got better.) The Huntley-Brinkley formula was magic and kept the network dominant in news for over a decade. But as Heraclitus once put it, "Nothing is permanent except change," and that goes double for television.

 It all began to unravel during a strike called by the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists in 1967, during which Brinkley declined to cross the picket line and Huntley went on the air every night alone. (chet talks, dave walks, headlined the New York Daily News on page one.) Their mail was hostile: letter writers accused Brinkley of being greedy and of trying to squeeze more money out of NBC (not true: he had nothing to gain by the strike's success or failure); others bashed Huntley for cynical insensitivity to the well-being of lower-paid members of his union (also untrue). But when the strike ended, Huntley-Brinkley's ratings plummeted and soon Walter Cronkite was back on top. NBC's evening news program would never again achieve the same degree of hegemony.

 Huntley hung around for a few more years and then retired and went home to the big-sky country where he was happiest. He'd always been (in Brinkley's words) "the friendly, open-shirted westerner who would have looked comfortable riding a quarter horse . . . his leather saddlery squeaking and the chuck wagon rattling and bumping in the rear, driven by a cook looking and swearing like Walter Brennan." The fabled Huntley-Brinkley Report became the NBC Nightly News and fell into other hands, leaving Brinkley to do TV newsmagazines and, eventually, to defect from NBC after thirty-eight years and accept ABC News president Roone Arledge's offer of a Sunday morning broadcast and a new and different brand
 of success.

Throughout all of this, David Brinkley was becoming as central an aspect of the Washington establishment as the most power-brokering politico. Indeed, he is a member of the permanent establishment: since he joined NBC's Washington bureau as a radio reporter in l943, thousands of elected officials have swung through the capital's revolving doors, but Brinkley -- who has known most of them -- is still greeting new arrivals and bidding others adieu as they go back where they came from.

 As NBC's youthful and inexperienced White House man during World War II, he stood around President Roosevelt's Oval Office desk along with Merriman Smith of the United Press and James Reston of The New York Times, hesitant to ask questions "out of fear I didn't know enough and my ignorance would be revealed." He learned fast. He traveled by rail with President Truman and Winston Churchill when the British statesman went to Fulton, Missouri, to deliver his famous warning about Soviet expansionism. ("From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.") So personally involved did he become with the Kennedy family that days after the assassination of JFK, Robert and Ted Kennedy, along with their wives, visited Brinkley at his Chevy Chase home. They were "drained and tired and in need of a little company outside the family," Brinkley writes. It was "the first time any of them had been out since the funeral." President Lyndon Johnson once tracked Brinkley down at a Sunday picnic and sent a helicopter to spirit him away to Camp David for dinner and a movie and to quiz him about why Washington intellectuals disliked him so much. President Richard Nixon saw Brinkley as s number one enemy; Nixon aide Jeb Magruder complained that even when Brinkley's words were seemingly impartial, "he would indicate his scorn for the president by a raised eyebrow or a note of irony in his voice." The White House was "in a frenzy to destroy Huntley and me," writes Brinkley. They cooked up a plan to have a private poll taken on Brinkley's credibility versus Walter Cronkite's and to leak it to the media if it made Brinkley look bad; and to urge businessmen and TV advertisers to complain to NBC bigwigs about Brinkley's alleged unfairness.

All heady stuff for a kid who grew up in modest circumstances near the Cape Fear River docks in Wilmington, North Carolina, the son of an Atlantic Coast Line Railroad employee who died when the author was eight. There's genuine poignancy in his description of that childhood, and you're likely to learn more about what makes David McClure Brinkley tick by reading it than you have in decades of watching him on television. The father: a decent, loving man who was a soft touch for anybody in need. The mother: implacable, hostile, ever resentful of David because he was born when she was forty-two, thereby shaming her before her friends at St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church who deemed it scandalous for a woman that age to be having sex and making babies.

 I had made her the victim of gossip. I was not wanted. I now believe that for every day of my life at home with her, every time she looked at me, when she could not avoid looking at me, I reminded her of the agony and suffering that came with me when I was born. . . . Another day burned forever in my mind was when I wrote a little story about something or other and walked upstairs and showed it to Mama. After a brief glance, she threw the paper in my face and said, "Why are you wasting your time on this foolishness?" It was another scar slow to heal.

After a kindly English teacher at New Hanover High School (Brinkley never went to college) told him he ought to become a journalist, he hooked up with the Wilmington Star-News at the age of seventeen, then progressed to United Press's offices in Atlanta, Nashville, and Charlotte before coming to ground at NBC's Washington bureau in 1943. That was the golden age of radio news, with stars like Edward R. Murrow, Elmer Davis, H.V. Kaltenborn, Robert McCormick, and Lowell Thomas, few of whom successfully made the transition to television because they couldn't learn how to relate words to moving pictures. ("I hate television," Kaltenborn once told Brinkley.) The first wave of television "anchormen" (before that word was coined) were Douglas Edwards, John Cameron Swayze, and John Charles Daly, who were, respectively, the Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Peter Jennings of that Pleistocene era even though none of them was a seasoned journalist. By accident or guile, Brinkley learned early to address viewers conversationally and without the grandiloquence of radio commentators, letting pictures speak for themselves when words were superfluous.

 The Brinkley career has been unique in other ways beyond its longevity. He's never been a mud-caked war correspondent, never labored abroad in a TV news bureau, never gone dashing from the newsroom to cover some violent outbreak in Africa or Eastern Europe or the Middle East. Trench coats aren't his style. And it's hard to imagine him donning native garb and sneaking into Afghanistan as Dan Rather did. He's every inch a denizen of Washington, a familiar of its back rooms, drawing rooms, and committee rooms. The peril for newspeople in so total and so prolonged an immersion in a single newsbeat is that close personal relationships with powerful newsmakers can sometimes color one's coverage of them. ("My friend Bobby Kennedy," Brinkley writes. And again: "Abe Ribicoff was and is a good friend of mine.") Apart from whether Brinkley's reporting has ever been affected by his palships, a few pages on how he has navigated those tricky shoals would be instructive.

Indeed, this is not the big book that David Brinkley is capable of. It's amiable and aimless, innocent of chronology, perhaps best read aloud in one's niftiest imitation of Brinkley's eminently imitable cadences and cosmopolitan languor. But one yearns for more detail: What did Brinkley actually tell Lyndon Johnson when the president asked him why intellectuals hated him? What did the Kennedys say when they visited Brinkley after the JFK assassination? What was the relationship of Huntley and Brinkley really like in their offscreen moments? (They were never close friends, never each other's kind of guy.) How about some up-close and personal impressions of the whole rollicking parade of colorful characters that has marched past his reviewing stand since World War II: Taft, Stevenson, Humphrey, Mondale, Rockefeller, Kissinger, Moynihan, Tip O'Neill. He does offer us a few longish cadenzas on subjects like political convention reform and the inequities in our tax structure. An entire volume of such essays by David Brinkley would be welcome and I for one would pay good money to read it, but they seem anomalously tacked on in the context of a memoir.

 But enough quibbling. The book entertains as it informs, and it gives us the best insights into David Brinkley we've had so far, thanks to his moving recollections of a less-than-happy childhood.

 And besides, where else can one enjoy stories like the one about President Kennedy ordering his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, to take an official car and go around Washington buying up all the Cuban cigars in town and to bring them back to the White House.

 After Salinger had successfully completed his mission, Kennedy issued his order banning all imports of cigars from Cuba.

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