Brinkley, David McClure

(b. 10 July 1920 in Wilmington, North Carolina; d. 11 June 2003 in Houston, Texas), television news reporter, anchorman, and commentator whose economical prose and stark, clipped delivery were familiar to tens of millions of Americans for a half century.

Brinkley was the youngest of five children of William Graham Brinkley, a railroad executive, and Mary MacDonald (West) Brinkley, a homemaker. His father died when he was eight years old. Brinkley was a voracious reader, with a particular admiration for E. B. White. At New Hanover High School he was a reporter for the student newspaper and a member of the marching band and the rifle team, but he stopped attending classes before receiving his diploma to take a job with the Wilmington Morning Star (now the Star-News) in 1938. Hired as a reporter and copywriter for United Press (UP), he had a succession of assignments at the wire service’s bureaus in Nashville, Tennessee; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Montgomery, Alabama. Brinkley took evening college courses at three universities during this period, but he never earned a degree. “I did not think there was anything [the professors] could teach me,” he said, crediting his education to self-directed reading at public libraries.

Brinkley joined the U.S. Army in 1940 and served as a supply sergeant, but he was diagnosed with a kidney ailment and received a medical discharge in 1941. Returning to UP, he was assigned as a radio copywriter in Atlanta, Georgia, and during the next two years developed a reputation for concise, easily understood writing. In a 1981 interview with Newsweek, Brinkley claimed he received a job offer from the Washington, D.C., bureau of Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) News in 1943 and quit his UP job to accept it. “When I got there, they claimed they’d never heard of me.... So I walked across the street to NBC [National Broadcasting Company] and got hired,” he said. He worked as a writer and on-air radio and television journalist for NBC News for almost forty years.

Many established journalists were reluctant to try television during the medium’s introduction to the public after World War II. But Brinkley, lacking a college degree, big-city newspaper experience, or the recognition enjoyed by veteran war correspondents, saw television as an opportunity and gained experience as a television reporter before almost anyone else in broadcast journalism. As early as 1945, he appeared as the moderator of America United, a news analysis program. In 1951 Brinkley was named as the Washington correspondent for NBC’s Camel News Caravan, one of the first daily news shows. He appeared regularly on the fifteen-minute news summary until 1956. During this five-year period, more than half of the households in the United States got their first television sets.

In the summer of 1956 Brinkley and Chet Huntley were paired by the NBC News chief Reuven Frank to coanchor the network’s coverage of the Democratic and Republican conventions. Pleased with their performance in the ratings and with the overwhelming adulation they provoked from the critics, the network replaced the Camel News Caravan that fall with a completely revamped daily evening news program called NBC News, featuring the two reporters. Within a year, the series was retitled The Huntley-Brinkley Report and expanded from fifteen minutes to half an hour.

The Huntley-Brinkley Report revolutionized television news, which previously had been little more than a combination of radio news scripts illustrated with clips of newsreel footage. State-of-the-art technology and image-making were both brought to bear. Huntley, the mature, serious westerner, sat in a New York City studio; Brinkley, the boyish southerner, sat in Washington. They tossed the spotlight back and forth, chatted necessary business (sometimes on split screen), and always ended the telecast with a signature farewell: “Good night, Chet.” “Good night, David—and good night for NBC News,” as classical music came up to cover the credits crawl.

Huntley and Brinkley became the face of NBC News for major events as well as for the daily news, and for the first time in the television era NBC News was outperforming its archrival, CBS News, in the ratings and winning the major journalism awards. Brinkley received the duPont Award in 1958 in recognition of his ability to get across crucial background facts that give news stories meaning. He received two Emmys and a Peabody for David Brinkley’s Journal, a half-hour prime-time program covering everything from nuclear disarmament to celebrity interviews and presaging the contemporary television news magazine. Brinkley won another Emmy for his major role in the network coverage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and its aftermath.

In 1970 Huntley retired after he was diagnosed with a fatal illness. Brinkley was now NBC’s best-known news personality; nationally, he was second only to Walter Cronkite of CBS. Some NBC executives felt Brinkley was capable of challenging Cronkite on his own; others wanted to pair him with a new partner, believing the coanchor concept was the basis of NBC’s success; a third faction felt it was time for a change and wanted Brinkley gone. After more than a year of wrangling, the anchor seat of what was now called NBC Nightly News went to John Chancellor, with Brinkley slotted to appear daily in the program’s commentary spot.

A year without an anchor in television news is a year without an image—and it cost NBC heavily. Nightly News fell to last place in 1975, behind CBS and the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). Frantic, the network named Brinkley as Chancellor’s coanchor in 1976. There was little public response to the pairing, but it lingered for three years in lieu of an alternative. Removed from the anchor seat once again, Brinkley was given a weekly prime-time hour, NBC Magazine with David Brinkley, apparently as a consolation prize. The series was scheduled against Dallas, then the top-rated show on television. When Brinkley complained, his show was rescheduled—against another top-ten entertainment program.

Brinkley showed little bitterness about his treatment by NBC after Huntley’s departure. Although he was only in his fifties, Brinkley had become the network’s “grand old man” of television news, enjoying the rare privilege of covering only those stories and topics that interested him in his commentaries. He also had become a sought-after lecturer, commanding top fees to speak in front of corporate, college, and civic audiences. But his relationship with NBC came to an end in 1981, when William Small, the president of NBC News, let Brinkley know that he would not have an assignment at the 1984 political conventions. Brinkley resigned, citing a desire to “continue covering politics.” He was hired almost immediately by ABC News. A variety of duties were announced for him, including commentaries on ABC’s World News Tonight, but only one turned out to be significant. He would host a weekly roundtable discussion series, This Week with David Brinkley. It revitalized his career and made him a force once again in television journalism.

Roone Arledge was the only network news chief without a journalism background. More a showman than a newsman, Arledge set Brinkley’s acerbic wit free in the Sunday morning news-ghetto slot occupied by NBC’s Meet the Press and CBS’s Face the Nation, two of the stodgiest talking heads public affairs shows on television. Arledge placed the opinionated Brinkley at the head of a table of opinionated journalists and commentators, introduced a lead topic with a filmed story, and let them go at it. Regulars during the show’s sixteen-season run included Benjamin Bradlee, the Washington Post’s editor in chief; Karen Elliot House of the Wall Street Journal; and Cokie Roberts of National Public Radio. A three-way discussion between Brinkley, the liberal ABC correspondent Sam Donaldson, and the conservative syndicated columnist George Will was among the show’s most popular features.

Over the course of his career, Brinkley had never been decisively labeled as a liberal or a conservative, instead projecting himself as a kind of all-purpose curmudgeon, unable to suffer fools. This persona grew fiercer with age. Sitting at a table of yakking politicos, he was able to dominate opinion just by looking bored at what they had to say. On election night 1996, the last of twenty-two presidential elections that he covered, Brinkley greeted President Bill Clinton’s re-election by saying of him, on camera, “He has not a creative bone in his body. Therefore, he’s a bore, and will always be a bore.”

This Week buried its distinguished rivals in the ratings and became the most quoted and imitated of the Sunday morning news reviews, affording Brinkley great personal satisfaction in the latter part of his career. He retired as its host in 1996, retaining a commentary spot for another year. “I’ve done the news longer than anyone,” he said in his farewell.

In January 1998, just months after he left the program altogether, Brinkley caused controversy in the world of broadcast journalism by appearing as a spokesperson in commercials for Archer Daniels Midland, the giant agribusiness corporation that sponsored This Week and other public affairs programs. A number of important figures, including Walter Cronkite, expressed dismay over Brinkley’s decision to represent the company, which was involved in several major legal disputes. ABC responded by refusing to run the ads. “It’s as if I’d robbed a bank,” said Brinkley.

Brinkley married Ann Fischer, a newspaper reporter, on 11 October 1946. The couple had three sons, including Joel Brinkley, a reporter for the New York Times who won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the plight of refugees in Cambodia. The couple was divorced in 1971. Brinkley married Susan Melanie Benfer, a real estate agent, on 10 June 1972. Brinkley became a stepfather to Benfer’s daughter, but the couple did not have any children together. Upon retirement in 1997, he left the Washington area to live in Houston. He died of complications from a fall at home. Brinkley is buried in Oakdale Cemetery in Wilmington.

Brinkley did much to shape the character of television news during the 1950s and 1960s as both the coanchor of NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report and the host of David Brink-ley’s Journal. After moving to ABC, he established This Week with David Brinkley as the most popular Sunday morning news commentary program of the 1980s and 1990s. Brinkley was the winner of ten Emmys, three Peabody Awards (including a lifetime achievement award), and the duPont Award. He was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ Hall of Fame in 1989 and presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1992.

Brinkley is the author of four books. David Brinkley: Eleven Presidents, Four Wars, Twenty-two Political Conventions, One Moon Landing, Three Assassinations, 2,000 Weeks of News and Other Stuff on Television and Eighteen Years of Growing Up in North Carolina (1996), and Brinkley’s Beat: People, Places, and Events That Shaped My Time (2003), are both autobiographical. He expresses his political views and interprets the views of others in Washington Goes to War (1988) and Everyone Is Entitled to My Opinion (1996). See also William Whitworth, “Profiles: An Accident of Casting,” New Yorker (3 Aug. 1968). An obituary is in the New York Times (13 June 2003).

David Marc