Abraham

David Brinkley: From the New Deal to the Contract with America (1995)

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• published: 03 May 2014
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David McClure Brinkley (July 10, 1920 -- June 11, 2003) was an American newscaster for NBC and ABC in a career lasting from 1943 to 1997. From 1956 through 1970, he co-anchored NBC's top-rated nightly news program, The Huntley--Brinkley Report, with Chet Huntley and thereafter appeared as co-anchor or commentator on its successor, NBC Nightly News, through the 1970s. In the 1980s and 1990s, Brinkley was host of the popular Sunday This Week with David Brinkley program and a top commentator on election-night coverage for ABC News. Over the course of his career, Brinkley received ten Emmy Awards, three George Foster Peabody Awards, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He wrote three books, including the critically acclaimed 1988 bestseller Washington Goes to War, about how World War II transformed the nation's capital. This social history was largely based on his own observations as a young reporter in the city. The main character of the Robert Mayer novel Superfolks is a superhero whose secret identity is as a journalist named David Brinkley, after Brinkley. David Brinkley was mentioned in the Scrubs episode, #4.23, "My Faith in Humanity". There's a patient named Betty talking to her neighbor, Jake, and J.D. walks in. Jake says, "Betty even let me in on a few of her romantic trysts from her younger days. You familiar with Mr. David Brinkley?" J.D. replies with a disbelieving "No way." On Second City Television, Rick Moranis did occasional impersonations of David Brinkley.[10] David Brinkley was mentioned in the 2001 Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical-episode "Once More, with Feeling" in the song "I'll Never Tell". Anya sings "When I get so worn and wrinkly / That I look like David Brinkley". In the episode of the cartoon show Johnny Bravo, "The Sensitive Man", Johnny asks a park go-er he if he's "...as studly as the statue of David..." to which she responds that he's "...as studly as David... Brinkley." The Tom Lehrer song "So Long Mom (I'm Off to Drop the Bomb)" includes the verse: While we're attacking frontally Watch Brinkally and Huntally Describing contrapuntally The cities we have lost. No need for you to miss a minute of the agonizing holocaust. In 1952, Brinkley began providing Washington reporting on NBC Television's evening news program, The Camel News Caravan (the name changed over time), hosted by John Cameron Swayze. In 1956, NBC News executives considered various possibilities to anchor the network's coverage of the Democratic and Republican political conventions, and when executive J. Davidson Taylor suggested pairing two reporters (he had in mind Bill Henry and Ray Scherer), producer Reuven Frank, who favored Brinkley for the job, and NBC's director of news, Joseph Meyers, who favored Chet Huntley, proposed combining Huntley and Brinkley. NBC's top brass consented, but they had so little confidence in the team that they withheld announcing it for two months.[3] Their concern proved unfounded. The pairing worked so well that on October 29, 1956, the two took over NBC's flagship nightly newscast, with Huntley in New York City and Brinkley in Washington, D.C., for the newly christened Huntley--Brinkley Report. Brinkley's dry wit offset the serious tone set by Huntley, and the program proved popular with audiences turned off by the incessantly serious tone of CBS's news broadcasts of that era. Brinkley's ability to write for the ear with simple, declarative sentences gained him a reputation as one of the medium's most talented writers, and his connections in Washington led CBS's Roger Mudd to observe, "Brinkley, of all the TV guys here, probably has the best sense of the city--best understands its moods and mentality. He knows Washington and he knows the people."[4] Most often described as "wry," Brinkley once suggested on the air that the best way to resolve the controversy over whether to change the name of Boulder Dam to "Hoover Dam" was to have former president Herbert Hoover change his name to "Herbert Boulder". Another example of Brinkley's seething wryness was evinced on the third night of Chicago's infamous Democratic Convention of 1968. After continuous abuses made on the floor of the convention of NBC correspondents -- namely, interference and shadowing of the media staff by supporters of Hubert Humphrey, presumably with connections to political boss Richard J. Daley -- voiced a protest of Daley's behavior and his alleged interference with freedoms of the press following Senator Abraham Ribicoff's stormy nomination of George McGovern. Perhaps in reply to a control room for objectivity, referencing Daley's refusal to be interviewed by John Chancellor earlier in the evening, Brinkley can be heard over the McGovern demonstration to have scolded "Mayor Daley had his chance!" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brinkley