Customer Reviews

David Brinkley: A Memoir

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I was quite excited to get David Brinkley's book, as I have enjoyed his newscasts for years, particularly the early conventions. As it turns out, this is a "Chatty-Cathy" book that rambles on about his life, with his TV persona somewhat as an afterthought. The book is quite readable with his enjoyable laconic style, but at the end, you don't know much more about him, TV, the process of TV news, or the events to which he was an eyewitness....at least not more than you already knew or could surmise.
The book was a pleasant interlude, but somewhat a bit of froth

Brinkley gives the reader a lot of insight on how it was like to be one of the first people in broadcast journalism and he fills the book with rich anecdotes and humorous incidents that he got to cover. One such incident is that when he was covering the opening of Cape Canavaral in Florida the town of Cocca Beach grew so fast that a hotel owner expanded a hotel without even bothering to check to see if the additional land belonged to him. The actual owner of the land did not complain until the construction was finished and then he claimed the hotel to himself. Although Brinkley tries to go into a chronological order sometimes he skips back and forth between different time periods and this can be very confusing. As far as his content is concerned he includes a lot about various topics from the political conventions to the foreign policy issues that affected this nation (Vietnam and post World War II Europe). However the civil rights movement was a major part of the 1950's and 60's and since he is from the South I would have expected that he would have devoted an entire chapter to covering this tumultuous time in American history. Overall this book is worth reading.

To me, Brinkley always seemed a cut above the modern TV journalist / anchor -- more sober, more professional and less interested in focusing the attention on himself rather than his subject.

David Brinkley tells his life story in this quick book. Growing up with the new medium of television, he and his partner (Chet Huntly) wrote much of the playbook for the way network news and tv interview shows are conducted.

This is an interesting story that tells not only of Brinkley's growth and development but also of the maturation of the tv news industry. Along the way, Brinkley was witness to many seminal events and has of course met many of the notables of his era.

The man's integrity and dedication to the profession of journalism shines through in this book. I can't imagine Sam or Cokie or Dan or Peter writing this book. Too much would be devoted to image and the their impact on the news. Brinkley was able to achieve the incredible credibility he enjoyed because he was made of different stuff -- this is the story of a darn good journalist who understood the difference between covering the news and entering it.

Being born in the early 1970's, the only way that I remember and have become endeared to David Brinkley was on ABC's "This Week with David Brinkley." It was Sunday morning must-see viewing for a political junkie like me. Tim Russert's "Meet the Press" has outstanding questioning of his guests, but for some reason Brinkley's show was my favorite.

This book was a treasure for me to read because it was like seeing the history of modern politics from the front-lines. Brnkley was there as tv gained its foothold, and then its firm grip as THE MEDIUM to campaign for president. His insights into the different presidents since FDR are non-partisan and quite funny. He pulls no punches about who he liked and disliked and keeps his political ideology to himself for the most part. Though in the final chapter of this book, he does provide some biting commentary on the money-grubbing and unfair tax practices in this country.

This book can be confusing at times, because Mr. Brinkley seems to have pieced it together as his thoughts were coming to him. It is random and does not follow any cohesive time-line. He will jump from talking about the 1950's then to the 1970's then back to the 1950's and 60's again. Frankly I did not understand the point and thought it might be easier to read had he decided to write in chronological order.

I was also surprised to learn that Brinkley and his co-anchor Chet Huntley were the top rated news broadcasters of hteir day. All this time I had thought Walter Cronkite had ALWAYS been the #1 rated broadcaster and in fact his CBS program only gained on NBC in the early 1970's. Mr. Brinkley continuously expresses his fierce competitiveness towards the other networks and their newscasters. Some habits die hard for this career journalist who was constantly working hard to provide the BEST presentation in his field.

This book is really an enjoyable read and I would recommend it anyone interested in the pre-CNN days of tv journalism. David Brinkley was a national treasure and I miss him every Sunday. He was truly the glue to that program among the huge egos of Sam Donaldson and George Will.

Even if you just come across this book in a book store, I would especially take a good read towards the end, about page 245-246. He writes about a page and a half on the men that died on the beaches of Normandy. It is heart wrenching and tears welled up in my eyes while I was reading it. Then I reread it again and highlighted the section, because I will save that portion one as of the most outstanding tributes to the men of that "greatest generation" who died that day. It's worth it's price for that page alone.

From 1956 to 1970, before the days of Dan Rather on CBS, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley said "good night" to each other at the 'finis' of NBC network news, leaving everybody watching feeling a kind of contentment that "all's right with the world." After his first eighteen years spent growing up, working for the small town newspaper, in North Carolina, his tenure fin the world of television news saw him through four wars, three assassinations, two wives, twenty-two political conventions, eleven presidents, 2,000 weeks of canvassing and reporting the news to the American public and one moon landing, he is on terra firma at last. Born in Wilmington, and educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Vanderbilt University at Nashville, Tennessee, he spent most of his life on the Washington, D.C. scene. He had a soft Southern drawl and a knack for brevity, using just the right word or phrase to sum up a situation. This memoir as such is mostly about politics and his role as observer of the leaders then and now.

He was in the press corps. "Even though I was in Washington covering the White House for the last years of Franklin Roosevelt's presidency and reported from the White House every day when there was any news and traveled with him on several trips, we only knew, as everyone knew, the U. S. Treasury paid him one hundred thousand dollars a year." Perhaps no form of governments needs great leaders so much as democracy. The political history of the 20th century lists six men as the best leaders: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao Zedong, Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. The first four were tyrants; had it not been for the final two, western civilization might have perished.

In March 1946, Harry S. Truman's private pullman, the 'Ferdinand Magellan,' passed on to him after Roosevelt's death, on a private train at Washington's Union Station pulled out with his guest, Winston Churchill, his press secretary, Charles Ross, and others as the Truman-Churchill Express to St. Louis. Churchill was noted for writing his own speeches and used Lord Byron as a part of this particular appeal: "He who ascends to mountain tops shall find the loftiest peaks most wrapped in clouds and snow.
He who surpasses or subdues mankind must look down on the hate of those below.
Though far above the sun of glory shine and far beneath the earth and ocean spread round him are icy rocks
And fiercely blow contending tempests on his naked head
And thus reward the toils which to those summits led."

David had grown up watching the Tennessee Williams' plays and movies about the South with its drunkenness and cruelty. "I survived early radio at NBC, and it survived me. The grand old names in radio never made it in television." There had been only one 100-wattt AM radio station in the small town of Wilmington He called a spade a spade. His sister Mary Driscoll worked as legal secretary for Joseph McCarthy, who he called the "Grand Champion American Liar." He routinely pronounced "him to be what he was, a loudmouthed liar." He said, "had he been truthful, ...he might have been a great political figure. But it was only one lie after another...."

The 1956 Democrat Convention was the first he covered. Adlai Stevenson from Illinois was the candidate to run for that party's choice for U. S. President. Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee was chosen with the help of Al Gore's dad, Senator Albert Gore, as Vice President. They lost. The 1960 election used "multimillion-dollar mainframe computers bigger than four-door Buicks" to count the votes.

He wasn't impressed by President Nixon ("Before Nixon was forced to resign the presidency, he chose Spiro Agnew as his vice president, only to begin still another degrading and humiliating episode in American presidential politics."). He observed, "While eight years later, Nixon was one of the most intelligent presidents of modern times, he never seemed happy or seemed to enjoyed what he was doing. He always looked mournful and it is difficult to find a photo of him with a smile on his face." He didn't have anything good to say about Agnew, Gerald Ford, or Jimmy Carter. He called Eisenhower the Republican party's first president in twenty years. At the 1964 Convention, the agenda had them denouncing the John Birch Society, an even harder-line right-wing fringe group, along with the klan, and the Communist party."

This memoir was just a beginning; David Brinkley also wrote EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION and BRINKLEY'S BEAT: PEOPLE, PLACES AND EVENTS THAT SHAPED MY TIME.

It is fine. After all David Brinkley was & is a great reporter. It is too light. It seems to be written because it was expected once he retired. I expected a little more substance and frankly a little more effort.

I very much enjoyed reading David Brinkley's memoir. As pages turn, one can hear his voice as though he was reading aloud, complete with his trademark short sentences and his unique half-Southern and half-like-no-other accent (he explains this, by the way). I finished Walter Cronkite's fine book "A Reporter's Life" a while back, and found a number of parallels since obviously they are of the same topics and era. But Brinkley's was even more fun to read in my humble opinion -- his dry wit comes across perfectly, and it's just very entertaining and enlightening. A fascinating, fast-paced read.

As a non-native English speaker who has been watching ABC's "This Week" all these years, I've always found David Brinkley's manner of speaking concise and easy to understand with short sentences and simple vocabulary. This was far cry from many other loud talking heads, including David's own colleagues on his Sunday program. He taught me how English could be spoken plainly but precisely and effectively. His memoir is written exactly the way he spoke. He gets to the point without being wordy and beating around the bush.
One thing I liked about this memoir is that he wrote more about his professional life than personal, which was of little interest to me. This memoir is also a history of American TV journalism, filled with episodes that were new to me. I was particularly interested in learning what he had to say about Joe McCarthy, whom David's own sister served as secretary for many years. Quite a bit is written about Kenndey brothers, too, including JFK assasination. So glad he published this memoir before he passed away.

Having grown up with the Huntley-Brinkley report and watching them at all the conventions, I truly enjoyed this book. Especially interesting is how Brinkley trashes Jesse Helms.