Customer Reviews

David Brinkley

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Disappointed almost to the point of disgust, to put it in as straightforward a way as possible. How can someone that has been involved in so much history give us a memoir with so little to say. He has seen so much, interviewed so many important and influential people during the last 40 years surly he has better stories then this. The book started out with the obligatory small town boy stories with the average level of interest, unfortunately the book really never got past this dull, inconsequential stuff. He gave as much time to getting stuck with a dinner bill by the Kennedy's as he did the assassination of JFK. You decide which is more important. Overall I felt the book was a major let down.

David Brinkley (1920-2003) brings his famous dry wit to this reasonably attractive 1995 memoir. Brinkley describes his youth in North Carolina, his education and military service, and then his long career in journalism. I liked reading about his covering Franklin D. Roosevelt, his 1945 visit to an anti-smoking group (whom he dismissed as cranks), and his covering Winston Churchill's ¨Iron Curtain¨ speech in Fulton, Missouri - on the train there President Truman ordered reporters to lose at poker to Churchill, who was a mediocre player. Brinkley also describes the rise of television news, his co-anchoring the top-rated Huntley-Brinkley Report (1956-1970), John F. Kennedy, Vietnam, Richard Nixon, etc. There is quite a bit of history in these pages.

I liked that Brinkley uses the same dry wit here that he brought to his TV shows. Yet he seldom goes deep in his subjects, and this memoir never quite connects as do those by Theodore H White, Walter Cronkite, William L. Shirer, and other top journalists.