Famed TV newsman David Brinkley died late Wednesday in his Houston home. ABC News reported he died of complications from a fall. He was 82.
Brinkley, who had been in failing health for some time, retired after a 54-year career in broadcasting that kept him at the pinnacle of television journalism for three decades. Brinkley and his wife, Susan, moved from Florida to Houston in 2000.
Former President Bush called Brinkley "the elder statesman of broadcast journalism," but Brinkley spoke of himself in less grandiose terms.
"Most of my life," he said in a 1992 interview, "I've simply been a reporter covering things, and writing and talking about it."
From 1956-1971, he co-hosted The Huntley-Brinkley Report, the NBC evening news program, with Chet Huntley. The program, at first only 15 minutes in length, switched back and forth between them.
Beyond that regular report, Huntley and Brinkley led NBC as it interrupted regular programming to cover space shots, assassinations, riots and other breaking news with a thoroughness summed up by the unofficial byword "CBS plus 30 (minutes)."
With Huntley and Brinkley at the helm, NBC News enjoyed ratings dominance throughout the 1960s. During the 1964 Democratic convention, NBC, up against CBS and its anchor Walter Cronkite, won an astonishing 84 percent of the viewership.
But their fame extended far beyond the realm of journalism. A consumer-research company found in 1965 that these co-anchors were recognized by more adult Americans than were John Wayne or the Beatles. Despite their mutual disdain for it, their Huntley-Brinkley Report signoff -- "Goodnight, Chet"; "Goodnight, David" -- became part of pop culture.
Then in 1970, Huntley retired. He died four years later.
Brinkley co-anchored the renamed NBC Nightly News with John Chancellor, then became the program's commentator. But the spell was broken. The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite had taken the ratings lead, and NBC News had stumbled.
In 1981, however, Brinkley joined ABC as the host of This Week With David Brinkley, making it the No. 1 Sunday morning news program.
He made his final appearance on the show in 1997 amid a rare controversy, and an apology: Late on election night, after a long evening, he had said unkind things about President Clinton on the air, including calling him a "bore."
Clinton sat for an interview for Brinkley's last show anyway, and after Brinkley apologized, told him: "I always believe you have to judge people on their whole work, and if you get judged based on your whole work, you come out way ahead."
The journalist won numerous broadcast awards include 10 Emmys and three Peabodys, and he has also won acclaim as a writer. His titles include Everyone Is Entitled to My Opinion and Washington Goes to War.
Brinkley aptly summed up his career and life in the subtitle of his 1995 memoir: "11 Presidents, 4 Wars, 22 Political Conventions, 1 Moon Landing, 3 Assassinations, 2,000 Weeks of News and Other Stuff on Television, and 18 Years of Growing Up in North Carolina."
Born in Wilmington, N.C., on July 20, 1920, Brinkley was still in high school when he began writing for his hometown newspaper. He was educated at the University of North Carolina and Vanderbilt University, and after Army service he worked in Southern bureaus for the United Press syndicate.
He moved to Washington, D.C., thinking a radio job awaited him at CBS News. Instead, he had landed a job four blocks away at NBC News. He became White House correspondent -- NBC's first.
Not long after that, as Brinkley recounted in his 1995 memoir, "a large, odd-looking object arrived at the Washington studio ..., so big it could barely be rolled through the door. It was our first television camera."
Focusing on politics, Brinkley was known for his gentlemanly manner, wry wit and, as the Clinton incident illustrated, occasional suffer-no-fools bluntness. Playing against such refinement were a boyish appearance and a jerky style of delivery that suggested a mild case of hiccups.
"If I was to start today I probably couldn't get a job," Brinkley once said, "because I don't look like what people think an anchorperson should look like."
Brinkley was divorced from his first wife, Ann, in the 1960s and married Susan Benfer in 1972.
Among his four children, Alan is an American Book Award-winning historian and Joel is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.
In addition to their Houson home, the Brinkleys kept a summer home in Wyoming, and earlier this year a bedridden Brinkley was rescued there during a fire by a persistent sheriff's deputy who broke into the home through a window.
Geo. H. Lewis & Sons in Houston is in charge of funeral arrangements.
Chronicle staffer Lynwood Abram and Associated Press contributed to this report.
.... As a broadcaster, he was known for a wry sense of humor, pithy observations and a low-key, matter-of-fact style of newscasting and commentary that lacked pretense and pomposity. He was supremely self-confident, not easily impressed, and he came across as less enamored of himself than many of his colleagues. “I don’t try to put a show on the air, be bright and vivacious, because it’s just not my nature,” he said.
....In his career with ABC, Mr. Brinkley also was on-call for special events, like elections and national conventions. His years in the business did not diminish his zeal for news. He liked politicians, he said, although he thought many of them were egocentric braggarts. He made headlines on election night 1996 when he called President Clinton a “bore” on national television and advised viewers to expect four more years of “nonsense” from the president. He later apologized. He didn’t know the microphone was still on, he said. There was a zaniness about political conventions that he always found irresistible. “They’re so crazy, nonsensical, idiotic. I love ’em,” he told Shales.
Gee, I wonder if any of the other kids made a name for themself. :-)