The Pol Watcher : David Brinkley ‘Turned Off’ by Washington Scene

Television came to politics 40 years ago like a great light cast across a long-dark room.

And the national political conventions became the place where the great light found its new masters. In 1956, at the second televised convention, NBC featured an older man with a serious demeanor and a younger partner with a sloping posture and a droll wit. Two months later, NBC named Chet Huntley and David Brinkley as the anchors of its nightly news.

Draped casually across a chair, drumming his long fingers as if he were a little bored, Brinkley has remained on screen ever since.

He is part of the national memory, partly defining what television is, a voice so recognizable that most in his business cannot help but imitate him.

At 72, as he anchors his 20th convention, he is bitter about politics and Washington, to which he has devoted his life.

It is, he says, “American politics in the worst period of its history.”

He is loath to give interviews anymore. The questions seem so familiar. But the answers still come out eloquently, the rhythm casual but the message dark.

“This country is really turned off on politics and politicians . . . and I know why. Because (the American people) have been lied to so much, and deceived so much. Cheated. Abused. Taken advantage of by pols. It would be surprising if they weren’t turned off. They deserve to be turned off.

“I’m turned off.”

Like much of the rest of his generation, Brinkley began in print, starting in his North Carolina hometown in 1938 with the Wilmington Morning Star. He later went to work for United Press. In 1943, at the age of 23, he moved to NBC radio. Thirteen years later, he was in the anchor booth with Huntley. (Huntley died in 1974.)

Conventions were a national phenomenon, “mainly because television was new,” Brinkley said. “And until that time no one had ever really seen a convention except a small number of people who had gone to them. And having never seen them before, they were enchanted. . . .

“At that time they had demonstrations. They had a lot of girls in short skirts carrying all sorts of things. They had bands marching up and down the aisles. It was show biz. It was very interesting, funny and attractive.”

Rather than a ratings loser, politics loaned television news credibility, so much so that the sponsors of the first conventions were makers of TV sets.

At the time, 1956, NBC’s nightly news show was the “Camel News Caravan” anchored by John Cameron Swayze--a broadcast controlled by Camel cigarettes. The show was written in the present-tense style of newsreels, and pictures were forbidden of anyone smoking anything but cigarettes. NBC executive Reuven Frank persuaded Camel to make a special exemption for cigars in the hands of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

After making a sensation and winning the ratings at the convention, Huntley and Brinkley changed all that with “The Huntley-Brinkley Report.”

Brinkley specialized in ironic reports about politics from Washington. Huntley took a more serious tone from New York. Together, they would dominate the evening news in the country for more than a decade.

When he was 61, Brinkley’s career entered a new phase, when he joined ABC in 1981 to begin “This Week With David Brinkley.”

Designed by ABC News President Roone Arledge, the program revolutionized the traditional Sunday Washington talk-show format. Unlike “Meet the Press,” Brinkley’s show was an hour long; it included more than one guest, along with a taped segment, and ended with a roundtable discussion among the reporters. Rather than a mock press conference, it was something more like a Washington salon for television.

In the 10 1/2 years since, he believes he has had virtually every national and international figure on the air, more than 1,000 of them.

The changes he has seen, however, are not pleasing. “The politicians have painted themselves into a corner . . . spending huge amounts of money, to the point that there is no money left to spend. And if they promise some kind of swell new program, people will simply laugh at them. They know it’s not going to happen.

“So it is not a great time in American history.”

Brinkley blames Congress more than the President for the political profligacy. But, unlike many observers, he does not think that television is at fault for somehow driving substance out of politics or reducing the business of governing to one-liners and staged events.

The major effect of his medium on politics, he says, is that “television has made politicians more relentless in their pursuit of money.” Since television is horribly expensive, he says, politicians are cozier with lobbyists than they were, because the lobbyists give them money. And they are hard-nosed about regulating candidates’ fund-raising--because they need the money.

“If you are running for Senate in California or any big state . . . for every working day you have to raise something like $2,700 every day for six years to pay the cost of running for re-election.”

But Brinkley does agree that the press has become more cynical.

“Covering politics if you are, say, 40 years old, you have seen very few if any political activities that are pleasing, successful, beneficial. You have seen American politics, I would say, in the worst period of its history: the naked pursuit of power and of privilege and of perks.”

Brinkley is not especially concerned with the networks’ decisions to scale back their coverage of conventions.

“If we were obsessed with (ratings), we would have quit the conventions long ago. Most people don’t look at it. They think of it as boring, tedious, repetitious, preplanned, organized, structured, almost like a movie. . . . However, we still put a lot of this stuff on the air even though most people don’t want to look at it. Put it on anyway. I guess we have some kind of duty to do it.”

And unlike some critics this year, Brinkley does not particularly blame the news media’s growing interest in the personal lives of politicians, though he thinks people have made too much of that.

“If your purpose in life is to achieve power, one aspect of it might be dominating women, and I think it is. And I don’t know how many politicians I have known who were obsessed with their sex lives. . . .

“How much of that should be printed or broadcast? I can’t answer that. Nor can anyone else. When we talk of the right to know, what it usually means is, it’s something a reporter wants to write. But the public does have a right to know something about the character of the people running for office.”

The decision, Brinkley said, needs to be made case by case.

The press shouldn’t have published recent questions about George Bush’s private life, he thinks. “Not on the basis of what they knew. All we have, as best as I can recall, is a third-handed piece of gossip said to have originated with an ambassador who is now dead.”

The questions about Bill Clinton’s private life were different, he said. “The woman (Gennifer Flowers) made the charge publicly, and he never really denied it. I assume it’s true, but beyond that, I don’t give a damn. His wife knows it. If she’s going to stay married to him, OK, it’s between the two of them. None of my business. But if she made the charge and he has not (fully) denied it, I believe it is a legitimate piece of evidence.”

Brinkley is not overly impressed with the current presidential candidates.

On George Bush: “He’s got his song and dance down pretty much pat. He’s pretty good.”

On Bill Clinton: “He’s afraid of us (on the Brinkley show). Afraid of George Will and Sam Donaldson. We’ve never really had him on as a full guest. He won’t come. That’s the only reason I can think of.”

On Dan Quayle: “We had him on the same day Bush picked him. And I’ve always rather liked him. He’s not as dumb as he’s made out to be. No Thomas Jefferson, but then who is? Certainly above the average of the political group. (But) he comes across looking like a kid. He looks like he just began to shave last year. Plus, he has had some bad luck. I don’t understand that potato thing. A mistake of minor consequence, but it has damn near destroyed him.”

On Ross Perot: “I had Perot on once. . . . Very nasty. He would make such remarks as, ‘Well, now, that is a stupid question,’ which is a judgment he is not equipped to make. . . . The sad part is, he offered some ideas that were very good, I thought.”

This brings Brinkley back to the basic problem with politics, the idea that it is political suicide to seriously discuss how to deal with the deficit.

“Or so it is thought. I don’t know if there is any real truth in all this. Everyone believes that, and that is something that has never been tested. . . . I think if you present it correctly and explain to the people what the problem is and told them it has to be solved somehow-- somebody, somehow, sometime, has got to do it.”