Not Quite ‘Good Night’

If he seems a little bent with age, his hair white and face overly pale even with the layers of makeup, David Brinkley’s voice still has the lilt, the cadence that makes politics sound infinitely interesting and absurd.

“The aMAZing thing is that the DEMocrats TWO years ago were SO BADly BEATEN, they were PRACtically VOTed out of this Earth,” he is saying, as he watches the launching of President Clinton’s Democratic convention here this week. “And NOW, President Clinton is LEADing in the polls.”

Ah, yes. It is a rhythm that began to make its mark on the viewing public in 1956, when young Brinkley and his seatmate Chet Huntley began their first live convention commentaries to the nation’s fresh new television audience.

Now, Brinkley is doing his final lap as a full-time presence in a network convention. Chicago, the 22nd convention he has attended as a broadcast journalist, will be his last, he says. Or, as he puts it, “Very nearly.”

And at age 76, with a 15-year anniversary looming at ABC-TV’s “This Week With David Brinkley” in November, Brinkley is planning to ask ABC about doing something different after the elections. Not retire, mind you.

But his friends say that after lung surgery and hearing problems, Brinkley is ready to shed some of his weekly duties in favor of a new pared-back schedule--maybe as an eminence-on-call like Walter Cronkite at CBS.

“I do not have any plans to leave, quit or retire. . . . In fact, I have been ordered not to retire,” he says forcefully.

Instead, he says that after the election, he will have a meeting with ABC’s executives “about what to do next. I would not mind trying some new programming, done in some fashion to be decided.”

Still, before he moves on, the grand old man of political prognostication took time to talk about how politics and political conventions have changed, not entirely for the better.

“The principal difference is that the audience seems to have tired of these events,” he said, betraying that semi-smile that makes even such an standard conclusion seem fresh and even funny. “There is a sameness about them, and conventions don’t do a great deal. Like the platforms. Parties used to make a big fuss about them, but now, Dole and Kemp, they say they haven’t read the platform and won’t. Essentially, it’s just a piece of paper that nobody reads.”

Indeed, like 15,000 journalists who came to San Diego and Chicago this summer to see the latest political stagecraft, Brinkley looks back at other conventions to find the kind of politics that can make people move away from baseball or “Seinfeld” or home shopping.

And, while the focus in Chicago is on 1968--the Democrats’ last convention here when their party split into two ugly camps--Brinkley goes back to 1952 and 1956--the years when television was first beginning to stake its claim on the American voter.

“Those were good years,” he says. “Great years.”

Well, 1952 wasn’t exactly a great year for television commentary, he admits. The East Coast was connected by one TV cable to the West Coast and the networks had to share it. There was one set of pictures--also shared by everybody, and Brinkley’s job with NBC was to do the audio that went along with what the novice television viewer was seeing.

“It was not exactly a big-time job,” he says now.

The big time in convention lore would start four years later when Huntley-Brinkley intoned from NBC’s simple booth while Cronkite was doing the same from CBS’ equally spartan quarters. (ABC News had not put a thoroughbred in the news race at that point, or as Brinkley puts it more gently, “they were not fully in the game yet.”)

“We just blundered our way through it, not knowing what we were doing exactly, but when the New York Times wrote about it, they gave me the greatest review I’ve had in my life, before or since.”

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More than praise from the writing press, Brinkley’s reports (the word “wry” is an almost obligatory adjective) also hooked a whole generation on politics--a pursuit that became more than the stuff of dusty civics books.

Even President Clinton has said that Brinkley’s commentary brought politics to life, making him realize that there was more to the presidential process than the pomposities offered by too many commentators from the past.

“Watching Brinkley in 1956 made a lot of difference to many of us, when he dropped the tone of, you know, the kind of Olympian comments from above,” said Jeff Greenfield, one of ABC’s political commentators. “I think he taught a lot of people like me that politics was theater as well as important and consequential.”

Said Sam Donaldson, one of Brinkley’s ABC colleagues: “Two things that stand out. One is his wit, that is the way he writes. The other is the way he talks. The great communicators--whether it’s Edward R. Murrow or Rush Limbaugh--it’s their voice. It’s their voice patterns. Those of us who are just plain Midwestern, we don’t have the impact that Brinkley has.

“Look, if you take something like this” and he begins a sentence in his deep but unaccented broadcast voice: “I went down to the Loop today after the broadcast and I looked around to find something to do and I couldn’t.”

“Well, it’s not very interesting.”

Then Donaldson begins dropping into an imitation of Brinkley that has been part of the repertoire of a good number of male journalists over the last four decades: “ ‘Well, I went DOWN to the LOOP after the BROADcast to see if I could FIND something to DO. I COULDn’t.’ Now, that’s interesting. If you look at a transcript you’d say, that’s not brilliant. But if you listen to him say it, you’d say ‘Wow, that’s witty. That’s brilliant.’

“But, it’s the wit too,” Donaldson adds quickly. “I’m not saying here’s some dummy.”

The wit, in fact, is now compiled into a new book set for release in October called “Everyone Is Entitled to My Opinion,” a collection of Brinkley’s homilies that come at the end of each Sunday show. They include the man who kept a small zoo in his apartment--apparently content until the police came, took the animals away and then left him alone with his wife.

Brinkley’s autobiography came out last year with the all-encompassing title of “David Brinkley: 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.”

Historical context has become increasingly rare in the speed-driven world of television. The institutional memory is fading. John Chancellor died this year. Cronkite is all but retired.

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Indeed, if the historical context helps many viewers, Brinkley’s flashbacks have begun to rankle some of his younger colleagues. Quietly, they grouse about his hold on the Sunday morning show that still claims the No. 1 spot nationally, even though Tim Russert’s “Meet the Press” on NBC has been increasingly nibbling at Brinkley’s lead.

Russert, who calls Brinkley “the king of Sunday morning,” says that his competitor “set the standard by which all other Sunday morning programs are judged. He is a great and stronger presence than anyone now on television. And when you turn on the TV and you see David Brinkley, you stop. Even the surfers stop.”

Most of ABC’s brass recognize that Brinkley is an icon not only at the network but in television, and they could be expected to find a way to accommodate him when he asks to move on.

“David knows it’s about time to do something else,” said one network official somberly. “He’s the champ, and he wants to walk out of the ring.”

For those nipping at Brinkley’s heels, any lapse--even those that would easily happen to one of ABC’s younger stars in this live medium--is attributed not to staff or to a bad day but to his years.

Still, for many, these “whippersnipers,” as one Brinkley fan called the critics, fail to recognize how much Brinkley gives these political events context, humor and a kind of gentility that may well depart from the television business as soon as he does.

In an odd way, if Brinkley began his career breaking the ice in his profession, at the end of it he is clearly trying to add civility to his now boisterous trade.

“The word I always use for David is ‘gracious,’ ” says Cokie Roberts as she sat outside the ABC sky-booth after Sunday’s show. “I think that’s a lot of what the viewers respond to too. There is that sense that they’re in the hands of a gentleman and that no matter how obstreperous the rest of us get, he will make sure it’s all OK in the end.”