Elegy for elegance

While television viewers remember David Brinkley as an elegant, wry presence on their screens, his colleagues in the broadcast news business recalled him Thursday for his journalistic skills that made his on-air presence look effortless.

Brinkley, who died Wednesday of complications from a fall, helped pioneer the dual anchor format when he and Chet Huntley hosted the top-rated “Huntley-Brinkley Report” from 1956 until Huntley retired in 1970. Brinkley joined ABC in 1981, where his “This Week With David Brinkley” brought a much livelier look to Sunday morning news programs.

The North Carolina native was from the old school of television journalism, a one-man band who preferred to do his writing and research for himself, despite an entourage of colleagues whose job it was to help support the on-air stars.

ABC “This Week” colleague Cokie Roberts recalled the time Brinkley was anchoring ABC’s nightly news during the Persian Gulf War and the script had to be changed in the teleprompter, so that Brinkley was reading it cold, on air, as it unscrolled before him. “As he read it, he corrected it,” she recalled, noting that he changed both an incorrect fact and the grammar. “It was the most remarkable trick I ever saw him do,” she said.

NBC’s Tom Brokaw grew up studying Brinkley’s style and now occupies the same “NBC Nightly News” anchor chair. Every election night, Brokaw said, he thinks about what he learned: “The key for David is less is more on television and to understand that you’re not writing captions. People can see the pictures for themselves; what you want to do is expand their understanding of what they’re seeing.”

Brokaw said that instinct kicked in for him when he was anchoring during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. “I was thinking, ‘We’re all seeing the same thing here, so now we have to think about what this means....’ And that all grew out of watching David.”

“He worked extraordinarily hard to make it look easy,” said Richard Wald, a Columbia University professor who first worked with Brinkley at NBC News and later recruited him for ABC’s Sunday morning news broadcast. When he would co-anchor hours of election or convention coverage, Wald said, “he would look as if he were talking off the top of his head,” but in reality he had traveled to the primaries to get a feel for the place, spent hours poring over briefing books, memorizing details and storing up material to trot out at the right time.

Wald recalled Brinkley’s NBC performance the night of the 1968 California primary. Just as NBC was preparing to go off the air, a report trickled in that Robert Kennedy had been shot, but NBC didn’t know details about the seriousness of the injury.

Today, TV anchors are accustomed to moments of on-air vamping to fill time, and viewers are used to seeing spontaneous performances. But back then, Wald said, networks “didn’t just stay on the air, and viewers looked for a much more polished performance.” A producer whispered in Brinkley’s ear: “David, talk.” And he did, Wald said, for 15 minutes, ad-libbing a “complete history of all the primaries up to that time and then Bobby Kennedy’s role in them. And he did it perfectly, as though it was scripted. It was quirk of mind, but it was his quirk of mind, and it was powerfully valuable for television.”

When NBC wanted Brinkley to retire in 1981, Wald helped ABC News President Roone Arledge recruit him to ABC, whose Sunday morning show was a distant third in the ratings. “This Week with David Brinkley” was first within a year and stayed on top until Brinkley relinquished the host role in 1996. He retired the following year.

“He made everyone feel welcome,” recalled Sam Donaldson, a panelist on the program. “I knew David had strong opinions about many things, but you never knew on air.”

Added Wald: “The reason he was essentially objective on air was that he didn’t think it was nice not to be. It wasn’t polite. He lived by a code that people sort of don’t live by anymore.”

Although Brinkley’s unique on-air style seems formal compared to today’s attitude-filled cable news anchoring, at the time he was a breath of fresh air. “He talked to you from inside the screen as if he were in the room,” ABC’s Roberts said. “It was the perfect combination of substance and style.” Donaldson added: “Substantive but not dull. He didn’t take himself seriously, but he took the work seriously.”

The challenge when anchoring together for hours, “ABC World News Tonight” anchor Peter Jennings recalled in a statement, was to avoid beginning to imitate his distinct style.

In addition to his behind-the-scenes skills, Roberts recalled a somewhat forgotten role Brinkley played in shaping the national debate over civil rights. “I don’t think modern Americans understand how important it was to have a Southerner talk about civil rights to the country,” said Roberts, whose father, Hale Boggs, and later her mother, Lindy Boggs, served in the U.S. House of Representatives from Louisiana.

“My friends and relatives were always able to dismiss people as Yankees who didn’t know our ways, who didn’t understand,” Roberts said. But “when the most famous man in America was from Wilmington and he was talking about civil rights on air and making it clear it was right and it was going to happen, it affected Southern viewpoints.”