Overview
He is an Icon of the American airwaves, a face and a voice we have been welcoming into our homes for the past half-century. Through times of great upheaval and interludes of business as usual, we have tuned in to David Brinkley's programs on NBC and now on ABC - The Huntley-Brinkley Report, David Brinkley's Journal, This Week with David Brinkley - for his sense of fairness and his distinctive ability to cut through cant and pretension. We know that when he delivers the news it will be cogent, trustworthy and stamped with his trademark sardonic wit. Since his arrival in Washington in 1943 we have heard our history unfold in his unmistakable North Carolina cadences, yet in an age of information overload he is deeply appreciated for being a professional talker who doesn't believe in talking too much. Rich in anecdote and humor, David Brinkley's is a classic American story that overlaps with some of the great events and great personages of our era. He shares priceless moments, public and private: playing poker with Harry Truman, riding the rails with Winston Churchill, being whisked off by helicopter to Camp David by Lyndon Johnson, receiving the Medal of Freedom from George Bush, walking the beach with D Day veterans. And he takes aim at some chronic American bugbears - including taxes and political conventions - from his own, uniquely Brinkley, vantage point.David Brinkley, icon of the American airwaves, has written his autobiography, a classic American story which overlaps with some of the great events and important personages of the era. From playing poker with Truman to riding the rails with Churchill to walking the beaches with D-Day veterans, readers are privy to some of Brinkley's most priceless remembrances. of photos.
Editorials
Mary Elizabeth Williams
The subtitle of David Brinkley's engaging, if idiosyncratic, memoir suggests both the range f the book's contents and its wry tone: 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. This is not so much an autobiography as a loosely organized collection of anecdotes and ruminations, and because its spare prose reproduces the distinctive cadences of Brinkley's speaking voice (is it possible to hear his name and not bring that voice to mind?) reading the book is like spending the evening in the company of an amiable, accomplished storyteller.
And he has wonderful tales to tell. As that subtitle reminds us, Brinkley, one of the most visible and influential television journalists of the past several decades, has covered or commented on most of the major events of in our recent past. What he has to say, about politicians past and present, about the political and social eruptions that have reshaped the country, about the current state of the nation, is almost always interesting, and often startling. But the book is most lively when Brinkley describes, precisely and with wit, the more peculiar features of our political system, including the increasingly odd way in which we select presidential candidates, and the memoir is most moving (and hilarious) when Brinkley recalls his "rich and pungent" boyhood in Wilmington, NC., and the hectic, improvisational nature of news reports in television's early days. -- Salon