Mr. Brinkley Goes to New York

THERE must be millions of Americans who have no idea who said "Good night, sweet prince," but who know full well who says "Good night, Chet" six evenings a week. He is, of course, that ironic (the cliche is "wry") fellow who has co-anchored the Huntley-Brinkley Report since its premiere in 1956. With Huntley in New York and Brinkley in Washington, the pair have made their dinner-hour news show the biggest revenue producer on NBC, except for the prime-time movies. That is undoubtedly one reason why the network made no point of the fact that at age 48 and after 25 years in Washington, David Brinkley has now moved to New York, where these days he co-anchors the program from the same Manhattan studio as Chet Huntley. Brinkley ended his quarter-century with NBC radio and TV in the capital because, he says, "I needed a change." He sought a new perspective: distance from a government system that he feels "is not working" and from a federal bureaucracy that he finds is "betraying" the people. Then, too, he obviously wanted to escape the insular Washington social scene, particularly since he and his wife of 22 years are now separated. Says NBC News President Reuven Frank: "Every story that came up, David remembered happening five times before. He needed recharging. He was really running down."

Career of Deadlines. Recharging is not all that easy. Last month, Brinkley finally took off for a week's vacation after what has probably been the most pulverizing year of newsbreaks (politics, assassinations, space shots) since he started reporting for his home-town Wilmington, N.C., Star-News in 1938. He booked himself into an Arizona dude ranch following a Tucson lecture. After only two days, he turned around disgustedly and flew home to New York: the weather was "lousy," and he couldn't stomach the group activities. Part of his difficulty, he adds, is that a career of deadlines (he also writes a 3 1/2-minute NBC radio commentary weekdays) has left him compulsive about time. "It affects--you might even say, warps--your personality," he says in the familiar, syncopated rhythm that is the same off the air as on. "Oh, yes, I can relax. But I can't relax doing nothing." His estranged wife, former United Press Reporter Ann Fischer, maintains that David's work is "the one thing in the world he's really comfortable with."

He goes to the office around 10 a.m., having read the Washington Post and the New York Times in his still sparsely furnished apartment on Sutton Place. Figuring "I'd rather not eat than cook myself," he sometimes makes breakfast out of toast and coffee carted down from the NBC commissary. Lunch generally comes in from a drugstore. From his office in New York, Brinkley still digs out stories and checks nuances by phone with his old Washington sources, which are, as ever, at the Cabinet and committee-chairman level. But his true vocation is news writing, and he is indisputably the best in television. CBS's Walter Cronkite edits the items he reads. Chet Huntley will write an item or two a night that he feels strongly about. To Brinkley, unhappiness is having to read someone else's copy. Even when he does the whole show by himself, he taps out the script in the last hour or two before air time.

Come 3:30 p.m., the executive producer decides the "rundown"--the priority and time allotted to each item and which anchorman does which. Formerly, Brinkley caught the domestic-politics stories, Huntley, the Viet Nam and foreign. Now, with both in New York, jurisdictions are less fixed, though Brinkley customarily gets the change-of-pace "closers." Says Huntley: "I've killed more good jokes than any man alive. David could read the dictionary, and it would be light and frothy." The two men, while not close personally, have always meshed perfectly professionally. "We just sort of took each other as we were, and we still do," Brinkley says. "For one thing, neither of us has any interest in hogging the air."

Watching Cronkite. As the afternoon wears on, one can tell the time by the edginess in the air in the Huntley-Brinkley newsroom. David is supercool, strolling occasionally from his private office to flip his copy onto the producer's desk. There are three echelons of editors, but none of them lays a glove on Brinkley's stuff. At 6:20 p.m., he heads for the studio three flights up. Huntley wears makeup. Brinkley never does. Generally, during the Huntley or filmed items and the commercials, Brinkley is still sandpapering his own prose and cutting it to size (he delivers only about 170 words a minute, as opposed to Huntley's or almost anyone's 180).

After the sign-off good nish's between David and Chet and "for NBC News," Brinkley returns to his office to stand by to retape any fluffs or update breaking stories for the part of the nation receiving the show on a delayed basis. He may also watch CBS to see how Cronkite has played that day's news. "I like to compete," he confesses.

Boondogqles. What he dislikes about the business is what he calls the "star system"--the inability to go anywhere without being gawked at (people are surprised that he is 6 ft. 2 in. tall) and bugged for autographs. As early as 1960, he found that he could no longer cover presidential primaries because bystanders were paying more attention to him than to the candidates. "One of the pains of this job," he said in an interview with TIME Writer Richard Burg-heim, "is that you spend one-third of your time being a celebrity."

A more professional peeve is the politicians who expect TV newsmen to be "their public-address system or megaphone." When Republican Party Aide John Fisher questioned his objectivity last December, Brinkley snapped that the charge was "perfectly silly, totally asinine--anyone who was objective would be some sort of vegetable." When Democrats suggested that he might now cover the Chicago convention differently, he bristled: "I wouldn't change one thing we did, not one shot, not one word." He sums up his own politics these days as "liberal, but not very. We of the liberal class," he says, "put our faith in two institutions," the labor unions and the Federal Government, which has become "a clumsy, heavy-footed bureaucratic monster out of contact with the American people." The unions have collaborated with the defense industry, he believes, to push such "boondoggles" as the ABM. The Congress has become "enthralled with military hardware" and gotten away with it "since militarism and patriotism have come to mean the same thing." In short, says Brinkley, "the people are being badly served by their political system. The system will break down if it isn't changed soon."

Brinkley thinks that kids today--he has three boys of his own, ages 13, 16 and 19--are "impressive, fine, just great." He disdainfully dismisses "the small minority of neurotics, hell-raising for its own sake and listening to Professor Marcuse, whom I regard as a fool --not because he's a left-winger, but because he's a fool." He refuses to contribute to the easy criticism of middle-class America. "We could spend the afternoon," he told Burgheim, "dissecting the two-car, backyard-barbecue, Bermuda-shorts, country-club syndrome. If people like that way of life, it suits me all right."

Degrading Gossip. What is Brinkley's own idea of recreation? Not television. Still the small-town railroad clerk's son who got much of his education from the library (he has no college degree), he is a reader--lately, George Kennan's Memoirs and Thirteen Days, an account of the Cuban missile crisis by his late friend, Robert Kennedy. He is also a Sunday painter and a music lover. He gave up the trombone 15 years ago, but keeps up with the scene and his old jazz-playing friends. In Manhattan, he goes to the Met for his favorite "Italian war-horses," avoids Mozart and Wagner. His pop preferences include Aretha Franklin and Simon & Garfunkel. When he really wants to relax, his refuge is a cabin he designed and built himself in Virginia. "I'm quite a good carpenter and architect," he says.

When his marriage soured, Brinkley for a time could be found in quiet restaurant corners with Washington's most eligible women, like Barbara Howar or the 1951 Miss America, Yolande Betbeze Fox. Gossip columns lately have linked him with Actress Lauren Bacall. At the very mention, his lips curl dourly: "I hardly even know the woman." He calls such chitchat "degrading" and again blames it on the star system resulting from "one man or two men appearing every day in the role of all-wise, all-knowing journalistic supermen. It is absurd." So absurd, he said in a Columbia University lecture honoring Elmer Davis, "that it may be that Huntley and Cronkite and I and a few others are the last of a type." That was in 1966. With the Huntley-Brinkley Report as profitable as it is, he now fears that TV anchormen are as indestructible as federal bureaucrats.

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