New York — David Brinkley, who first gained fame as one-half of NBC's Huntley-Brinkley anchor team and for more than a half-century loomed large in the newscasting world he helped chart, has died. He was 82.
Brinkley died Wednesday night at his home in Houston of complications from a fall, ABC News said.
During his career, which in recent years took him to ABC, Brinkley won 10 Emmy awards, three George Foster Peabody Awards and, in 1992, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the United States.
Former president George H.W. Bush called him "the elder statesman of broadcast journalism," but Brinkley spoke of himself in less grandiose terms.
Brinkley, who first gained fame as one-half of NBC's Huntley-Brinkley anchor team, died at the age of 82. (Brent Petersen/AP)
"Most of my life," he said in a 1992 interview, "I've simply been a reporter covering things, and writing and talking about it."
He stepped down as host of ABC's This Week with David Brinkley in November 1996 but continued to do commentaries. He left amid a rare controversy, and an apology: Late on election night, after a long evening, he had said unkind things about president Bill Clinton on the air, calling him a "bore."
Mr. Clinton sat for an interview for Brinkley's last show anyway, and after Brinkley apologized, told him: "I always believe you have to judge people on their whole work, and if you get judged based on your whole work, you come out way ahead."
Based in Washington and focusing on politics, Brinkley was known for his gentlemanly manner, wry wit and, as the Clinton incident illustrated, an occasional suffer-no-fools bluntness. Playing against such refinement were a boyish appearance and a jerky style of delivery that suggested a mild case of hiccups.
"If I was to start today I probably couldn't get a job," he once said, "because I don't look like what people think an anchorperson should look like."
Perhaps not. But in 1956 his distinctive presence was paired with craggy, leading-man-handsome Chet Huntley for NBC News' coverage of the Democratic and Republican national conventions. It was a perfect fit. NBC News enjoyed ratings dominance throughout the 1960s. Going up against CBS, anchored by Walter Cronkite, during the 1964 Democratic convention, NBC won an astonishing 84 per cent of the viewership.
In 1970 Huntley retired. He died four years later. Brinkley co-anchored the renamed NBC Nightly News with John Chancellor, then became the program's commentator. But the spell was broken. The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite had taken the ratings lead, and NBC News had stumbled.
Entering his 60s, Brinkley in 1981 began the second act of his career by exiting the organization he had joined 38 years earlier. He lent his heavyweight status to ABC News, a late bloomer then on the way up. There he flourished, particularly on This Week with David Brinkley, a Sunday morning interview and discussion program.
Despite having been present for the creation of TV news, Brinkley insisted "I didn't create anything. I just got here early."
Born in Wilmington, N.C., on July 20, 1920, Brinkley was still in high school when he began writing for his hometown newspaper. He was educated at the University of North Carolina and Vanderbilt University, and after army service he worked in southern bureaus for the United Press syndicate.
He moved to Washington, D.C., thinking a radio job awaited him at CBS News. Instead, he had landed a job four blocks away at NBC News. He became White House correspondent — NBC's first. Not long after that, as Brinkley recounted in his 1995 memoir, "a large, odd-looking object arrived at the Washington studio ... so big it could barely be rolled through the door. It was our first television camera."
Brinkley was divorced from his first wife, Ann, in the 1960s and married Susan Benfer in 1972. Among his four children, Alan is an American Book Award-winning historian and Joel is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.
