David Brinkley

David McClure Brinkley was an American newscaster whose career ran from 1943 to 1997, carrying him from wartime Washington radio work into the age of national television news. Born on July 10, 1920, in Wilmington, North Carolina, he became one of the familiar voices and faces of NBC and later ABC. He worked in a period when the nightly newscast, political convention coverage, and election-night analysis became shared national habits.

Brinkley is best known for co-anchoring The Huntley–Brinkley Report with Chet Huntley from 1956 through 1970. Huntley sat in New York City, Brinkley in Washington, D.C., and their paired sign-off, “Good night, Chet” and “Good night, David,” entered popular usage. The program became NBC’s top-rated nightly news broadcast, helped by the contrast between Huntley’s serious manner and Brinkley’s dry wit. Brinkley then appeared as co-anchor or commentator on NBC Nightly News through the 1970s.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Brinkley moved to ABC News, where he hosted the Sunday program This Week with David Brinkley and became a leading commentator on election-night coverage. Across his career, he received ten Emmy Awards, three George Foster Peabody Awards, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He also wrote three books, including the 1988 bestseller Washington Goes to War, about how World War II changed the nation’s capital.

The habits that shaped Brinkley began early. He wrote for the Wilmington Morning Star while still attending New Hanover High School, then attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Emory University, and Vanderbilt University before entering the U.S. Army in 1940. After a medical discharge, he worked for United Press International in several Southern bureaus. In 1943 he went to Washington, D.C., looking for a radio job at CBS News, but took a job at NBC News instead. He became NBC’s White House correspondent and, in time, moved onto television.

Brinkley’s strength was not only that he knew Washington, but that he could explain it in clear, spoken language. He gained a reputation for writing simple, declarative sentences that worked on the air. His books drew heavily on what he had seen as a young reporter in the city. His wit could be sharp, as when he suggested that the dispute over Boulder Dam and “Hoover Dam” might be solved if former president Herbert Hoover changed his name to “Herbert Boulder.” In moments of national shock, he could be spare and direct, as he was during NBC’s coverage of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

Brinkley died on June 11, 2003, after a life spent close to politics, presidents, conventions, wars, and the daily pressure of live news. His words still resonate because they show how much force can live in plain speech. A line attributed to him on this site says, “A successful person is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at them.” It fits the broadcaster’s public style: steady, unsentimental, and built sentence by sentence.