THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 3, 1995 TAG: 9512040188
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY TIM WARREN
LENGTH: Medium: 94 lines
DAVID BRINKLEY
A Memoir
DAVID BRINKLEY
Alfred A. Knopf. 273 pp. $25.
Anyone familiar with David Brinkley's work as a newscaster and commentator at first NBC and now ABC knows he is a witty and literate man. As he demonstrated in Washington Goes to War, he is also a fine writer and excellent observer. He has all the credentials to write a good memoir, and he certainly has lived an interesting enough life.
But David Brinkley: A Memoir is a disappointment. For all of Brinkley's accomplishments, and the many interesting and famous people he's known, his book still comes across as flat and uninvolving. You leave the book knowing more about what happened to David Brinkley, and what he thinks. But you know precious little about the man himself.
That may be by design, for Brinkley is a journalist of the old school - the school that dictated keeping feelings about the subjects covered to oneself, that stressed a critical detachment in reporting. But while that approach works fine for journalism, it produces empty memoirs.
Take Brinkley's comments about his father, who died of a heart attack when David was 8. Early in the book, Brinkley describes his dad as ``the kindest man I ever knew,'' yet gives only one paragraph to his death, and most of that is about how his mother regarded his father (mixed feelings, evidently). Toward the end, he provides another page about how his father had practically bankrupted his family before his death by lending thousands of dollars to people who had no chance or inclination to pay him back. In between: nothing. Admittedly, his father died early. Nonetheless he must have had a great influence on David - or perhaps his death did.
But Brinkley is too guarded to delve into such matters. He hints that he and his mother had a clash of wills, and that she rejected him, but gives little detail. With his father dying early and his mother being so distant, Brinkley apparently had a lonely childhood, but he doesn't say - he spends much more time describing the Wilmington, N.C., of his childhood than telling his own youthful hopes and aspirations. You don't learn when he met his first wife or how they happened to divorce. He didn't have to tell all, but he could have been more forthcoming.
This absence of personal detail and insight is all the more frustrating because Brinkley wanders into some areas that bring down the book. Why the tirade at the end directed at the federal tax system? And why 4 1/2 pages discussing whether the television networks should project winners of elections?
That said, David Brinkley: A Memoir has some good and useful parts. In particular, Brinkley has a lot to say about two subjects he knows well: broadcast journalism and Washington.
He is very good on the evolution of television news and how the networks struggled to use this strange new medium. He writes:
``Perhaps it is difficult to see now, but those of us standing around in television's beginnings could not help wondering what the human mind could do with a new device, a new technology, that allowed pictures and sound - movies, of a sort - to be sent simultaneously across the entire United States and eventually the world. What was this? Was it radio with pictures?''
What it was, quite often, was confusing and even comical. Brinkley notes the power of cigarette advertisers to shape news broadcasts in TV's early days. When John Cameron Swayze announced the ``Camel News Caravan'' for NBC, sponsor R.J. Reynolds wanted the show ``to always have a lighted cigarette smoking in the ashtray at Swayze's elbow.''
The networks were often no better. Brinkley relates that soon after he was paired with Chet Huntley to do the evening news for NBC in 1956, a network executive suggested that he and Huntley wear red blazers as a way of livening up their broadcasts. Both refused, and Brinkley writes: ``Ever since, I've wondered if that might have been our foremost public service. I do think we saved a whole generation of local news broadcasters from having to come on the air looking like animal trainers.''
That's typical of Brinkley's self-deprecation - and quite amusing - but while that quality works well in his journalistic persona, it's often out of place here. Discussing one of his career advancements, he writes, ``In my lifetime of modest talent and immodest good luck, at this point, I was lucky again.'' If you're one of the pre-eminent journalists of the past century, you don't have to affect an aw-shucks demeanor.
If only Brinkley had turned his eye inward as well as he does toward the outside world. He has a great sense for storytelling, and I counted at least a couple of dozen terrific anecdotes. But as much as he can inform about politics and television, those topics don't make a memoir compelling. In a curious way, Brinkley becomes in this book rather like the medium he has worked for this past half-century: He shows you a lot, but doesn't really tell very much. MEMO: Tim Warren is a free-lance book critic and writer who lives in Silver
Spring, Md. by CNB