Image And Substance With Opinions And Anecdotes, David Brinkley Breaks Out From His Broadcaster Persona

“David Brinkley: A Memoir” By David Brinkley (Knopf, 273 pp., illustrated, $25)

Despite all the anecdotes, parables and name-dropping, the real nugget in David Brinkley’s biography, “David Brinkley: A Memoir,” comes when he speaks about the hated T-word: taxes.

In a half-century of network broadcasting, spent mostly at NBC, Brinkley never approximated Walter Cronkite’s nonpartisan avuncularity. But he conveyed a stoic Southern insouciance that kept him largely above the ideological fray. “I decline to wear any label other than fairness and decency,” he writes solemnly.

Throughout the book, there are hints about what the man behind the microphone believes: a distaste for the morass of the Vietnam War and relief that abortion wasn’t available to his mother when she bore him at the scandalous age of 42. But it is only when Brinkley tackles taxes in an uncharacteristically lengthy and fervent dissertation that he lets his guard down.

Complaining that the income tax is disproportionately burdensome to the wealthy, Brinkley rails that “fantasies that soaking the rich will solve all problems continue even now to float through the dreams of the descendants of the Puritans who hated money so long as it belonged to someone else.” He goes on to assault the luxury tax and calls, a la Steve Forbes, for a flat tax to rectify the egregious imbalance of payments.

Whatever one thinks of supply-side cheerleading, such honest advocacy is a refreshing counterpoint to the rest of the book, which, though engaging and informative, mimics the sparse, dispassionate style of the famous Brinkley cadence and delivery.

In breezily chronicling the American news industry, Brinkley sends something of a reassuring message about modern media mores, if only by contrasting them with the raucous pioneer days of his early career.

There were the local political bosses who provided willing young women to bed the White House correspondents accompanying President Truman to a Missouri homecoming. Then there was the governor of West Virginia who showed his gratitude for a story by offering Brinkley a license to lend money to the state’s impoverished residents at usurious rates.

In Las Vegas to cover a heavyweight title bout, our hero was accosted in his hotel room by a scantily clad mob emissary who warned against negative publicity with a unique carrot-and-stick approach.

Other Brinkley tales point to a considerably more innocent - and ignorant - media culture of bygone days. The R. J. Reynolds company - which sponsored the early NBC news program the “Camel News Caravan” - wanted a lighted cigarette smoldering in the ashtray next to announcer John Cameron Swayze.

More telling is the author’s explanation of why the press never reported John F. Kennedy’s womanizing. For one thing, Brinkley says, most journalists didn’t know. But even if they had, the rules of engagement were dramatically different. These were the days when broadcasters had to say “criminal assault” instead of “rape” and “illegal operation” for “abortion.”

If there is an annoying undercurrent to this book, it is the dichotomy between Brinkley’s awshucks modesty and the ego of a TV news giant. While it is true that there was more serendipitous career advancement when Brinkley was breaking in, he carries the self-deprecation too far.

A move to the United Press bureau in Nashville becomes another undeserved break in a “lifetime of modest talent and immodest good luck.” Later, after being assigned to the White House by NBC, Brinkley summed up his qualifications as “tall, white, Protestant and neatly dressed.”

He isn’t exactly effusive about his longtime cohort Chet Huntley either, implying that his partner’s rugged good looks were mostly responsible for his success. And Brinkley’s anger at NBC for deep-sixing a panel show that would have allowed “The Brinkley Group” to beat “The McLaughlin Group” concept to the air also suggests a man with few self-esteem problems.

As someone who has managed a balancing act during decades in the public eye, David Brinkley understands how to have it both ways. In this book he tries to be both modest and proud, storyteller and subject, sophisticate and country boy, disdainer of Democrat and Republican alike. That’s why it was fascinating to see him venture out of the closet as an unabashed tax basher. It was news from a tight-lipped source.