David Takes On a Goliath

Brinkley 's new show goes up against Dallas, TV's fastest draw

When David Brinkley, 60, left his co-anchor post at NBC Nightly News last fall for the pastures of commentary, industry observers speculated that perhaps the network was tiring of his detached, low-key delivery. Brinkley was not sorry to leave after 24 years: "I had been doing it longer than anyone dead or alive," he says. "And I didn't feel that I was doing anything that required any great skill. It was too easy."

His new assignment will not be so easy. On Sept. 26, he and a hand-picked crew of correspondents--Garrick Utley, Douglas Kiker, Betsy Aaron and Jack Perkins--will go up against CBS's runaway hit Dallas. The vehicle: NBC's Magazine with David Brinkley. Replacing NBC's failed Prime Time, the show will have a new format and a hefty weekly budget of $300,000. Brinkley plans on something different from the tick-tock style of CBS's 60 Minutes and the razzmatazz of ABC's 20/20, but he is rather vague when he talks about Magazine's own format. Says he: "Mostly, the program will be ad lib. We are going to let the correspondents pretty much pick their own stories. There isn't going to be any central authority figure dispensing orders and dispatching people to this place or that." Will Brinkley be an anchorman or a host? Neither; he prefers to be recognized as the chief correspondent. Says he: "I think of a host as someone on daytime TV with a lot of flashing lights behind him who gives away washing machines, which I will not do."

This kind of dry riposte is the Brinkley trademark. Faced with the task of making news during a lull in last month's Democratic Convention, Brinkley drolly noted the "rampant inactivity on the floor." The convention was the 14th that he has covered since 1956, when he and Chet Huntley launched their evening news program. Before long, an estimated 20 million people were watching Huntley-Brinkley and their innovative presentation. Recalls Brinkley: "We sort of set the form of TV news as it persists to this day. A story or two, or three; somebody setting them up and then switching away to somewhere and coming back to do a commercial or two." The format was soon adopted by every other news show.

But no one could duplicate Brinkley. No one can even write for him. He insists on doing his own research and his own scripts. His delivery is the same on-camera or off. Says he: "I can't be anything but myself. If I start trying to act, I am lost right away. I can't talk any way but the way I talk. I am physically unable to read anything written by someone else." The results of this inability have been remarkable. Says Executive Producer Shad Northshield at rival CBS: "Brinkley is the best writer developed by TV."

He is also a good poker player and considers himself a pretty fair carpenter: "The last thing I built was an elaborate dollhouse for my daughter Alexis. It belongs in a museum, if I do say so myself." Brinkley would rather spend an afternoon in a hardware store than on the Washington celebrity circuit. He is one of the few major stars in TV news who still negotiate their own salaries; his is now close to $700,000 a year, including expenses.

These days Brinkley is trying to finish a book about Washington, D.C., during World War II, with the aid of his son Alan, 30, a teacher at Harvard and M.I.T. His other children: Joel, 28, a reporter at the Louisville Courier-Journal, who this year won a Pulitzer Prize for a series on Cambodian refugees; John, 24, a student at American University.

Brinkley, not eager to uproot his life in Washington with Second Wife Susan plans to commute to New York for a year and see if things work out. It is a big if that has network executives wondering: Can Brinkley, the son of a Wilmington, N.C. railway clerk, outdraw that rich, bad bunch from Dallas? Prime time will tell--or, as Edward R. Murrow, the granddaddy of the laconic news style, used to say, "Good night and good luck."

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