Posted on 06/13/2003 2:03:10 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
WASHINGTON--To have worked alongside David Brinkley on television is to have experienced what might be called the Tommy Henrich Temptation. Henrich, who played right field for the Yankees when Joe DiMaggio was playing center field, must have been constantly tempted to ignore the game and just stand there watching DiMaggio, who defined for his generation the elegance of understatement and the gracefulness that is undervalued because it makes the difficult seem effortless.
Brinkley, who died Wednesday, a month shy of his 83rd birthday, was a Washington monument as stately, and as spare in expression, as is the original. Long before high-decibel, low-brow cable shout-a-thons made the phrase ``gentleman broadcaster'' seem oxymoronic, Brinkley made it his business to demonstrate the compatibility of toughness and civility in journalism.
He was the most famous son of Wilmington, N.C., until Michael Jordan dribbled into the national consciousness. Brinkley arrived in Washington in 1943, an era when a gas mask occasionally hung from the president's wheelchair and the city--then hardly more than a town, really--fit John Kennedy's droll description of it as a community of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
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