THERE must be millions of Americans who have no idea who said "Good night, sweet prince," but who know full well who says "Good night, Chet" six evenings a week. He is, of course, that ironic (the cliché is "wry") fellow who has co-anchored the Huntley-Brinkley Report since its premiere in 1956. With Huntley in New York and Brinkley in Washington, the pair have made their dinner-hour news show the biggest revenue producer on NBC, except for the prime-time movies. That is undoubtedly one reason why the network made no point of the fact that at age 48 and after 25 years in Washington, David Brinkley has now moved to New York, where these days he co-anchors the program from the same Manhattan studio as Chet Huntley. Brinkley ended his quarter-century with NBC radio and TV in the capital because, he says, "I needed a change." He sought a new perspective: distance from a government system that he feels "is not working" and from a federal bureaucracy that he finds is "betraying" the people. Then, too, he obviously wanted to escape the insular Washington social scene, particularly since he and his wife of 22 years are now separated. Says NBC News President Reuven Frank: "Every story that came up, David remembered happening five times before. He needed recharging. He was really running down."
Career of Deadlines. Recharging is not all that easy. Last month, Brinkley finally took off for a week's vacation after what has probably been the most pulverizing year of newsbreaks (politics, assassinations, space shots) since he started reporting for his home-town Wilmington, N.C., Star-News in 1938. He booked himself into an Arizona dude ranch following a Tucson lecture. After only two days, he turned around disgustedly and flew home to New York: the weather was "lousy," and he couldn't stomach the group activities. Part of his difficulty, he adds, is that a career of deadlines (he also writes a 3½-minute NBC radio commentary weekdays) has left him compulsive about time. "It affects—you might even say, warps—your personality," he says in the familiar, syncopated rhythm that is the same off the air as on. "Oh, yes, I can relax. But I can't relax doing nothing." His estranged wife, former United Press Reporter Ann Fischer, maintains that David's work is "the one thing in the world he's really comfortable with."
He goes to the office around 10 a.m., having read the Washington Post and the New York Times in his still sparsely furnished apartment on Sutton Place. Figuring "I'd rather not eat than cook myself," he sometimes makes breakfast out of toast and coffee carted down from the NBC commissary. Lunch generally comes in from a drugstore. From his office in New York, Brinkley still digs out stories and checks nuances by phone with his old Washington sources, which are, as ever, at the Cabinet and committee-chairman level. But his true vocation is news writing, and he is indisputably the best in television. CBS's Walter Cronkite edits the items he reads. Chet Huntley will write an item or two a night that he feels strongly about. To Brinkley, unhappiness is having to read someone else's copy. Even when he does the whole show by himself, he taps out the script in the last hour or two before air time.