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Come 3:30 p.m., the executive producer decides the "rundown"—the priority and time allotted to each item and which anchorman does which. Formerly, Brinkley caught the domestic-politics stories, Huntley, the Viet Nam and foreign. Now, with both in New York, jurisdictions are less fixed, though Brinkley customarily gets the change-of-pace "closers." Says Huntley: "I've killed more good jokes than any man alive. David could read the dictionary, and it would be light and frothy." The two men, while not close personally, have always meshed perfectly professionally. "We just sort of took each other as we were, and we still do," Brinkley says. "For one thing, neither of us has any interest in hogging the air."
Watching Cronkite. As the afternoon wears on, one can tell the time by the edginess in the air in the Huntley-Brinkley newsroom. David is supercool, strolling occasionally from his private office to flip his copy onto the producer's desk. There are three echelons of editors, but none of them lays a glove on Brinkley's stuff. At 6:20 p.m., he heads for the studio three flights up. Huntley wears makeup. Brinkley never does. Generally, during the Huntley or filmed items and the commercials, Brinkley is still sandpapering his own prose and cutting it to size (he delivers only about 170 words a minute, as opposed to Huntley's or almost anyone's 180).
After the sign-off good nish's between David and Chet and "for NBC News," Brinkley returns to his office to stand by to retape any fluffs or update breaking stories for the part of the nation receiving the show on a delayed basis. He may also watch CBS to see how Cronkite has played that day's news. "I like to compete," he confesses.
Boondogqles. What he dislikes about the business is what he calls the "star system"—the inability to go anywhere without being gawked at (people are surprised that he is 6 ft. 2 in. tall) and bugged for autographs. As early as 1960, he found that he could no longer cover presidential primaries because bystanders were paying more attention to him than to the candidates. "One of the pains of this job," he said in an interview with TIME Writer Richard Burg-heim, "is that you spend one-third of your time being a celebrity."