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A more professional peeve is the politicians who expect TV newsmen to be "their public-address system or megaphone." When Republican Party Aide John Fisher questioned his objectivity last December, Brinkley snapped that the charge was "perfectly silly, totally asinine—anyone who was objective would be some sort of vegetable." When Democrats suggested that he might now cover the Chicago convention differently, he bristled: "I wouldn't change one thing we did, not one shot, not one word." He sums up his own politics these days as "liberal, but not very. We of the liberal class," he says, "put our faith in two institutions," the labor unions and the Federal Government, which has become "a clumsy, heavy-footed bureaucratic monster out of contact with the American people." The unions have collaborated with the defense industry, he believes, to push such "boondoggles" as the ABM. The Congress has become "enthralled with military hardware" and gotten away with it "since militarism and patriotism have come to mean the same thing." In short, says Brinkley, "the people are being badly served by their political system. The system will break down if it isn't changed soon."
Brinkley thinks that kids today—he has three boys of his own, ages 13, 16 and 19—are "impressive, fine, just great." He disdainfully dismisses "the small minority of neurotics, hell-raising for its own sake and listening to Professor Marcuse, whom I regard as a fool —not because he's a left-winger, but because he's a fool." He refuses to contribute to the easy criticism of middle-class America. "We could spend the afternoon," he told Burgheim, "dissecting the two-car, backyard-barbecue, Bermuda-shorts, country-club syndrome. If people like that way of life, it suits me all right."
Degrading Gossip. What is Brinkley's own idea of recreation? Not television. Still the small-town railroad clerk's son who got much of his education from the library (he has no college degree), he is a reader—lately, George Kennan's Memoirs and Thirteen Days, an account of the Cuban missile crisis by his late friend, Robert Kennedy. He is also a Sunday painter and a music lover. He gave up the trombone 15 years ago, but keeps up with the scene and his old jazz-playing friends. In Manhattan, he goes to the Met for his favorite "Italian war-horses," avoids Mozart and Wagner. His pop preferences include Aretha Franklin and Simon & Garfunkel. When he really wants to relax, his refuge is a cabin he designed and built himself in Virginia. "I'm quite a good carpenter and architect," he says.