By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff, 6/12/2003

David Brinkley, whose dry wit and clipped delivery made him a fixture on network news programs for five decades, died Wednesday at his Houston home. He was 82. The cause of death was complications from a fall.

The winner of 10 Emmy and three George Foster Peabody awards, Mr. Brinkley was one of the foremost figures in television news. Indeed, as he once pointed out, the two of them "grew up together," as he was a broadcast journalist almost from the inception of network television.

"David Brinkley set a shining example for everyone in broadcast journalism," ABC News president David Westin said in a statement yesterday.

NBC's Tom Brokaw hailed Mr. Brinkley as "an icon of modern broadcast journalism. He was also great personal company: charming, witty, and mischievous. He was my hero as well as my friend."

Mr. Brinkley first won fame as the partner of Chet Huntley for 14 years on NBC's nightly news broadcast, "The Huntley-Brinkley Report." In 1981, he began hosting ABC's "This Week with David Brinkley," which brought him a new generation of admirers too young to remember his work with Huntley.

On both programs, as throughout his career, Mr. Brinkley maintained a wry, slightly acerbic detachment, earning "a reputation," as he once described it, "for being a professional talker who did not talk much."

David McClure Brinkley was born in Wilmington, N.C., on July 10, 1920, the son William Graham Brinkley and Mary MacDonald (West) Brinkley. Mr. Brinkley was the youngest of five. "At the age of 10 or 12," he once said, "I became a semipermanent fixture at the Wilmington public library. I would go every day after school and stay till it closed.... That's really where I learned what little I know."

As part of his high school's cooperative education program, Mr. Brinkley began working part-time for the local newspaper, The Wilmington Star-News. His debut story, on a Wilmington woman's non-blooming century plant, was picked up by the Associated Press and even ran in the Los Angeles Times.

Mr. Brinkley's first taste of broadcasting came soon thereafter when the paper's publisher volunteered his staff as news announcers for the local radio station. "I got by with a profound incompetence because the local audience knew no more ... than I did," Mr. Brinkley later said.

Mr. Brinkley enlisted in the US Army in 1940. He was honorably discharged a year later because of a kidney ailment. He returned to the Star-News to work full time, then was hired by the United Press to work in its Atlanta bureau. This was followed by stints as UP bureau chief in Nashville and Charlotte. During this time, he took classes at Emory University, in Atlanta, and then Vanderbilt University, in Nashville. (Before the Army, he had briefly attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.)

Offered a job at CBS' Washington bureau, Mr. Brinkley arrived at the nation's capital to be told the opening did not exist, so he walked to the NBC News bureau four blocks away and was promptly hired there as a news writer. This was in 1943, and Mr. Brinkley would work at NBC for the next 38 years.

Mr. Brinkley covered the White House during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations (and was an occasional poker partner of President Truman's). He also began doing work for NBC in a medium then in its infancy: television.

"To this day I am glad I started in television so early that I committed my many blunders before there was much of an audience to see and hear them," he wrote in his 1995 autobiography.

After serving for five years as Washington correspondent on NBC's "Camel News Caravan," the network's nightly news broadcast, Mr. Brinkley was paired with Huntley as coanchor of the network's coverage of the 1956 Democratic National Convention. An instant success, they took over the network's evening news broadcast on Oct. 29, 1956, with Huntley based in New York and Mr. Brinkley in Washington. Within two years, "The Huntley-Brinkley Report" was television's most-watched news program and would largely remain so until Huntley's retirement in 1970.

"What is now commonplace was in its beginning a grand and glorious adventure," Mr. Brinkley once wrote of television news, "a vicarious balloon ride into the stars, and Huntley and I -- happening to be in the right place at the right time -- were able to grab hold and ride it up."

Huntley, a heavyset Westerner with a bluff manner, complemented Mr. Brinkley, a lean Southerner given to irony and diffidence. Their nightly sign-off -- "Good night, Chet," "Good night, David" -- became a national catchphrase. "We both hated it," Mr. Brinkley later said of their reaction when it was first proposed. "I thought it sounded contrived, artificial and slightly silly. We lost. We used it. It worked."

According to the Associated Press, a 1965 survey found Mr. Brinkley and Huntley were recognized by more adult Americans than John Wayne or the Beatles.

From 1961 to 1963, Mr. Brinkley hosted a weekly public affairs program, "David Brinkley's Journal." He hosted a similar program, "NBC Magazine with David Brinkley," in the 1980-81 season. Earlier in the '70s, after Huntley retired, he had briefly served as a rotating coanchor, along with John Chancellor and Frank McGee, on NBC's nightly news, then as a commentator from 1971 to 1976, at which time he again became a coanchor (this time with Chancellor) until 1979.

Mr. Brinkley left NBC in 1981 to join ABC and host "This Week with David Brinkley." The new program's mixture of news interviews, panel discussions, and pungent opinion from Mr. Brinkley and his colleagues, Sam Donaldson, George F. Will and, later, Cokie Roberts transformed the genre of Sunday-morning public affairs shows. He retired as host in 1996 and delivered commentaries for another year.

Mr. Brinkley also occasionally substituted as anchor on ABC's "World News Tonight" and served as analyst during coverage of major news events such as political conventions and national elections.

His last appearance as an Election Night commentator, in 1996, got Mr. Brinkley into hot water when he twice referred to President Clinton during the broadcast as a "bore" and lamented the prospect of four more years of "goddamned nonsense" from the reelected incumbent. A chagrined Mr. Brinkley swiftly offered an apology, which the president just as swiftly accepted.

A little more than a year later, Mr. Brinkley again found himself the center of controversy. It was announced in January 1998 that he would appear as a television spokesman in advertisements for Archer Daniels Midland, the commodities giant. A broad spectrum of well-known media figures, ranging from "60 Minutes" commentator Andy Rooney to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, denounced Mr. Brinkley for trading on his journalistic reputation.

The brouhaha left Mr. Brinkley characteristically unfazed.

Mr. Brinkley was the author of four books, "Washington Goes to War" (1988), "David Brinkley: A Memoir" (1995), "Everyone Is Entitled to My Opinion" (1996), and "Brinkley's Beat" (2003), which is to be published in November.

He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in 1992.

Mr. Brinkley's first marriage ended in divorce. He married Susan Benfer in 1972.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Brinkley leaves three sons from his first marriage, Alan, a historian and provost-designate at Columbia University, Joel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at The New York Times, and John; a stepdaughter, Alexis; and several grandchildren.

Funeral services are private.

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.