David Brinkley - Retirement

Retirement

Days before his announced retirement from regular news coverage, Brinkley made a rare on-air mistake during evening coverage of the 1996 presidential election, at a moment when he thought they were on commercial break. One of his colleagues asked him what he thought of Bill Clinton's re-election. He called Clinton "a boor" and added, "The next four years will be filled with pretty words, and pretty music, and a lot of goddamn nonsense!" One of his team pointed out that they were still on the air. Brinkley said, "Really? Well, I'm leaving anyway!" Brinkley worked this mistake into a chance for an apology as part of a one-on-one interview with Clinton that followed a week or so later.

Brinkley stepped down from hosting This Week on November 10, 1996, but continued to provide small commentary pieces for the show until 1997. He then fully retired from television. He had been an electronic journalist for over fifty years and had been anchor or host of a daily or weekly national television program for just over forty years. His career lasted from the beginning of broadcast news to the information age.

During his career, he won ten Emmy Awards and three George Foster Peabody Awards. In 1992, President George H. W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. Bush called him "the elder statesman of broadcast journalism"; but Brinkley was much more humble. In an interview in 1992, he said "Most of my life, I've simply been a reporter covering things, and writing and talking about it".

Brinkley is the father of historian and former Columbia University Provost, Alan Brinkley, and of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Stanford professor, Joel Brinkley.