From famed TV anchor, a memoir of people, times

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BRINKLEY'S BEAT

By David Brinkley

Knopf, $22.95, 224 pages

REVIEWED BY LYN NOFZIGER

"Brinkley's Beat" is a slim volume that the long-time and widely admired television news personality, David Brinkley, wrote shortly before his death earlier this year. Fortunately Brinkley's reputation as one of television's most respected anchors, and also as a genuinely nice man, will survive this book. It isn't much. It reads as if it were put together on assignment and the author searched his memory and his files to find things and people to write about in order to pad it out.

The first chapter, for some strange reason, is about a long forgotten racial bigot from Mississippi, a Democratic senator named Theodore Bilbo who, if Brinkley had been serious about writing a serious book, would hardly rate a paragraph.

Some Southern racists, George Wallace for instance, had an effect on their times; Bilbo, though elected to the Senate three times, had none. It's apparent that while Brinkley might have "encountered" (his word) Bilbo and while he regards him as a "preposterous and extraordinary" figure, he clearly did not know him well and covered him only casually, if at all.

This chapter, like too many of the others, has nothing to do with any relationship, either personal or professional, the two men might have had; it reads more like a biographical sketch any reporter might have been assigned to write without interviewing his subject.