Here are firsthand profiles of Washington insiders that only an insider himself could have given us: Franklin D. Roosevelt counting out enough cigarettes to get through a half-hour debriefing with the press; May Craig, the first female reporter to penetrate Roosevelt's inner sanctum, who never failed to remind the president that his wife was a newspaper writer, too; Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi senator and race baiter who effectively became mayor of Washington at a time when it was a segregated provincial town; Jimmy Hoffa, the popular and ill-fated union leader; Lyndon Johnson, whom Brinkley describes as the most impressive and appalling figure he encountered; and Ronald Reagan, whom he found to be the most mysterious of the eleven presidents he covered. Here is also Brinkley's account of President Kennedy's assassination and a poignant remembrance of D-day.
David Brinkley was there and saw it all. In the "sour-lovable manner" (Mark Feeney, Boston Globe) of storytelling that he perfected, and in a narrative style that is both "hilarious and instructive" (George Will), Brinkley's Beat gives us his vivid recollections and the intelligence, acuity, and clear-sightedness on which his unimpeachable reputation rested for more than half a century.