Several days before his scheduled departure as the mainstay of ABC World News Tonight David Brinkley made a common, and in a way characteristic, error. Believing the cameras were off, Brinkley opined that Bill Clinton’s second term will be filled with a lot of “nonsense.” Informed they were still on the air, he said “Really?” Then after pausing a beat, “Well, I’m leaving anyway!” This was vintage Brinkley — sharp-witted, candid, and fearless.

On this day, September 29, in 1997, David Brinkley retired for good from the news business. His illustrious career spanned, as he summarized in the title of his memoir, “11 Presidents, 4 Wars, 22 Political Conventions, One Moon Landing, 3 Assassinations [and] 2,000 Weeks of News.”

Brinkley was at the height of his popularity for two decades, from the mid 50s to mid 70s, as NBC’s answer to Walter Cronkite. Brinkley in Washington teamed up with Chet Huntley from New York on The Huntley-Brinkley Report, which passed Cronkite in ratings after just two years. And while Brinkley was the personification of seriousness on air, in person he was often described as wry. In one typical example, on the controversy over the renaming the Boulder Dam in Colorado to Hoover Dam, Brinkley quipped the issue could readily be solved if former president Herbert Hoover would just change his name to “Herbert Boulder.”