“Good Night, Chet”

Book excerpt: “If a judgment were ever rendered on all the multi-million words I have spoken into microphones, I hope something like this could be said: ‘He [Huntley] had a great respect, almost an awe, of the medium in which he worked. He regarded it as a privilege, not a license.... Perhaps the best I might hope is that by some accident of voice tone or arrangement of words I did, on a few occasions, excite, exhort, annoy or provoke a few of my fellow human beings to think with their heads, not the viscera’”—Chet Huntley. This biography of NBC newsman Chet Huntley, who, along with David Brinkley, anchored NBC’s “Huntley-Brinkley Report,” covers his youth on a farm in Montana, his education and his graduation from the University of Washington, his development as a radio personality and news reporter for stations in Seattle, Spokane, Portland, and his work for CBS, ABC and NBC radio and television in Los Angeles from 1939 to 1955. It also details his move to New York and his work on the “Huntley-Brinkley Report” from 1956 to 1970, his retirement from the news business, his supervision of the development of the Big Sky Ski resort in Montana, and his death from cancer in 1974 at the age of 62.