[4] Network executive Ben Park suggested replacing Swayze with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, who had garnered favorable attention anchoring NBC's coverage of the national political conventions that summer.

Producer Reuven Frank, who had advocated pairing Huntley and Brinkley for the convention coverage, thought using two anchors on a regular news program "was one of the dumber ideas I had ever heard.

(When one was on vacation the other would typically handle the full broadcast alone, leaving viewers with a familiar anchor instead of a little-known substitute such as a field reporter.)

[8] Critics considered Huntley to possess one of the best broadcast voices ever heard, and Brinkley's dry, often witty, newswriting presented viewers a contrast to the often sober output from CBS News.

In fact, aside from their sign-off, Huntley and Brinkley's only communication came when one anchor finished a story and handed off to the other by saying the other's name, a signal to an AT&T technician to switch the long-distance transmission lines from New York to Washington or vice versa.

[2] In 1961, Frank Sinatra and Milton Berle entertained a crowd in Washington by singing, to the tune of "Love and Marriage," "Huntley, Brinkley/Huntley, Brinkley/One is glum, the other quite twinkly.

The impact of The Huntley–Brinkley Report on popular culture of the 1960s can be illustrated by a verse from the 1965 song "So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III)" by the satirist Tom Lehrer: Entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. was shown in a 1964 photograph watching The Huntley–Brinkley Report on a television backstage in his dressing room in Life magazine, who quoted him saying, "My only contact with reality.

Unbeknownst to most viewers, that relationship was fairly limited—Huntley and Brinkley operated from different cities and rarely met in person, except for live coverage of political conventions, election nights, or a few other events.

On July 19, 1969, during the Apollo 11 mission, both co-anchored live (Huntley and Brinkley were commentators during NBC's coverage of the historic Moon landing, again with McGee as anchor).

Tom Lehrer's bitterly satirical So Long Mom (a Song for WWIII) mentions the pair: "While we're attacking frontally watch Brinkaly and Huntaly recounting contrapuntally the cities we have lost..."