TV news great Peter Jennings dies

The face of ABC news succumbed to cancer

By David Bauder
Associated Press

NEW YORK – Peter Jennings, 67, the suave, Canadian-born broadcaster who delivered the news to Americans each night in five separate decades, died of lung cancer yesterday at his New York home.

``Peter has been our colleague, our friend, and our leader in so many ways. None of us will be the same without him,'' ABC News President David Westin said.

With Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather, Jennings was part of a triumvirate that dominated network news for more than two decades, through the birth of cable news and the Internet.

He was the face of ABC News when big stories broke, logging more than 60 hours on the air during the week of the 9/11 attacks.

``There are a lot of people who think our job is to reassure the public every night that their home, their community and their nation is safe,'' he once said. ``I don't subscribe to that at all. I subscribe to leaving people with essentially – sorry it's a cliche – a rough draft of history. Some days it's reassuring, some days it's absolutely destructive.''

Jennings' cancer announcement four months ago came as a shock.

``I will continue to do the broadcast,'' he promised, his voice husky, in a taped message. But he never again appeared on the air.

``He knew that it was an uphill struggle. But he faced it with realism, courage, and a firm hope that he would be one of the fortunate ones,'' Westin said.

News was the family business for Jennings. His father, Charles Jennings, was the first person to anchor a nightly national news program in Canada. Peter Jennings had a weekend radio show in Ottawa at age 9. He never completed high school or college, and began his career as a news reporter at a radio station in Brockton, Ontario, moving quickly to an anchor job at Canadian Television.

Sent south to cover the Democratic convention in 1964, he was noticed by ABC's news president. In 1965, as third-place ABC aimed for young viewers, he was picked to anchor the evening news.

``It was a little ridiculous when you think about it,'' Jennings said. ``A 26-year-old trying to compete with Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley. I was simply unqualified.''

Critics savaged him as a pretty face unfit for the job. His Canadian accent and gaffes such as misidentifying the Marine Corps' anthem as ``Anchors Aweigh'' didn't help. He lasted three years. As a foreign correspondent, he thrived, setting up an ABC bureau in Beirut and becoming a Middle East expert.

Jennings returned to the evening news a decade later, as chief foreign correspondent and one of three anchors on ABC's ``World News Tonight.'' In 1983, he became the program's sole anchor, and would soon dominate, spending a decade on top of the ratings, as viewers responded to his smart, controlled style.

``When it's clearly an emotional experience for the audience, the anchor should not add his or her emotional layers,'' Jennings said.

Jennings pushed a turn-of-the-century history project at ABC and also led a documentary team at ABC News that produced 2000's high-rated special ``The Search for Jesus.''

``I have never spent a day in my adult life where I didn't learn something,'' Jennings said. ``And if there is a born-again quality to me, that's it.''

In the 1990s, NBC's Tom Brokaw surpassed Jennings in the ratings. When Brokaw stepped down last year, soon followed by Rather, ABC began a campaign stressing Jennings' experience. But he was deprived of his role as elder statesman by his cancer diagnosis only a month after Rather's departure.

He is survived by his wife, Kayce Freed, and his two children, Elizabeth, 25, and Christopher, 23.