Peter Jennings

Peter Charles Archibald Ewart Jennings, CM (July 29, 1938 – August 7, 2005) was a Canadian-American news anchor for the ABC network. He anchored ABC's World News Tonight from 1978 to 2005, becoming the lead anchor in 1983.

Early life

Born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Jennings was the son of Charles Jennings, the first news anchor and head of the news department at the CBC. The family moved to Ottawa, Ontario, where Peter grew up and attended Lisgar Collegiate Institute in the mid-1950's.

He also attended Trinity College School in Port Hope Ontario. Although a member of the class of 1957, Peter left in 1955 to pursue broadcasting. Jennings also attended Carleton University, University of Ottawa, and Rider College in New Jersey. He never graduated from high school or college.

He got his start in broadcasting at the age of nine, hosting a weekly half-hour CBC Radio kids' show called Peter's People. In his late teens and early twenties, he appeared in a number of amateur musical theatre productions with the Orpheus Musical Theatre Society, including Damn Yankees and South Pacific.

He later hosted a local television program called Club Thirteen, similar to American Bandstand. He also worked as a Royal Bank of Canada teller before his journalist days. At the age of 23, he was hired by a Brockville, Ontario radio station. After his coverage of a local train wreck was picked up by the CBC, Canada's first private TV network CTV (a competitor of his father's network) hired Jennings to co-anchor its late-night national news.

He was assigned to cover civil rights activities, where he was quickly noticed by American network ABC and in 1964 was hired right away as a correspondent. Barely a year later, he was given several high-profile reporting opportunities for what was then a 15-minute news broadcast on ABC Evening News.

Anchor career

In 1961, Jennings became, with Baden Langton, the first anchors of a Canadian private national news program. The two were the first co-anchors of CTV National News. The program had varying anchor teams in its first years, although Jennings was the sole constant. He was with the program until 1964. During his years at CTV, he also covered the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, being present at the Dallas police station where Lee Harvey Oswald was held. His first stint as ABC's anchor took place in 1965 on the appropriately named Peter Jennings with the News. At 26, he was and is the youngest-ever American network news anchor ever. He could not compete with older anchors of other networks such as Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. His Canadian English accent, grammar, and diction and mistakes from inexperience with American topics led to his being replaced in 1968, and derided by critics as "glamourcaster" or "anchorboy."

Determined to rebuild his career, Jennings stayed with ABC as a foreign correspondent. He reported from the Middle East during the Yom Kippur War and the Lebanese civil war. Jennings's expertise served him well, as he received notice as the ABC reporter on-scene during the Munich Olympics Massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists.

Beginning in 1978, Jennings was part of a three-anchor team on World News Tonight, with Frank Reynolds in Washington, Max Robinson from Chicago, and Jennings from London. A year later, he married his third wife, Hungarian-American author Kati Marton, with whom he had two children, Elizabeth and Christopher.

After Reynolds' unexpected death in 1983, ABC News President Roone Arledge first chose Tom Brokaw, NBC's White House Correspondent, to take the top job as main news anchor. Brokaw turned down the offer and took over as sole anchor on the NBC Nightly News. Jennings was then selected, starting on August 9, 1983, and became a very influential TV personality. On December 31, 1999, 175 million people tuned into at least a portion of his network's Millennium Eve special ABC 2000, also known as ABC 2000 Today.

For more than two decades, Jennings was a presence in many American homes every night. Along with the two other pillars of the so-called "Big Three" — Tom Brokaw (NBC) and Dan Rather (CBS) -Jennings had, in the early 1980s, ushered in the era of the TV news anchor as lavishly compensated, globe-trotting star.

The magnitude of a news event could be measured by whether Jennings and his counterparts on the other two networks showed up on the scene. Jennings was second in the ratings race behind NBC's Tom Brokaw and later to his successor Brian Williams.

Brokaw's retirement in December 2004, followed by Rather's forced resignation from the evening news in March 2005, and finally Jennings's death, brought that era to a close.

Jennings was a frequent target of charges of "liberal bias" by certain conservative groups, such as the Media Research Center (see ^*). He was criticized for being biased in favor of Proposals for a Palestinian state due to his personal romantic relationship with Hanan Ashrawi, a one-time spokeswoman for the Palestine Liberation Organization, by many conservatives and some Jews. Wntlogo2.gif

Jennings' supporters contended that most critical reports of him consisted of inaccuracies or out-of-context quotes. Nonetheless, due to Jennings's perceived Liberal leanings and Canadian origins, George W. Bush was the first President in recent memory who did not sit down for an interview with Jennings.

During his career, Jennings had reported from every major world capital and war zone, and from all 50 U.S. states during their 2004 "Fifty States in Fifty Weeks" tour of World News Tonight. According to his official ABC biography, he was "in Berlin in the 1960s when the Berlin Wall was going up", and there again "in the late 1980s when it came down." He seemed to draw on that collective experience—as well as his practiced ability to calmly describe events as they unfolded live—not long after two hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

Over the course of that day, and those that immediately followed, he would spend more than 60 hours on the air in what Tom Shales of The Washington Post praised as a tour de force of interviewing and explanatory broadcast journalism.

Many would also take notice of his absence in Rome, Italy at the death of Pope John Paul II as well as in Asia during the aftermath of the tsunami. The future World News Tonight co-anchor Bob Woodruff traveled to the tsunami zone along with Diane Sawyer. Woodruff also anchored both ABC's live coverage of the Pope's death and the World News Tonight Saturday broadcast on the Pope's death instead of Peter. Charles Gibson was later sent to Rome to cover the Pope's funeral.

Ratings

Tom Brokaw and his NBC Nightly News was ranked #1, Peter Jennings and World News Tonight was second, Dan Rather and the CBS Evening News was third. Rather was #1 in the early and mid 1980s, Jennings was #1 in 1989-1997, and Brokaw took over as America's most watched anchor in 1997 and the NBC Nightly News, today under anchor Brian Williams, still remains the top evening newscast to this day.

Leaving the chair

On Friday, April 1, 2005, Jennings anchored World News Tonight for the last time. Jennings had been out of the anchor chair for much of the week, and didn't sound that well. Four days later, on April 5, Jennings informed viewers through a taped message (with a distorted voice that sounded worse than when he anchored on April 1) that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer, and was starting chemotherapy treatment the following week.

(According to his sister Sarah, Jennings reportedly started smoking when he was 11 years old but quit in 1988, then briefly resumed following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.)

Though he said he would continue to host World News Tonight whenever possible, April 5 would prove to be his final broadcast. ABC News' Charlie Gibson, co-host of the network's Good Morning America program, and Elizabeth Vargas, co-host of the network's 20/20, served as temporary anchors until his death from lung cancer.

Charles Gibson announced Peter Jennings' death at 11:41 p.m. (Eastern Time) on August 7, 2005, with an ABC News special report that included the reading of his life story. Barbara Walters gave her comments during this, as did fellow ABC anchors Diane Sawyer and Ted Koppel.

Later on during the day, former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw and former CBS News anchor Dan Rather spoke fondly of him. In the days that followed ABC would run a number of memoriam showings saying, "The American Broadcasting Company and ABC News mourn the passing of Peter Jennings, Anchor, Reporter, Leader, Friend."

ABC News followed up their special report on August 10 with a two-hour special entitled "Peter Jennings: Reporter" consisting of interviews with colleagues and friends and clips from his reports.

The special was hosted by Charles Gibson, who ended it standing in front of Jennings' empty anchor chair, giving way to a trumpeter, playing the ABC News division's theme music in the manner of a military bugler playing Taps; he did not play the final phrase, leaving the piece unresolved.

The Jennings family held a private service in Manhattan in which the anchor's cremated remains were split in half. Half of his ashes will be in his home in Long Island and the other half in his summer home in Gatineau Hills, near Ottawa. Married four times, he was survived by his wife, television producer Kayce Freed, and two children, Elizabeth and Christopher (who were from his third marriage, to Kati Marton). He had also been married to Valerie Godsoe, followed by Annie Malouf.

On September 18, 2005, Peter Jennings was later remembered at the 57th Emmy Awards in Los Angeles in a special memoriam tribute with TV anchors Brokaw and Rather as the speakers. Brokaw and Rather commented that Jennings' heart goes out to the lives lost in Hurricane Katrina (this was the first major news story since the three veteran anchors of the broadcast anchors departed).

Citizenship

Jennings was a dual citizen of Canada and the United States, having become an American citizen on May 30, 2003. He was said to have been very proud of scoring 100 of 100 on the U.S. citizenship exam.

Even though Jennings became a dual citizen, he was still a proud Canadian, and would often retire in the summer to Wakefield, Quebec, near Ottawa.

He was given the key to the city by former mayor Jim Watson and he received an honorary degree from Carleton University. Jennings donated a sculpture to the city's By Ward Market and was often seen there during the summers.

Jennings' official biography on ABC mentioned nothing of his Canadian origins as that had been the target for much criticism. However, Jennings did cover a number of Canadian events that were largely ignored by other U.S. networks. He often brought up Canadian examples during intense policy debates in Congress, notably bringing up the Canadian Medicare when President Clinton was trying to push through his health care reform plan. Most notable was his coverage of the 1995 Quebec referendum where Jennings went to great lengths to explain why it was important to Americans.

In an interview on CBC's The National the evening after Jenning's passing friend and former rival, CBS anchor Dan Rather, noted in a tribute that Jennings' Canadian upbringing allowed him to get a different perspective on events from both inside and outside the US.

That same day, the big three Canadian anchors, Peter Mansbridge at the CBC, Lloyd Robertson at CTV, and former ABC correspondent Kevin Newman at Global gave their thoughts about Jennings and his Canadian roots; Robertson, in an interview on CTV's morning news show, Canada AM, and Newman, on Global National, which opened its broadcast with news of Jennings's death and closed it with Newman's thoughts.

Newman later recalled these thoughts on his blog. ABC anchors Barbara Walters and Ted Koppel also appeared on Canada AM and shared their thoughts about Jennings and his Canadian roots.

Only a few days before his death, Jennings was told he would be receiving the Order of Canada. His family accepted the award on his behalf. Since the Order of Canada cannot be awarded posthumously, the award was dated as of the day the investiture committee approved the nomination, June 29, 2005.

The memorial service for Peter Jennings, which was held at Carnegie Hall in New York City on September 20, featured an RCMP honour guard, paying tribute to Jennings' Canadian roots. It was also attended by Lloyd Robertson, other noted Canadians, and other noted personalities from both sides of the border. The RCMP presented to Jennings' family the flag that flew on Parliament Hill when he died.

Honors in New York

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed a bill to designate the corner of West 66th Street and Columbus Avenue as "Peter Jennings Way" in honor of the late ABC News anchor because West 66th Street and Columbus Avenue is also home to ABC News world headquarters.

The new street sign was unveiled on February 21, 2006.

Awards

Edward R. Murrow Lifetime Achievement Award from Washington State University, 2004
Sol Taishoff Award for Excellence in Broadcast from the National Press Foundation, 2000
14 National Emmys
2 George Foster Peabody Awards
Several Overseas Press Club Awards
Several Alfred du Pont Columbia University Awards for Journalism
Harvard University's Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism
Radio and Television News Directors Paul White Award (award chosen by the news directors of all three major networks)
National Headliner Award, 1970
Named by the Washington Journalism Review anchor of the year three straight years.
Fred Friendly First Amendment Award from Quinnipiac University, 2001
Order of Canada, 2005

Trivia

Jennings was the youngest anchor ever of an American prime time network news program, at 26.
Jennings was parodied in World Police.
In 1999, he anchored the 12-hour ABC series, The Century, and ABC's series for the History Channel, America's Time.
Jennings was quite the ladies man in his day; in a tribute special, Charles Gibson called him "catnip for women."
Jennings once relayed a report from memory after a correspondent's taped report broke during broadcast.
Jennings was the only American News Media reporter to broadcast from Montreal during the 1995 Quebec referendum (which ended in a "No" vote).
Jennings was a certificated private pilot.
Jennings logged 25 hours on air for the millennial new year, December 31, 1999 – January 1, 2000.
Jennings logged more than 60 hours on the air during the week of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, including 16 hours straight on the 11th.
Jennings visited the stadium of the Portland Sea Dogs minor league baseball team in 1996. He stayed there for a week and took batting practice several times with the Sea Dogs, wearing a full Sea Dogs uniform (see ^*).
Jennings was the last anchor to retire of the original American network Evening News anchors.
Jennings left an estate of over $50,000,000 (USD), the bulk of which went to his wife Kayce and his children.
Jennings was the son-in-law of the famous Hungarian correspondent and political prisoner Ilona Neumann Marton.

External links

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