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Peter Jennings

1938–2005 · 67 years Specialist

The high school dropout Americans trusted to read them the news

Portrait of Peter Jennings — Peabody Awards — 2002 — CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Peter Jennings was born July 29, 1938, in Toronto, to Charles Jennings, a prominent CBC radio broadcaster, and Elizabeth Osborne Jennings. He hosted a children's radio program at nine, failed tenth grade, and dropped out of high school for good, later drifting briefly through two universities without finishing either. He worked as a bank teller before CFJR radio in Ottawa hired him in 1959, and by 1961 he was anchoring newscasts and co-hosting a dance program on CJOH-TV. ABC brought him to New York in 1964, and at twenty-six, with no American credentials and a Canadian accent critics mocked on the air, he became the youngest anchor in American network news history.

Peter Jennings with the News put him in the anchor chair at ABC in 1965, and the network's own affiliates turned on him within three years, calling him a lightweight glamorcaster in over his head; he quit the desk in 1968 and asked to become a foreign correspondent instead. He opened ABC's first Middle East bureau, in Beirut, covered the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and landed the first American television interview with PLO chairman Yasser Arafat. When anchor Frank Reynolds died in 1983, ABC gave Jennings sole control of World News Tonight, and over the next two decades he built it into the ratings leader among the three evening broadcasts, capped by seventeen consecutive hours anchoring live coverage of September 11, 2001, without a script.

That September 11 marathon drew more than ten thousand complaints after Jennings, on air, questioned aloud where President Bush actually was during the attack, a moment critics called unpatriotic and colleagues called simply reporting. He had quit smoking two decades earlier and started again in the weeks after 9/11, under stress he later admitted he could not otherwise manage; the habit killed him. Four marriages, to Valerie Godsoe, Annie Malouf, the writer Kati Marton, and finally Kayce Freed, tracked a private life as unsettled as his public one looked composed; Marton's affair with a Washington Post columnist ended their fourteen years together in 1993. He announced his lung cancer to viewers himself, on his own broadcast, on April 5, 2005, and said plainly that he intended to keep working for as long as he could manage it.

Jennings died August 7, 2005, in New York, four months after the diagnosis, with his fourth wife and two children at his side; his ashes were split between Long Island and the Gatineau Hills outside Ottawa. Canada inducted him into the Order of Canada eight days before his death, and Disney later named him a Disney Legend. He had won 16 Emmy Awards and two Peabody Awards by the time he died, and competitors Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather, the other two of television's so-called Big Three anchors, both spoke of him afterward less as a rival than as the last of a kind of network authority their successors would not hold again.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Peter Jennings's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Peter Jennings with the News television
His first, short-lived run as ABC's evening anchor 1965
ABC Middle East bureau other
First American network news bureau in Beirut 1968
World News Tonight with Peter Jennings television
Sole anchor for 22 years, beginning September 5, 1983 1983
The Century book
Co-written history of the 20th century, with Todd Brewster 1998
September 11, 2001 live coverage television
Anchored 17 consecutive hours without a script 2001