Peter Jennings: A Worldly Anchorman
PETER JENNINGS, born in Toronto in 1938, was, for a generation, the iconic anchorman for ABC News. Handsome, polished, a man of the world, he always knew what he was talking about. He worked very hard, too. On the week of 9/11, he was on the air for over 60 hours and took that in stride; that was part of what he was paid for. He was proud of the strong reviews that ABC got that week — but he expected them. He was always learning.
In television history, he came along at the tail end of the era when the three networks were king. CBS had Dan Rather, and NBC had Tom Brokaw, but many people found Jennings the best of the three. Rather had a hard-charging, unadorned style; Brokaw was the most folksy and no one was better at delivering sad news; but Peter Jennings seemed the most worldly and urbane. He looked like an anchor while he read the news and he had a superb voice for broadcasting.
Jennings also really cared about substance. Though he was not religious himself, he insisted the evening news have a Religion beat. He installed Peggy Wehmeyer as the first full-time Religion correspondent in the history of network news and when Wehmeyer left, Jennings replaced her with Dan Harris. Jennings also hosted substantive prime-time specials about Jesus and Saint Paul, which got both good reviews and good ratings.
Jennings knew that first-rate journalism was crucial in a democracy, especially one so far-flung and powerful as the United States. He felt geography was important and used maps to explain to viewers where far-off countries were. He made his colleagues feel they were part of something special, holding the powerful to account, informing the voters. It was never just a job to Peter Jennings.
He was very young when he began in broadcasting. His father, Charles Jennings, was a beloved anchorman for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, and Peter did his first news show (“Peter’s Program”) when he was only nine years old. Later, he hosted a teen dance program.
After his sophomore year of high school, Jennings dropped out of school to work as a radio reporter in Brockville, Ontario. Always acutely aware of how little formal education he had, he often traveled with an extra suitcase filled entirely with books.
Jennings worked briefly in Canada and then, in 1964, ABC hired him. He still had a lot to learn about the news business, about the United States of America and about himself as a person. But ABC had a very thin bench in those days. It was not yet a serious rival of CBS or NBC. ABC was the perennial number three network and in Jennings they had a hardworking young star in the making. And so, in 1966, when Peter Jennings was just 26 years old, ABC made him its new anchorman.
He worked hard and did his best, but those years were shaky. ABC’s correspondents then tended to be crusty old print reporters touchy about working for the number three network. Some of them thought this Canadian pretty boy was a joke. It didn’t help that he pronounced the word “about” as “aboot” and “schedule” as “shedule” and “lieutenant” as “left-tenant.” Critics and viewers tended to agree; Peter Jennings didn’t belong in the anchor chair. Not yet, anyway.
But to his credit, Peter Jennings sat down with the executives at ABC and said he didn’t want to anchor anymore. He wanted to go abroad and learn how to be a first-rate foreign correspondent. When he was a better reporter, then maybe he’d return to anchoring.
ABC executives agreed to this and Peter Jennings set up the first network TV bureau in the Arab world. From 1968–1975, he worked out of Beirut, Lebanon. He covered the Vietnam War. He reported live from Munich in 1972 when Arab terrorists murdered 11 Israeli athletes. In 1979, he covered the Iranian hostage crisis. He made a huge network of contacts in the Middle East, up-and-coming politicians and journalists and artists and dissidents, not just in Beirut, but in Jerusalem, Damascus and Cairo.
Here being Canadian helped; people were more willing to talk to a reporter from Canada than from the United States. As a Canadian, he was more able to see the flaws in the United States, and to understand why people in other nations might mistrust the U.S.
Jennings had charisma. Conversation picked up when he was in the room. A colleague noticed that Jennings could walk into a crowd of “street urchins” in India, and they surrounded him, all wanting a look, and a chance to talk. There was a pied piper quality to him.
If anything in the world made Peter Jennings angry, it was seeing vulnerable people being stepped on, especially children. When wars, famines and other disasters turned vibrant families into refugees, there was an edge to his reporting. The pain and injustice in the Third World drove him to do his job better and, in that sense, it helped him; it served his career.
But it was hard on him personally; it was hard to carry around so much pain.
ABC had been using co-anchors for some time: Howard K. Smith, Frank Reynolds, Max Robinson, Harry Reasoner, Barbara Walters… When Frank Reynolds became mortally ill, Jennings was called home to replace him temporarily, and three weeks after Frank Reynolds died in 1983, Jennings got the news anchor job for good. ABC abandoned the idea of co-anchors, brought Jennings back to New York and put him on the anchor desk by himself.
He still had the hunger to master the latest story, to get all the facts. Barbara Walters hugely admired Peter Jennings — but he drove her a little crazy with his passion to know everything about any story ABC was covering. She recalled him cramming and studying, poring over hundreds of 3 x 5 index cards for a major story. Dr. Timothy Johnson, a medical expert for ABC, said he couldn’t think of a single subject in the world that Peter Jennings wasn’t curious about.
Jennings was far from perfect. He had a temper.
He married four times — first to a proper young Canadian, Valerie Godsoe, whose mother was president of the Junior League in Toronto; next to a Lebanese photographer, Anouchka “Annie” Malouf; third to the Hungarian-born ABC correspondent Kati Marton with whom he had two children; and finally, in 1997, to the 20/20 producer Kayce Freed.
He could be bluntly critical. He might observe what a correspondent was wearing and say, “You’re not going to wear that on television, are you?”
But he was so capable, and did so much heavy lifting for ABC News, that people took him at his word that he could cover anything, handle anything.
In 1995, all three networks gave saturation coverage to the long, garish murder trial of O.J. Simpson. But ABC did the least, because Peter Jennings was determined to keep running more important stories from Bosnia and Herzegovina, about the mass rapes and murders the Serbians were committing there against Muslims.
On December 31, 1999, Jennings’s friend and rival Tom Brokaw thought NBC had produced a pretty good program about the end of the millennium — but Brokaw noted ruefully how much better and more ambitious Peter Jennings’s program was on ABC, using satellites to bring in voices from China, Africa, Australia…
Though Jennings made some “Best Dressed” lists, he bought his fine clothes entirely from catalogues. He didn’t apologize for dressing well; looking the part was part of gaining his viewers’ trust. But he was too busy to go clothes shopping. With his little free time, he liked to play tennis, sail boats, or listen to jazz.
He had a good sense of humor, too.
He believed in challenging ABC’s correspondents, and might tell one of them, ‘You have a bad reputation around here — but you can improve it by bringing in a great story.’ Some people felt inspired by that sort of treatment, others a little manipulated.
Jennings insisted on seeing every reporter’s script and almost always found something to correct with his red pen. No sentence could start with the word “But.” The phrase “such as” was much better than “like.” No script should include the word “meanwhile.” Sometimes, very close to airtime, he’d tell a reporter that the ideas in their script were strong, but he’d completely reordered their paragraphs.
So the basic feeling a correspondent got from Jennings was that his script was not quite good enough; the teacher was not very impressed. Yet if Jennings liked something in a script, he might steal it for his intro. He was not above poaching other reporters’ stuff.
He could also be very generous. In 1989, Katherine O’Hearn helped produce ABC coverage of the U.S. invasion of Panama. Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega had nullified an election which went against his side and had put down a coup attempt. His forces had killed an American serviceman in Panama. President George Bush, Sr. felt we had to invade Panama. It was very dramatic, ABC was scrambling to cover it and after the ABC special report ended, Jennings rushed over to Katherine O’Hearn, lifted her off the ground and said, “You’re brilliant!”
When correspondent Dan Harris was in Kandahar, even though Jennings was preparing hard for the Evening News, he took the time to call Dan Harris’ parents, to assure them their son was safe.
He gave a great deal of money to charity.
Ted Koppel, Diane Sawyer and Charles Gibson had great respect for the way Peter Jennings could talk for hours at a time on the air without seeming to be tired or bored, without missing a cue, or mouthing a single cliché. If the show’s director suddenly went to Jennings, because of a mechanical problem with a live feed, or because a guest wasn’t ready, Jennings was a master of the ad-lib.
A producer might be screaming into Peter’s earpiece but, watching the broadcast, you’d never know it. When a disaster was unfolding, he had a great feel for how much viewers needed to know, and what was too much. He was both informative and reassuring. Other anchors knew just how hard it was to do what Peter Jennings made look easy.
Jennings had a motto: ‘Question authority!’ He wanted his correspondents to question authority. Question the President of the United States and the Congress. Where do they get their facts? What is their real agenda? Could they be wrong? Question the FBI, the CIA, the police. What facts are they unwilling to admit? He even encouraged his correspondents to question executives at ABC News.
But don’t question Peter Jennings; he was the one authority who should be obeyed without question.
Cancer was one thing that Jennings couldn’t handle. He’d been a smoker, had quit — but then started again after 9/11 when the hours were so long and the sadness so deep. Four years later, in 2005, he contracted lung cancer. He kept his cancer a secret for as long as he could.
When he anchored the news on April 5, 2005, he sounded hoarse, and struggled to find a speaking rhythm. Charles Gibson, the ABC correspondent and anchor, had always been in awe of Jennings, and considered him invulnerable. Suddenly, Gibson realized, Jennings looked quite vulnerable. It was moving to see him struggle to get through the broadcast.
Peter Jennings died at age 67, just four months after he’d announced he had cancer, and before ABC had a replacement ready.
He’d become a U.S. citizen and was thrilled to vote in the 2004 presidential election. He assumed it was the first of many presidential votes he would make but it turned out to be his last.
Tributes were immediate and heartfelt. David Westin, an executive at ABC, recalled something childlike in Peter Jennings, a boyish delight in finding a new story to tell, the sense that a good reporter can never be bored, that you’re always learning more and getting ready for the next broadcast, and every day is an adventure.
Westin added that once Jennings had been on that adventure, he was impressively mature about finding the best way to tell the story: what sources, which metaphors and historical parallels. When the story was complex, Jennings knew the metaphors and parallels were important, and tried very hard to get them right.
Ted Koppel recalled once taking a walk with Peter Jennings. They passed a panhandler. Koppel handed the man a coin and walked on. Jennings stopped to talk to the man, and ended up speaking to him for 10 minutes, and thanking the man for his insights.