final credits - peter jennings
"Good evening. We begin tonight ... "
He was the Canadian face of American television news. For over 25 years, Peter Jennings tended the electronic hearth alongside Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw, bringing the news home to America. All three started within a two-year period in the early 1980s, but Jennings was the last to leave the desk, bringing to an end a generation of television anchormen. Jennings died August 7, 2005 at the age of 67 from lung cancer.
It almost seemed as if Jennings was born to the role of explaining the world to the masses. The son of Canada's first national news anchor, Jennings brought an impassionate sensibility to American primetime TV news.
Jennings was born on July 29, 1938 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. His father was Charles Jennings, a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio man who gained fame as a national news anchor and rose to become a CBC news executive.
Jenning's family moved to Ottawa. Despite attending several esteemed halls of learning, Peter never graduated -- from high school or college. In 1947 he found his calling, hosting a weekly half-hour CBC Radio kids' show called "Peter's People." Jennings was nine years old when he made his broadcast debut.
In 1959, just barely in his twenties, Jennings joined the news department of CFJR, a radio station in Brockville, Ontario. His coverage of a local train wreck, one of many stories he fed the CBC, caught the attention of the brass and he was soon offered a job hosting "Let's Face It," a public-affairs show, and "Time Out," an afternoon talk show. He also hosted "Club Thirteen," one of many imitations of Dick Clark's "American Bandstand." A classical music fan, he had absolutely no knowledge of teen pop music.
In 1962, CJOH-TV in Ottawa had just become part of the fledgling private CTV television network. Jennings was hired by CTV to co-anchor its late-night national news with Baden Langton. Jennings was 23 at the time. Although CTV's news team varied over the years, Jennings was a constant.
During his CTV years, Jennings was already displaying his desire to report from where the news was happening. He covered the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy from the Dallas police station where Lee Harvey Oswald was held. He was reporting on the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City when Elmer W. Lower, then president of ABC News, offered him a job as a correspondent for the American network.
Within a year, the 26-year-old Jennings found himself in the evening anchor chair -- the youngest anchor ever at ABC's Evening News -- on February 1, 1965. ABC was hoping he might entice younger viewers away from CBS's Walter Cronkite and the NBC tag team of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. Ironically, Jennings took over the anchor duties from another Canadian, Ron Cochran.
But it wasn't long before the knives came out. Glamourcaster. Anchor boy. Stanley Stunning. Critics complained that he was too young and inexperienced. Besides that, he talked funny.
Buried in the CBC Archives is an amazing piece of television history. It's from a 1965 broadcast of "Telescope," a magazine program that was hosted by Fletcher Markle. The 22-minute episode (called "Spell it Lootenant for Jennings") shows the Canadian boy who made good addressing criticisms that would follow him for forty years. It also shows the presence of mind that became a Jennings trademark, with the 27-year-old fending attacks from veteran Canadian newsmen (whose salaries were suddenly a fraction of Jennings'). The clip also provides a rare glimpse of how ABC put their evening news on the air in the 1960s –- the camera happens to capture one of Jennings' worst nights. With the wrong film rolling with his stories, he has to be told how to pronounce "St. Paul" during a hurricane story.
It was only the beginning. Jennings jokingly asked the makeup artist to draw bags under his eyes so he would look his age. Viewers didn't like the way he said "leftenant" instead of "lieutenant." He mispronounced "Appomattox" and misidentified "The Marine Hymn" as "Anchors Away" at Lyndon Johnson's presidential inauguration. The ratings were poor and he lacked the experience of rival anchors Cronkite and the Huntley/Brinkley team. In a case of "I quit/you're fired," Jennings then embarked on a fifteen-year road trip that put him at ground zero of some of the greatest news stories of the latter half of the Twentieth Century.
Jennings was one of the first TV journalists to go to Vietnam, and he covered the civil rights movement in the southern U.S. He was sent to the Middle East in 1969 to establish the first American television news bureau in the Arab world, covering the Yom Kippur and Lebanese civil wars. He was the ABC reporter on-scene during the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre. He reported on apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s, and the birth of the Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s. Jennings followed the demise of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and in his career he witnessed both the construction and the destruction of the Berlin Wall.
In the middle of this globetrotting, Jennings became an ABC anchor again. In 1978, the network experimented with a three-anchor team with Frank Reynolds in Washington, Max Robinson from Chicago, and Jennings from London. Reynolds died of bone cancer in 1983, and ABC News President Roone Arledge offered Tom Brokaw, then NBC's White House Correspondent, the top job as main news anchor. Brokaw turned the offer down, soon landing the anchor role on the NBC Nightly News. Jennings started again at the ABC desk on August 9, 1983.
For two decades, Jennings held his own as part of the big league that had rejected him a decade-and-a-half before. Dan Rather slid into Cronkite's chair in March, 1981, and Tom Brokaw was now the new kid, coming on board in September, 1983. At left, Jennings with Brokaw, CNN's Bernard Shaw and Walter Cronkite
The ratings-title of "America's Most Trusted" visited Brokaw, Rather and Jennings each at various times, with Peter hanging onto it a bit longer and a bit more often than the others. A veteran road warrior, it was Jennings who dragged the other two networks into sending "The Big Guy" to wherever the breaking story was. Jennings' penchant for reporting the international stories himself annoyed network field reporters who resented "Jennings' Flying Circus" invading their turf.
In later years, Jennings hosted a number of thoughtful and thought-provoking programs that helped set ABC apart from the constant chatter of CNN, Fox News and other cable outlets. Ratings for the three network news shows were eroding. When Jennings started, combined viewership was about 43 million. That number was 24 million when he left in April, 2005. Jennings took the high road with a series of hour-long primetime specials called "Peter Jennings Reporting." The shows covered a wide range of issues, such as the Kennedy assassination, religious controversies, the crisis in arts funding, a chronicle of the bombers of Oklahoma City ... and UFOs.
On December 31, 1999, 175 million people tuned into Jennings' Millennium Eve special "ABC 2000," with Jennings staying on the air for 25 hours. Almost two years later, Jennings again demonstrated his iron man capacities, broadcasting 60 hours in the week after the 9/11 World Trade Center event. Jennings was on the air for sixteen hours straight on September 11, and viewers could actually see his beard grow.
It was the events of that day that caused Jennings to do two things: take up American citizenship, and resume smoking -- a habit he had given up two decades earlier. Jennings reportedly first started smoking when he was 11 years old.
On April 5, 2005, Jennings addressed his audience through a taped message. He told viewers he was diagnosed with lung cancer, and was starting chemotherapy treatment the following week. Jennings never returned to the air after that announcement, and made but one brief appearance at his office in May to visit colleagues. Jennings took the opportunity to take a black felt pen and mark up the night's story lineup. Peter Jennings died Sunday evening, August 7, 2005. He delivered the news to Canadians and Americans in five separate decades.
With Tom Brokaw's retirement in December, 2004, followed by Rather's forced resignation from the CBS Evening News in March, 2005, Jennings's death brings an era in television journalism to a close. The landscape in which information is delivered has changed. It has become fragmented and is no longer bound by time of day or place of venue. When news breaks, the event is as close as a mouse or remote-control click. One no longer has to wait for the Evening News on one of but several television networks.
In an earlier day, it was seasoned and veteran journalists who delivered the news. Their wisdom of experience was sought out, and people didn't watch the news -- they watched a Walter Cronkite. It was a personality who comforted us or helped make us understand.
Despite the artifice of impartiality that the role of 'television news anchor' requires, personality was itself an overriding story in Jennings' career -- and that of his colleagues.
At the root of Jennings is his "Canadianism." Modest, unassuming, deferential and self-deprecating, Jennings was also openly skeptical, particularly when it came to things "American."
"Media observers" noted that his ABC newscast always seemed to have more "Can-Con" than the other U.S. networks. Jennings admitted delight in presenting the opinions of those in the minority. In the heightened tension of today's gun-shy, protectionist (and some say blinkered) American media, Jennings was a red flag waved in front of a bull-headed ideology. George W. Bush was the first President who did not sit down for an interview with Jennings during his years with ABC.
Jennings was tarred with the tired "liberal bias" brush by the usual gang of conservative groups who no longer had Dan Rather to kick around anymore. He was accused of being pro-Palestine despite the fact that two of his four wives were Jewish. How the media in general can be described as "left-leaning" defies logic: ABC is owned by Walt Disney; NBC is owned by General Electric; and CBS is owned by Viacom -- all hardly known for their communist sympathies as corporate entities.
The three news anchors who dominated American news in the 1980s and 1990s were a study in contrast. There was Tom Brokaw, a plain-spoken South Dakota boy who never lost his heartland twang (or his masked lateral lisp). Even when his hair turned grey he hung onto a certain winning ... boyishness.
Also submitted for approval is Dan Rather. Hailing from the lone-star state of Texas, Rather came across as a strange mixture of intense but folksy charm, complete with numerous sweater & tie changes and equally bizarre Ratherisms. His on air meltdown on the David Letterman show post 9/11 became the stuff of talk-show and "Don't erase that tape" legend.
And then there was the elegant one. If he hadn't chosen television journalism, Jennings could have a played a secret agent on the screen. When he was covering civil rights issues in America's south in the sixties, he was often mistaken for an FBI agent. He didn't speak like his viewers, Canadian pronounciation aside, and chose a simplistic style to belie the complexities of the issues he delivered. Some felt this affectation was patronising and off-putting, but Jennings' syntax found a home in great numbers.
Jennings' ownership of his show came from years of meticulous attention to detail and research, perhaps to compensate for his lack of academic achievement. Once during a broadcast when a video feed abruptly stopped, Jennings made eye contact with the camera and continued the reporter's story practically verbatim.
On the air, Jennings projected an air of quiet confidence and detachment. He wasn't above letting the viewers know, once in a while, just how clever he was. An offbeat story from Wales somehow made its way into a story lineup, and Jennings reported that the event took place in "Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch" without missing a beat. On another occasion, he dismissed the faux-importance of the world's slowest high-speed chase. Covering the O.J. Simpson white Bronco pursuit, Hugh Downs asked Jennings what he believed was going on in the former football star's mind. Jennings shot back with "I haven't the vaguest idea, Hugh." Jennings also scored 100 percent on his citizenship test.
Jennings wrote two books with Todd Brewster: "The Century" (1998), which became a 12-hour ABC series, and "In Search of America" (2002).
On June 29, 2005, six weeks before his death, Jennings was named to the Order of Canada. That award from his much-loved country joins other recognitions such as the Edward R. Murrow Lifetime Achievement Award, the Sol Taishoff Award for Excellence in Broadcast, 14 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, the Radio and Television News Directors Paul White Award (chosen by news directors of all three major networks), the National Headliner Award in 1970 and the Fred Friendly First Amendment Award from Quinnipiac University in 2001. He was also named by the Washington Journalism Review as anchor of the year for three straight years. Jennings no doubt also enjoyed his parody in "Team America: World Police." He was also a certificated (fully qualified) private pilot.
For more about Peter Jennings and his career, visit the tribute pages at both the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and American Broadcasting Company sites.
After two decades of calling it "World News Tonight with Peter Jennings," ABC announced on August 15 that the program would be titled simply "World News Tonight" out of respect for Jennings' sense of accuracy.
The Last Link ends this tribute with the highest words possible -- from one of Jennings' peers. Dan Rather once said, "If Peter was in the area code, I didn't sleep."