Jennings, Peter

UXL Encyclopedia of World Biography, (2003)

Peter Jennings

The urbane face of ABC television's World News Tonight for over 25 years, Peter Jennings (1938–2005) embodied the highest standards of American television news journalism.

Peter Jennings

Never an avuncular father figure like longtime CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, Jennings nevertheless earned viewers' trust through a combination of hard work, authoritative expertise on world affairs, and a certain charisma born of unflappable composure. Though cooped up behind an anchor desk during the best-known phases of his career, Jennings was a foreign correspondent at heart. Viewers expected him to report from the scene at important world events, microphone in hand and dressed in a trademark trench coat, and when he failed to show up in south Asia after the disastrous tsunami of 2004, they correctly guessed that something was wrong.

Hosted Program at Age Nine

The man who became one of the best-known television personalities in the United States came from Canada and took American citizenship only two years before his death. His skeptical outsider's viewpoint on American politics and culture became part of his appeal; in the words of newscaster Robert MacNeil, he had an "ironic distance" that meshed perfectly with his international sense of savoir faire. Jennings was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on July 29, 1938. Broadcast journalism was in his blood; his father Charles Jennings was a pioneer newscaster on the then-new Canadian Broadcasting Corporation network. Peter Jennings often called his father his hero. Thanks to his father's influence, Jennings made his broadcast debut at age nine, with a children's radio show called "Peter's Program."

Jennings's father tried to steer him away from a career in journalism, however, and in school he floundered. When he was 11 he stole a pack of cigarettes from his grandmother and introduced his sister as well as himself to an unyielding addiction. Spending more time on comic books than on classes, he dropped out of school in the tenth grade and worked for several years as a bank teller. As a result, he has often been cited in lists of people who have risen to the tops of their professions without benefit of a college or even a high school degree. Yet Jennings was far from uneducated; he soon began to read voraciously and to soak up information on almost any subject he encountered. "I have never spent a day in my adult life where I didn't learn something," he said in an interview quoted in People . "And if there is a born-again quality to me, that is it."

Jennings also minimized the impact of his lack of formal education by starting at the bottom of his chosen field and steadily working himself up. He became a reporter and disc jockey at a small radio station in Brockville, Ontario when he was 17, and he soon gained national notice with his on-the-scene reporting of a train crash. A series of career moves followed, each of them occurring when news executives spotted him as a rising young talent and recruited him as an asset for a new organization. In 1961 he was hired by a television station that became part of the launch of Canada's first privately owned television network, CTV. At first his duties involved a music-and-dance show modeled on "American Bandstand," but when CTV launched its own national news broadcast in 1963, Jennings was named co-anchor.

From the start, he showed a propensity to go to the story rather than having correspondents bring it to his desk. He traveled to New York to cover the Democratic Party's national convention there in 1964, and ABC news executive Elmer Lower was impressed by his smooth manner and James Bond-like confidence. ABC at the time was an upstart competitor to the better-known NBC and CBS, and Jennings was picked in 1965 to anchor a 15-minute evening news broadcast.

Teased by Cronkite

Jennings was only 26, and his competition was formidable: the legendary Walter Cronkite at CBS and the duo of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley at NBC. Once, when Jennings appeared on a panel with these three veterans, Huntley remarked that his only show-business practice he permitted on NBC's news broadcast was to have a makeup artist paint out the bags under his eyes. "Yeah, Jennings steps in and has them painted on," quipped Cronkite (according to Jamie Malanowski of Entertainment Weekly ). ABC's evening news program failed to take off in the ratings, partly because at the time the network did not have the news-gathering resources to match those of its better established competitors. Jennings stepped down as anchor in 1968.

He took the failure to heart and decided that he needed a wider range of experience in the news business. Requesting and receiving a posting to the Middle East, he became ABC's only correspondent covering hot spots in Asia, Africa, and the Arab world. Jennings immersed himself in the history and politics of the countries he covered, developing the beginnings of a wide general expertise that later enabled him to comment comfortably on almost any topic in spontaneous on-air situations. In 1969 he opened an ABC news bureau in Beirut, Lebanon—the first full-time American television news office in the Middle East. He and a sound engineer were briefly imprisoned by Lebanese authorities as tensions with Israel flared. Jennings traveled tirelessly by plane around the Third World, often wearing a trench coat that had belonged to his father.