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| Canadian-born ABC Anchor Peter Jennings Passes Away |
| Posted
on Monday, August 08, 2005 - 07:50 AM |
Peter Jennings, the Canadian-born broadcaster who delivered the news to Americans in five separate decades, died Sunday. He was 67.
Jennings died at his New York home, ABC News President David Westin said late Sunday. Jennings announced he was battling lung cancer in April.
The announcement that he would begin treatment for lung cancer came as a shock.
``I will continue to do the broadcast,'' he said, his voice husky, in a taped message that night. ``On good days, my voice will not always be like this.''
But although Jennings occasionally came to the office between chemotherapy treatments, he never again appeared on the air.
Broadcasting was in the Jennings' family. His father, Charles, was the first person to anchor a nightly national news program in Canada; he later became head of the CBC's news division.
Peter had a Saturday morning radio show in Ottawa at age nine. He had never completed high school or college, and began his career as a news reporter at a radio station in Brockville, ON.
He quickly earned an anchor job on Canadian television, but sent to cover the Democratic national convention in 1964, the soft-spoken and handsome correspondent was noticed by ABC. Jennings was offered a reporting job and left Canada for New York.
In 1978, ABC renamed its broadcast World News Tonight, and Jennings became part of a three-person anchor team: Frank Reynolds based in Washington, Max Robinson from Chicago and Jennings, by then ABC's chief foreign correspondent, from London.
Following Reynolds' death from cancer, ABC abandoned the
multi-anchor format and Jennings became sole anchor on Sept. 5, 1983.
Starting in 1986, Jennings began a decade on top of the ratings. His international experience served him well explaining stories like the collapse of European communism, the first Gulf War and the terrorist bombing of an airplane over Lockerbie, Scotland.
Two-thirds of local broadcasters responding to a 1993 survey by Broadcasting & Cable magazine said Jennings was the best network news anchor. Washington Journalism Review named him anchor of the year three straight years.
Jennings was proud of his Canadian citizenship, although it was occasionally a sore point with some critics. When Jennings spoke at the dedication of a museum celebrating the U.S. Constitution in 2003, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia told him, ``not bad for a Canadian.''
Jennings whispered back his secret: He had just passed a test earning him dual citizenship in the United States.
``My decision to do this has nothing to do with politics,'' Jennings told The Associated Press at the time. ``It has nothing to do with my profession. It has everything to do with my family.''
He is survived by his wife, Kayce Freed, and his two children, Elizabeth, 25, and Christopher, 23.
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