Peter Charles Archibald Ewart Jennings (July 29, 1938 – August 7, 2005) was a Canadian and American television journalist. He was best known for serving as the sole anchor of ABC World News Tonight from 1983 until his death from lung cancer in 2005. Despite dropping out of high school, Jennings transformed himself into one of American television's most prominent journalists.
Jennings started his career early, hosting a Canadian radio show at age 9. He began his professional career with CJOH-TV in Ottawa during its early years, anchoring the local newscasts and hosting the teen dance show Saturday Date on Saturdays and then co-anchoring the CTV Television Network's national newscast. In 1965, ABC News tapped him to anchor its flagship evening news program. Critics and others in the television news business attacked his inexperience, making his job difficult. He became a foreign correspondent in 1968, reporting from the Middle East.
Jennings returned as one of World News Tonight's three anchormen in 1978, and he was promoted to sole anchorman in 1983. He was also known for his marathon coverage of breaking news stories, staying on the air for 15 hours or more to anchor the live broadcast of events such as the Gulf War in 1991, the millennium celebrations in 1999–2000, and the September 11 attacks in 2001. In addition to anchoring, he was the host of many ABC News special reports and moderator of several American presidential debates. He was always fascinated with the United States and became an American citizen in 2003.
Along with former television anchors Tom Brokaw of NBC Nightly News and Dan Rather of CBS Evening News, Jennings was one of the "Big Three" news anchormen who dominated American evening network news from the early 1980s to the mid-2000s. Jennings's death closely followed the retirements from anchoring evening news programs of Brokaw in 2004 and Rather in 2005.
Jennings was born on July 29, 1938, in Toronto, Ontario; he and his younger sister Sarah were children of Elizabeth (née Osborne) and Charles Jennings, a prominent radio broadcaster for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Jennings started his broadcasting career at the age of nine, hosting Peter's People, a half-hour, Saturday morning, CBC Radio show for kids. His father was on a business trip to the Middle East when the show debuted; upon returning, Charles Jennings, who harbored a deep dislike of nepotism, was outraged to learn that the network had put his son on the air.
When Jennings was 11 years old, he began attending Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario, where he excelled in sports. After the CBC moved his father to its Ottawa headquarters in the early 1950s, Jennings transferred to Lisgar Collegiate Institute. He struggled academically, and Jennings later surmised that it was out of "pure boredom" that he failed 10th grade and dropped out. "I loved girls," he said. "I loved comic books. And for reasons I don't understand, I was pretty lazy." Jennings then briefly attended Carleton University, where he says he "lasted about 10 minutes" before dropping out. He also attended the University of Ottawa.
Although Jennings dreamed of following in his father's footsteps in broadcasting, his first job was as a bank teller for the Royal Bank of Canada. He had hoped that the company would assign him to its Havana branch; instead, it located him to the small town of Prescott, Ontario, before transferring him to its nearby Brockville branch. During this time, he explored acting by appearing in several amateur musical productions with the Orpheus Musical Theatre Society, including Damn Yankees and South Pacific.
While in Brockville, then 21-year-old Jennings started his rise in broadcasting. In 1959, CFJR, a local radio station, hired him as a member of its news department; many of his stories were picked up by the CBC. By 1961, Jennings had joined the staff of CJOH-TV, then a new television station in Ottawa. When the station launched in March 1961, Jennings was initially an interviewer and co-producer for Vue, a late-night news program. His producers saw a youthful attractiveness in him that resembled that of Dick Clark, and Jennings soon found himself hosting Club Thirteen, a dance show similar to American Bandstand.
In 1963, CTV, Canada's first private TV network and a fledgling competitor of his father's network, hired the 24-year-old Jennings as co-anchor of its late-night national newscast, CTV World News. While reporting for CTV, he was the first Canadian journalist to arrive in Dallas after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In 1964, CTV sent Jennings to cover the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. There, he ran into Elmer Lower, then president of ABC News, who offered him a job as a correspondent for the American network, an opportunity Jennings initially rejected. "The job was pretty intimidating for a guy like me in a tiny city in Canada," Jennings later recalled. "I thought, What if I screw up? What if I fail?" Three months later though, he changed his mind and moved to the United States.
Though he had moved to ABC, he accepted a freelance assignment narrating the documentary series The Fabulous Sixties for CTV in 1969.
United States' youngest anchor
Jennings started reporting for ABC at its New York news bureau. At the time, ABC lagged behind the more established news divisions of NBC and CBS, and the network was trying to attract younger viewers. On February 1, 1965, ABC plucked the fresh-faced Canadian from the field and placed him at the anchor desk of Peter Jennings with the News, then a 15-minute nightly newscast. He replaced Ron Cochran, a fellow Canadian. At 26, Jennings was, and remains, the youngest-ever American network news anchor. "ABC was in bad shape at the time," Jennings said. "They were willing to try anything, and, to demonstrate the point, they tried me."
An inexperienced Jennings had a hard time keeping up with his rivals at the other networks, and he – and the upstart ABC News – could not compete with the venerable newscasts of Walter Cronkite at CBS and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley at NBC. Some in the American audience disliked Jennings's Canadian accent. He pronounced lieutenant as "leftenant", mangled the pronunciation of "Appomattox", and misidentified the "Marines' Hymn" as "Anchors Aweigh" at Lyndon B. Johnson's presidential inauguration; his lack of in-depth knowledge of American affairs and culture led critics to deride Jennings as a "glamorcaster". "It was a little ridiculous when you think about it," he later reflected. "A 26-year-old trying to compete with Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley. I was simply unqualified." After three rocky years at the anchor desk, Jennings quit to become a foreign correspondent.
Jennings attempted to build his journalism credentials abroad. In 1968, he established ABC's Middle East bureau in Beirut, Lebanon, the first American television news bureau in the Arab world. The next year, he demonstrated his growing sympathies regarding Middle Eastern affairs with Palestine: New State of Mind, a half-hour documentary for ABC's Now news program. As ABC's Beirut bureau chief, Jennings favored the Arab cause in the Arab–Israeli conflict, including the rise of the Palestinian Black September Organization during the early 1970s. He conducted the first American television interview with Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat. While stationed in the Lebanese capital, Jennings dated Palestinian activist Hanan Ashrawi, who was then a graduate student in literature at the American University in Beirut.
In 1972, Jennings covered his first major breaking news story, the Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes by Black September. His live reporting, which drew on the sympathy he had acquired for the Arab world, sought to influence Americans who were critical of the Palestinian group. By hiding with his camera crew close to the athletic compound where the Israeli athletes were being held hostage, Jennings was able to provide ABC with clear video of the masked hostage-takers. He would later be criticized for insisting on using the terms "guerillas" and "commandos" instead of "terrorists" to describe the members of Black September.