Peter Jennings: A Reporter's Life, an oral biography tells the story of Jennings' extraordinary life and career through the words of his friends, family, colleagues, competitors, and those he covered. Recorded in the immediate aftermath of the news anchor's death from lung cancer, this collection of memories capture his love for journalism and his passion for living.
Jennings was a high school dropout who spent the rest of his life in pursuit of knowledge. An autodidact, he traveled the world in search of stories, a notebook perpetually tucked into the back of his pants. He also carried a miniature copy of the Constitution, a testament to his love for the United States; Jennings, a Canadian, acquired American citizenship in 2003. The memories are detailed and tender, fiercely honest and often funny. They reveal surprising facets of a man many of us felt we knew well.
As the people who knew him best make clear, Jennings’ first foray into anchoring in America was a failure. In 1965, he was named anchor of ABC’s fifteen-minute nightly news digest. He was twenty-six years old, making him the youngest anchor in the history of American television. Soon both Jennings and his bosses realized he was too green for anchoring, Jennings soon returned to his first and abiding love, reporting. In 1971, he moved to Beirut, Lebanon, where he established the first American television bureau in the Arab world. The experience would inspire his life-long love of the Middle East – and his enduring fascination with its complicated history. He returned to the ABC anchor desk in 1978, first as part of a triple-anchor team, and then, in 1983, as solo anchor of World News Tonight, where he remained until his death from in 2005.
Peter Jennings was a celebrity, of course - a dashing, handsome and elegant man, famous for his ability to charm women and world leaders alike – but in these pages he is remembered as a loyal friend and a devoted family man who loved nothing more than to take his canoe out on a quiet lake in Canada with his kids, his wife and his dog. Not that he was the relaxing sort. Peter Jennings was a perfectionist and a task-master who ripped other reporters’ pieces to shreds, forcing them to re-write from the ground up. He drove his fellow correspondents crazy with his ad-libbed questions on the air...to keep them fresh and on their toes, he'd say. But if he was tough on others, he was tougher on himself. It was all about standards. Throughout his life, Peter Jennings was driven by a passion to seek the truth and convey that truth accurately, simply, cleanly, and elegantly.
