Peter Jennings, 1938-2005

In a profession where miracles, great and small, occur each and every day, I think, deep down, I was hoping he had one more in him. Instead, tonight, the world lost a great man, journalism lost the last of the network anchors. I lost an idol.

Peter Jennings succumbed to lung cancer. He died in his New York home at the age of 67.

I grew up watching ABC News with Peter Jennings. Dan Rather was too old for me, and Tom Brokaw, well, NBC didn't come in very well until we got cable, and by then my preference was set. I was an ABC gal. I remember watching Peter Jennings and realizing that journalists weren't just the vultures television portrayed them to be. I remember watching him when I finally understood the difference between being famous and being known.

His voice is the one that narrates my memories of all the big news events of the 80s and 90s. Pan Am 103...The Challenger....Even Oklahoma City and the Atlanta Olympic Park bombings. By then, CNN had infiltrated the common conscience, but at 6:30, I flipped over to ABC to get the network take on it all. And I'll never forget watching at the to of every hour as he rang in Y2K in each timezone around the world, donning a sporty tux for the bash in New York City.

Pardon me a moment as I draw a rather long quote from an ABC News piece on Jennings' background, but it makes a wonderful point about the experience he brought to the desk despite his youth...or youthful appearance.

He was in Berlin in the 1960s when the Berlin Wall was going up, and there in
the '90s when it came down. He covered the civil rights movement in the southern
United States during the 1960s, and the struggle for equality in South Africa
during the 1970s and '80s. He was there when the Voting Rights Act was signed in
1965, and on the other side of the world when South Africans voted for the first
time. He has worked in every European nation that once was behind the Iron
Curtain. He was there when the independent political movement Solidarity was
born in a Polish shipyard, and again when Poland's communist leaders were forced
from power. And he was in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania and
throughout the Soviet Union to record first the repression of communism and then
its demise. He was one of the first reporters to go to Vietnam in the 1960s, and
went back to the killing fields of Cambodia in the 1980s to remind Americans
that, unless they did something, the terror would return.

Now, the era has ended, not only for ABC News, but for network news. NBC groomed Brian Williams to be Brokaw's successor. Now he is the senior anchor on the evening news desk. A strange state of affairs indeed.

The world has lost a man who made many a meaningful contribution. We are all the poorer for it, yet all the richer for having encountered him and his work. On behalf of America, I bid you...goodnight.