Silicon Insider: Remembering Peter Jennings

ByABC News
August 18, 2005, 11:35 AM

Aug. 11, 2005 — -- Peter Jennings was a gentleman. A self-made gentleman, which is always the best kind -- and that is, I think, what gave his death last Sunday an added sadness even among people who never met him. Such individuals are so rare that when they depart we aren't sure if there is anyone left to take their place.

Like millions of other Americans, I grew up watching Jennings, from the early days when he was an intrepid field correspondent who looked like James Bond and had the apparent confidence of a sophisticated man of the world. Then I watched him during that first awkward run at network anchor, where his gracefulness almost redeemed the miserable situation in which he found himself. Then London, where you could almost imagine him finishing a live feed before popping into a tuxedo for a night on the town.

And then his triumphant, and what later seemed inevitable, return to New York as the face of ABC News.

Through it all, like most other Americans, I assumed I knew what Peter Jennings was like. He was the man on the television screen: erudite, unflappable, ageless, gracefully conducting a symphony of reports streaming in from the newsroom behind him and ABC's far-flung web of field correspondents. No matter how horrible or chaotic the events out there in the world, we did not need to panic because Peter Jennings was staying calm and measured as he told us about it; and it wasn't senseless because, in explaining it to us, he had given the events shape and order.

Never was that more true than on Sept. 11, 2001, when the entire world seemed to go mad. He didn't scream or cry like we did, nor did he even wince at the horrific images. He couldn't. Instead, he struggled throughout the day to keep us calm, to make sense of what had just happened, and, most of all, convince us that at least one institution -- the press -- was still alive and functioning.

We know now what it cost for Peter Jennings to keep his cool that day. As he told us on the evening when he announced that he was dying, he had been a lifelong chain smoker who had quit and then fell back on his old habit amid the stresses of that day.

But even as I watched Peter that terrible day, I already knew him as a different man than the one on the screen.

It had been my original, lifelong impression of Jennings that had led me, a few years before that, to contact him and ask if he'd be interested in writing for me. I was then editor of Forbes ASAP and we were preparing the second of the celebrated Big Issues, in which we solicited the writings of everyone from legendary novelists and poets to Nobel Prize-winning scientists to celebrities and business titans. I thought Jennings belonged in the same crowd with Seamus Heaney and Tom Wolfe and Muhammad Ali, so I wrote him a note asking if he'd like to contribute.

I expected a brief note back, likely a no-thank-you from a busy man. Instead I got a phone call from New York. It was the familiar voice I'd heard on television since I was a teenager. "I just got your letter," he said, "and I'm very flattered. But looking at that list of contributors you've got, I just don't think I deserve to be in with them."