Silicon Insider: Remembering Peter Jennings

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."

Of course you do, I told him, thinking: Good Lord, you're Peter Jennings!

"Well," he said, "I called Stephen Gould up at Harvard. I guess he wrote for you last year. And he says I should do it."

He's right, I told Jennings, you should. [Only in retrospect can I see the sad irony that cancer would take both men long before their time.]

But, in the end, Jennings never did write for a Big Issue. Each year I asked, and each year he apologized and begged off. And each time, he would ask: Isn't there something else I can write instead? I thought he was just being polite.

I learned the real reason a year or so later, when other events led me and one of my editors, Bob Grove, to New York and a meeting with Peter in his office. It was a fairly busy news day, but Jennings gave us an extraordinary amount of time.

Indeed, in one respect, he was the Peter Jennings of my television memory: elegant, impossibly youthful, with that great voice. But he was also the very opposite of what I had imagined; something far more interesting and complicated than the perfect persona projected by the prism of television. The real-life Peter Jennings was affable, profane, incisive, a little goofy sometimes, and a journalist right down to his chromosomes. Most surprisingly, and most touchingly, he was also self-conscious, especially about his lack of education.

I suspect many, if not most, Americans were astonished a few days ago to learn that Peter Jennings was a high school dropout. It was not something he kept hidden -- on the contrary, he readily admitted it to me, and I suspect most other people he talked to, almost as a kind of defense against any ignorance he might exhibit thereafter. If people were astonished to learn this fact, it was probably because he seemed the very embodiment of a classical education.

I've known a lot of successful self-educated men. But none were as well-educated and as well-rounded in their knowledge as Peter Jennings. It must have taken an extraordinary effort, backed by an irrepressible will, to have gotten to where he was from where he began. And I got a brief glimpse of how he did it: sitting in his office waiting for Jennings to arrive, Bob and I scanned his jammed bookshelves. It wasn't a typical editor's collection: on the contrary, it looked like a small village library, with books covering everything from the world's religions to American history to business. I was amused to even find a book of mine; its worn cover showing that it had been read as assiduously as all the others.

Talking with Jennings was to see in action the endlessly curious mind behind that library. He asked question after question, not only like a reporter, but like a college student. What was going on in Silicon Valley? What were the hot new technologies? Who were the next big entrepreneurs? He knew far more about high technology than anyone could rightly expect from a network news anchor. And he wanted to know more.

Like most autodidacts, Jennings was both proud of what he knew and nervous about what he didn't know, the holes in his knowledge that he assumed a better education might have filled. That fear, I suspect, helped drive his endless curiosity -- until, whether he knew it or not, he was better educated, certainly more roundly educated, than just about any world leader he ever met.

A few months later, Forbes ASAP was asked to compile the best essays of the various Big Issues into a hardcover book. The collection needed a foreword ... and I knew just the guy to write it. As before, Peter tried to beg off: he wasn't a good writer, he didn't belong in such august company, etc. But this time I wouldn't take "no" for an answer.

What I received two weeks later -- with a cover note apologizing for the crudeness of the writing, offering to kill the piece if it wasn't good enough -- was a beautiful little essay, written with the lightest touch, alternately witty, self-effacing, charming and moving. I made fewer edits than I had to some Nobel laureates.

After that, I suspect like many others in Jennings' vast network of contacts and reference points, we stayed intermittently in touch. I wrote a little for one of his books, he read this column when the topic interested him. I watched Jennings each evening, and, like everybody else, was awed by his marathon 24-hour End of the Millennium broadcast.

Then came 9/11, and, along with millions of other Americans, I turned to Peter Jennings for explanation, consolation and even hope. He rose to the occasion, as if everything in his past had prepared him for that moment. And it seemed to change him -- in one case, as we now know, for the worse -- giving Jennings an added gravity, a new level of candor, and, at least it seemed from 3,000 miles away, a greater comfort with himself.

Two months after 9/11, I got a call from one of Jennings' assistants. Peter, she told me, is doing a big, three-hour New Year's Eve special -- and he'd like for you to be on the show. Can you come to New York?

So, on Dec. 31, 2001, I found myself sitting on a giant ABC set in the middle of the Museum of Natural History. New York was still in a state of shock and mourning. The nation was coming off one of the most horrifying and disorienting years in its history -- and somehow this television special was going to put it all into perspective, while raising our hopes about the future. And Jennings was to be the ringmaster, flinging questions out to correspondents covering the festivities at a dozen locations around the globe, emceeing live music acts, conducting live interviews with guests like me -- and somehow making it all seamless and filled with a higher meaning.

Even to an outsider like me it was obvious that within the first 15 minutes the show had already begun to go off the rails. A young producer beside me tried to follow the script for a couple pages, then gave up and dumped the sheets on the floor. Guests all around me, far more distinguished than I was, were politely thanked and sent home. The tension began to rise in the hall. Jennings was going to have to improvise the next two hours, alone, in front of millions of viewers.

He did it, of course, and so perfectly that, if you watched the show, you probably never noticed a thing. To the viewer, Jennings seemed as silky and unflappable as ever. I found myself ignoring the guests and features and just watching the host in awe: here was one of the grand masters of the television medium, at the top of his form.

As the show approached the 2-½ hour mark, I turned to my older son, who had accompanied me on the trip, and told him that it was too late, that I wouldn't be called up. He didn't care; he'd already eaten the free food, toured the museum's fossil room and met Rudy Giuliani.

But almost at the instant I said this, a producer appeared, and told me to tighten my tie and get ready. As she led me on the set she whispered, "Peter feels terrible that you came all the way from California for this and he wants you on." Jennings, who was also hurriedly talking with a producer, gave me a wave, then a quick handshake as I passed. Here was a man walking a tightrope without a net worrying if the crowd below had comfortable seats

I was seated on a hard wooden box, hip-to-hip with a distinguished scientist from the museum. He was shaking slightly. I told him that the audience would only notice his terrific tie and not hear a word either of us said. Besides, I told myself, most of America is half-bombed by now.

Jennings, looking as calm and dapper at the end of a three-hour marathon as he had at the beginning, walked over and said, just as the control room announced Fifteen seconds!, "OK guys, are you ready? Let's have some fun." He winked conspiratorially.

Then the cameras rolled. Peter hit his mark, made a clever remark in introduction, then casually tossed a question to us. He made it look so damn easy.

But then he was, after all, Peter Jennings.

This work is the opinion of the columnist and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News.

Michael S. Malone, once called "the Boswell of Silicon Valley" most recently was editor at large of Forbes ASAP magazine. He has covered Silicon Valley and high-tech for more than 20 years, beginning with the San Jose Mercury-News as the nation's first daily high-tech reporter. His articles and editorials have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Economist and Fortune, and for two years he was a columnist for The New York Times. He has hosted two national PBS shows: "Malone," a half-hour interview program that ran for nine years, and in 2001, a 16-part interview series called "Betting It All: The Entrepreneurs." Malone is best known as the author of a dozen books. His latest book, a collection of his best newspaper and magazine writings, is called "The Valley of Heart's Delight."