That Soothing Voice

When News Got Stormy, Peter Jennings Was Calm

During a rambling conversation on the Saturday shuttle from New York last fall, ABC News anchor Peter Jennings said it was no accident that he granted fewer interviews than his longtime rivals, CBS's Dan Rather and NBC's Tom Brokaw.

He just wasn't comfortable talking about himself, he confided, and besides, he wasn't particularly good at it.

How ironic that this man who could speak with great eloquence for hours, whose soothing voice helped calm the country in times of war and tragedy, was the least interested in explaining and promoting himself. Jennings had an understated quality that he learned from his broadcaster father, said ABC News President David Westin, and in covering state funerals "he would make everyone be quiet . . . and allow the audience to hear the horses' hooves."

Jennings, who died Sunday from lung cancer, was a man of contradictions: A high-school dropout who got his education around the globe as a foreign correspondent. A Canadian who came to love America and tearfully got his citizenship after 9/11. A fiercely disciplined journalist whose personal life encompassed four marriages. A hugely successful anchor who joked about how awful he had been during his first tour of duty in that coveted chair, when he was in his twenties.

I remember hanging out in the ABC skybox at the Democratic convention in Boston last year as Jennings, in shirtsleeves, anchored a two-hour digital cable broadcast also available to America Online and cell phone users. He reveled in the spontaneity of it, without knowing whether the audience would be hundreds or hundreds of thousands, and boasted that the program would kick off with music by Jimi Hendrix.

Jennings sent me a personal e-mail only once, and it wasn't about him. It was to thank me for an article about a colleague of his who he felt was being unfairly pilloried by some commentators.

While Brokaw radiated midwestern earnestness and Rather a Texas tenaciousness, Jennings was smooth, witty, urbane -- too detached for some people's tastes, but to others a welcome antidote to the cacophony of network hype. In less than a year, the Big Three have all departed -- Brokaw by retirement, Rather by stepping down under pressure after a botched story about President Bush, and Jennings by the tragic illness that we all heard in his raspy voice when he announced the diagnosis, with typical grace and humor, last April.

It is in the nature of television fame that an anchor touches masses he has never met; as of yesterday afternoon, 25,000 people had posted online messages on ABC's Jennings message board. We remember such people through images and moments. Jennings's longevity -- he was there when the Berlin Wall went up and when it came down -- was such that, electronically speaking, we grew up with him.

I recall the discursive ease with which Jennings spoke to Ted Koppel two years ago during the invasion of Iraq, telling the embedded correspondent amid the advancing tanks in Kuwait to take his time, as if the two were just casually chatting over cocktails. I remember as well him interviewing young kids in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, eliciting their concerns as naturally as he might converse with world leaders.

And I was riveted last year when, during an interview in which former president Bill Clinton said he didn't care what critics thought of his personal misconduct, Jennings brought him up short: "Oh yes you do, sir. Excuse me, Mr. President, I can feel it across the room. You feel it very deeply." Clinton narrowed his eyes and lectured Jennings that "you don't want to go here, Peter," not after what ABC did in reporting "every sleazy little thing" from Ken Starr's probe -- thus underscoring Jennings's point.

I spoke to Jennings during the Monica Lewinsky frenzy, and he defended the media's behavior. "Some of us have been plumbing people's private lives with such vigor that they are saying, 'Enough already!' I don't know how to account for the fact that the public is clearly fed up but continues to watch." It was like a car wreck, he said, and "rubbernecking is part of the human condition."

Colleagues say Jennings was a tough taskmaster as managing editor of "World News Tonight," peppering correspondents with questions, rewriting scripts and insisting that the show live up to its title by highlighting foreign coverage. "He wasn't averse to surprising you on the air as a kind of tough love," said former ABC correspondent Chris Wallace, now a Fox News anchor.