REMEMBERING PETER JENNINGS

Peter Jennings died August 7, 2005, of lung cancer. He was 67. Jennings came of age at ABC News where he worked for more than 40 years, the last 20 as anchor of World News Tonight. Urbane and handsome, Jennings was first hired to be ABC's anchor at the age of 26. It didn't work out. "It was a dreadful mistake, a foolish experiment," Jennings said. "I'm the classic example of how not to do it. I'm glad it didn't hurt me more than it did." After three years, the network made Jennings a foreign correspondent. "I was so wet behind the ears, I was practically drowning," he told ABC affiliate KATU in February. "ABC was my education and they sent me to all of these extraordinary places in the world and allowed me as a journalist to develop. I can't complain about that for five seconds."

Jennings drew high praise for his anchor work on 9/11. In the book "Running Toward Danger," Jennings recalls that his first instinct was to ask for background information. "The very next thing I did was take an emotional and intellectual breath and say to myself, be careful. As we've said occasionally on the air, very often the first apparent facts are the wrong ones. I think that way all the time. My job is to listen to everybody, question everybody and try to build as complete and as comprehensive a picture as I can."

"People think this is silly," Jennings told Columbia Journalism Review in 1995, "but the most important thing anybody can bring to this business is their mind." Jennings reflected on the job of anchor and the future of network news in a conversation with the NewsHour in 2001. "I think it's hard to be an anchor person if you don't know what you're doing," he said.

Canadian-born, Jennings became a United States citizen in 2003, after reporting the news to Americans for almost 40 years. Why? "Not to sound too corny about it, but love, respect, gratitude, time," he said. "I've been thinking about this for so long. This is not the kind of thing you can do overnight."