Dan Rather & CBC remember Peter Jennings (17min)

Peter Jennings not only changed the face of North American television news -- in many ways, he was the face of television news. And his death marks the end of an era (1:20-18:14).

It was an era where the importance of a news story could be measured by his mere presence on the scene -- when TV news anchors wore flak jackets and trench coats and took their audiences to the most remote regions of the globe. And when the best journalists in the trade had never heard of journalism school and high-school drop-outs were the leaders of the profession. Peter Charles Jennings died in New York of lung cancer last night. He was 67.

Peter Jennings was born in Toronto in 1938 and he came to the craft of journalism honestly. His father, Charles Jennings, was a senior CBC executive and a pioneer in Canadian radio news.

In his biography, Peter recalled an early exercise his father used to tune his powers of observation:"Describe the sky," his father would say. And after Peter diligently reported back, his father would ask him to return outdoors again."Now, go out and slice it into pieces and describe each piece as different from the next."

At the age of nine, Peter Jennings hit the airwaves in Ottawa with his CBC radio show"Peter's Program." a Saturday morning newscast for kids. It was his first job as an anchor. But it would take 17 years before he was ready to take on the likes of Walter Cronkite and Huntley-Brinkley on the American networks.

At the age of 26, after less than a decade in Canadian radio and TV news, Peter Jennings became the youngest person ever to anchor a network newscast. He worked as anchor for three years before he quit. For the next decade, he reported from nearly every world capital and every war zone. He was there when the Berlin wall went up. And he was also there when it came down.

In 1983, Peter Jennings returned to the anchor chair on the ABC nightly news. This time he was up against Walter Cronkite, but Dan Rather.

Dan Rather is the former anchor of the CBS Evening News. As It Happens reached him on assignment for 60 Minutes in Beirut.

This remembrance concludes with a clip of CBC journalist Brian McFarlane interviewing Peter Jennings in May 1965, when he was moving from CBC to ABC.