'Even in Death, Peter Jennings, American, Continues to Have an Impact'
Longtime friend Todd Brewster reflects on the ABC News legend's life work.
Jan. 20, 2011— -- Five and a half years have passed since Peter Jennings, the longtime ABC News anchor and reporter (as he preferred to be known) died of lung cancer. By most measures, that's not a long time, but it seems long, oh so very long, to those, like me, who miss him terribly.
This week, Peter will be named to the Academy of Television Arts and Science's Hall of Fame (what took so long?), an appropriate, if unintended piece of timing when you consider how much talk there has been recently about the need for the kind of reasonable, earnest and intelligent discourse that he epitomized with his work.
Peter and I were friends and colleagues -- we wrote two best-selling books together and, along with plenty of others, produced two mammoth ABC television series based on those books: one, a 22-hour history of the 20th century called, simply, "The Century," the other a Tocqueville-style journey through the country that we achingly titled "In Search of America."
When Peter died, two other projects he and I had conceived departed with him: one on the Constitution, which, while a native Canadian, he had grown to admire, and one -- unusually personal for him -- that was, presciently, a "call to civility." As it turns out, the two were born of a common instinct.
The word civility has become trite in recent weeks, the victim of the sort of get-on-the-bandwagon journalism that Peter loathed.
But this was long before Obama and the "birthers," long before Sarah Palin and Speaker Pelosi, long before a congressman was heard shouting "liar" at a president delivering his "State of the Union" speech in the chamber of the House of Representatives and long before a murderous rampage prompted people to wonder if the verbal fisticuffs of political partisans could be blamed for tipping the bloodlust of the deranged.
Peter enjoyed a good scrap as much as anyone, yet even back then he had come to think that the public dialogue, the daily conversation, was turning regrettably raw.
