Peter Jennings

Blessed with matinee idol looks, Peter Jennings married four times. His first marriage was on 21 September 1963 to Valerie Godsoe, whom he divorced in 1970.

Between 1973 and 1979, he was married to Anouchka (Annie) Malouf, a stunning Lebanese photographer and socialite.

His third marriage in September 1979 was to author and ‘ABC’ journalist, Kati Marton; the couple had two children, Elizabeth (1979) and Christopher (1982) before they parted ways in 1995.

Peter Charles Archibald Ewart Jennings was born on July 29, 1938, in Toronto, Canada, to Elizabeth (née Osborne) and Charles Jennings. His father, Charles, was a senior executive of the ‘Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’. Peter had a younger sister, Sarah.

Peter’s first brush with broadcasting happened at the age of just nine, when he hosted a half-hour show for kids, ‘Peter's Program’, on ‘CBC Radio’.

At the age of 11, he enrolled at Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario, but subsequent to his father’s relocation to the ‘CBC’ headquarters in Ottawa, Peter took a transfer to Lisgar Collegiate Institute. However, he dropped out after failing his 10th grade. Thereafter, he enrolled at Carleton University and then at the University of Ottawa but failed to graduate.

In 1959, when Peter was in Brockville working as a teller at ‘Royal Bank of Canada’, he was recruited by ‘CFJR’, a local radio station as a news reporter. In March 1961, he joined a new television station in Ottawa, ‘CJOH-TV’, to produce a late-night news program but soon found himself hosting a dance show. The next year, he joined ‘CTV’, the nation’s first private TV network as a co-anchor of the late-night news.

In 1964, Peter joined the ‘ABC’ New York news bureau at a time when ‘ABC’ was lagging behind both ‘CBS’ and ‘NBC’ and WAS desperate to improve its ratings. On February 1, 1965, Peter was made the anchor of a 15-minute nightly newscast, ‘Peter Jennings with the News’; the 26-year old became the youngest-ever news anchor of an American network.

An inexperienced Jennings had a torrid time and in 1968, Jennings quit the anchor desk and established ABC's Middle East bureau in Beirut, Lebanon, becoming the first American TV network to be present in the Middle East.

Peter covered the rise of the Palestinian ‘Black September Organization’ during the 1970s and became the first American TV journalist to interview Yasser Arafat, the chairman of ‘Palestine Liberation Organization’.

Jennings shot into the limelight with the coverage of the ‘Black September’ massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. He was able to provide the much-needed political context to an un-informed American audience and also deliver exclusive footage by getting really close to the hostage compound.

‘World News Tonight’, an evening news show on ABC Television with which, he stayed for his entire career and acted as its sole anchor for 22 years.