ABC's Peter Jennings dies

Peter Jennings, the Canadian-born anchor of ABC's flagship network news program for more than two decades, has died of lung cancer.

Jennings, who was 67, died at his home in New York on Sunday, ABC News president David Westin said.

"Peter has been our colleague, our friend, and our leader in so many ways. None of us will be the same without him," Westin said as the network made the announcement shortly before midnight Sunday.

Jennings was forced to leave the anchor chair at World News Tonight in early April to undergo chemotherapy.

For more than two decades, he had been part of a trio – with Dan Rather of CBS and Tom Brokaw of NBC – who guided Americans through important news events on the major U.S. networks.

"There are a lot of people who think our job is to reassure the public every night that their home, their community and their nation is safe," he once told Jeff Alan, author of Anchoring America: The Changing Face of Network News.

"I don't subscribe to that at all. I subscribe to leaving people with essentially – sorry, it's a cliché – a rough draft of history. Some days it's reassuring, some days it's absolutely destructive."

His was the face known to ABC News viewers on all the big stories, including the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.

In the week that followed those attacks, Jennings anchored more than 60 hours and was widely lauded for his calm reassurance in a time of national crisis.

"Jennings, in his shirt sleeves, did a Herculean job of coverage," The Washington Post newspaper wrote.

As a reporter, Jennings had reported from the front lines of many of the past half-century's most significant events, including:

The conflict in Vietnam, which he was one of the first reporters to visit in the 1960s.
The construction of the Berlin Wall that same decade and its destruction in the 1990s.
The civil rights movement in the southern United States during the 1960s.
The struggle against apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s.
The flowering of the Solidarity movement in Poland.
The repression of communism and its demise in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, including Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Romania.

Yet despite his vast exposure to major international and domestic events, the veteran journalist seemed to have been particularly deeply affected by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

When he retired from World News Tonight, Jennings told the show's viewers he had quit smoking 20 years earlier, but resumed the habit after the attacks.

The anchor, who was born in Toronto and raised in Ottawa, said he also felt compelled to become a U.S. citizen two years after the attacks, while retaining his Canadian citizenship.

Jennings said the events in New York and Washington strengthened his sense of connection to the United States.

He was known for his smooth and reassuring delivery from the most important desk at ABC News headquarters in New York.

He dominated the ratings from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, when Brokaw surpassed him.

Jennings was born on July 29, 1938. He got an early start in broadcasting, at age nine, hosting a weekly half-hour CBC Radio kids' show called Peter's People.

He got his first shot at network news anchoring at 23 when he was hired by CTV to host its late-night national news.

He received many awards for news reporting over his career, including 14 national Emmys, two George Foster Peabody Awards and several Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards for excellence in broadcast journalism.

Jennings lived in Manhattan with his wife, Kayce Freed. He had two children.