Peter Jennings

Longtime ABC anchorman Peter Jennings died last night after a short bout with lung cancer. Only 67, Jennings was the one "Big Three" anchorman who had not announced any plans for retirement before lung cancer forced his hand.

I never met Jennings, though I saw him a couple times at the Republican National Convention last summer. I work with several people who have dealt directly with him, and their comments seem to be consistent with everything I've read. He was driven and controlling at times. He was also known for legitimately caring for the people he worked with, tempering exhausting schedule demands with moments of making sure they and their families were comfortable and had what they needed.

A person I work with described Jennings taking part in a town hall-style political forum in New Mexico fairly recently. Jennings was taping a special edition of World News Tonight in the area, so he was splitting time between that broadcast and the forum. He didn't know any of the forum participants before getting to the station, but an hour before the show began, he had memorized all their names, bios and other relevant information and talked the state's nervous governor into not walking off the set. It was his preparation that made him such a valuable part of the media world.

His experience was with international news. He established a bureau in Beirut and became an expert on the Middle East. He was on the scene of the Israeli athlete hostage-taking by an Arab terrorist group at the 1972 Munich Olympics. He dominated the ratings when America cared about what was going on overseas.

By the mid-1990s, Jennings had slid to No. 2 behind Tom Brokaw, as Americans shifted to more insular concerns. But on Sept. 11, 2001, I and many others tuned into ABC and heard Jennings' informed, somewhat patrician tone describing the events and putting them into a perspective that few others could.

This morning on NPR, Jennings' colleague and friend, Cokie Roberts, described how thrilled he was, a transplanted Canadian, to finally get his American citizenship recently. Last election was the first presidential election in which he voted, and Roberts said he was excited to finally take direct part in the process he had covered for so long. He never thought that his first election would be his only one.

The national nightly news has become a stagnant product across the networks. With Brokaw and Dan Rather retiring, and now with Jennings' untimely death, it will be interesting to see if the networks do anything to revive the format.

But Jennings was one of the voices I grew up with. It's unfortunate that in his last appearance on World News Tonight, the cancer had ravaged his voice, although his hoarse tone did not affect his usual smooth delivery.

"I have never spent a day in my adult life where I didn't learn something," Jennings told the Saturday Evening Post. "And if there is a born-again quality to me, that's it."

The appeal for journalism to me is that it's given me the chance to always learn something new, every day. I'm glad it did the same for Jennings, and it's too bad that his education ended sooner than he would have liked.

For ABC News' coverage of Jennings, go here, where you can also find video retrospectives and a message board.