A couple of decades ago, before the internet became the way most people found the news, network television news was king.
There was fierce and spirited competition among the big three networks. Each of their newscasts was anchored by a longtime veteran, battle tested correspondent.
CBS had Dan Rather, who had succeeded Walter Cronkite in the anchor chair. NBC had Tom Brokaw, who succeeded John Chancellor.
And over at ABC, there was Peter Jennings, a longtime veteran correspondent who was elevated to the anchor chair in 1983.
By the early 2000, rather and Brokaw had retired – and cancer claimed the life of Peter Jennings. His death was in many ways the end of an era for network TV news.
In 2007 Jennings’s fourth wife Kayce, along with Jennings’s former ABC News colleague Lynn Sherr, published a book about him, called Peter Jennings: A Reporter’s Life. The three of us met one afternoon in the fall of 2007 in Washington to talk about the book.
So here now, from 2007, Kayce Jennings and Lynn Sherr.