Remembering Peter: “We Miss Him. We Think Of Him. We Are Influenced By Him”

Tom Nagorski, the senior broadcast producer for ABC’s World News, writes a must-read “Appreciation of Peter Jennings, One Year Later” on CJRDaily.com:

A year ago today I received a call from my colleague Jon Banner, the executive producer of World News Tonight With Peter Jennings. It was a little after ten o’clock at night, on a summer Sunday. “Peter just died, Tom. I’m headed for the office.” In some ways the news was no surprise. Peter had been diagnosed with an advanced form of lung cancer four months earlier, and while he had fought valiantly — testing the limits of science, and deploying his own formidable energies — Peter had weakened, slowly at first, then profoundly in midsummer. So really we should have been prepared for such a call. Still, when it came — “Peter just died” — the effect, for me at least, was like a punch to the stomach. It was — and it still is, one year on — difficult to imagine that a man of such vigor and vitality, such a consumer of life, had breathed his last.

“The year since has been long indeed,” Nagorski continues. “And not merely because a patch of uncertainty at ABC News followed Peter’s death — or because another intrepid reporter and colleague, Bob Woodruff, was nearly killed in a January 29 attack outside Baghdad. For many of us who worked with Peter for so many years, there is a simpler reason: We miss him. We think of him. And we are influenced by him, in one way or another, several times each day.” Here’s the full essay…