Working the Dead Beat

by Sandra Martin

  But being a Canadian often helped him understand outsider stories and get access to situations in a way that eluded his American colleagues. For example, he flashed his Canadian passport to enter Cuba and send inside reports at a time when American journalists were barred. And because of his influence, ABC extensively covered the 1995 Quebec referendum; Jennings was the only U.S. anchor to broadcast from Canada on the eve of the cliff-hanger vote. The events of 9/11 affected Jennings so profoundly that he finally applied for dual citizenship, having lived in the United States for four decades.

  PETER CHARLES JENNINGS was born in Toronto on July 29, 1938, the elder child and only son of homemaker Elizabeth Osborne and Charles Jennings, chief announcer for CBC Radio and later vice-president for regional programming.

  Describing his father as one of the pioneers of radio news, Jennings compared him with the legendary Edward R. Murrow. He remembered his father challenging him as a young boy to “describe the sky,” and after he complied, telling him to “go out and slice it into pieces and describe each piece as different from the next.” He also credited his father and the CBC for teaching him to respect the audience and the ethic that “everybody in the country has a right to hear themselves represented somehow on the national broadcasting system.” Living up to (and surpassing) his father’s broadcasting credentials laregely accounts for Jenning’s extraordinary drive.

  Jennings made his own debut behind the microphone at the age of nine, when he began hosting Peter’s People in 1947, a weekly half-hour CBC Radio show of music and news for children. His father, who had been in the Middle East on CBC business when the program first aired, was outraged to learn that his son was broadcasting for his own employer, because he “couldn’t stand nepotism,” according to an interview Jennings gave the U.S. edition of Reader’s Digest in 2002.

  At eleven he began boarding at Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario, where he excelled at cricket, hockey, and football. Six years later he shifted to Lisgar Collegiate in Ottawa (his father had been transferred to CBC headquarters in the early 1950s). School couldn’t compete with sports and the real world, and he dropped out before graduation, much to his parents’ chagrin.

  Despite his fantasies of being a broadcaster, he ended up in the archetypical Canadian job — bank teller — at the Royal Bank of Canada. He hoped the bank would transfer him to its branch in Havana. Instead he was sent to Prescott, a small town on the St. Lawrence, and then to nearby Brockville, where he was hired by radio station CFJR for his first real job in radio.

  He soon gravitated to the CBC, where he hosted Let’s Face It, a public affairs show, and Time Out, an afternoon talk show. In 1962 he moved back to Ottawa for a job with CJOH-TV, where he appeared as a special events commentator and host of Vue, a daily late-night interview program that he also co-produced.

  CTV lured him away to anchor the first national news broadcast out of Ottawa on the private network in 1962. Two years later he was reporting on the Democratic national convention in Atlantic City for CTV when Elmer W. Lower, then president of ABC News, offered him a job as a correspondent for the network. Jennings had cold feet and declined, thinking he wasn’t “ready to leave Canada,” as he told TV Guide in 1965. About three months later he “woke up in a cold sweat,” wondering if he had torpedoed his television career.

  Fortunately ABC was still interested. At twenty-six he left his higher-­paying anchor job at CTV and moved to New York to go back to reporting. “I decided, ironically enough, that I was tired of being an anchorperson,” he told Jeffrey Simpson for his book Star-Spangled Canadians. “I was too young and too ill-equipped, and America I perceived as this great new canvas on which to paint, to use the cliché. I was also aware that neither CTV or CBC could afford to send me anywhere.”

  He’d been on the job for only a few months when ABC executives plunked him behind a desk and made him anchor of the network’s fifteen-minute nightly newscast. They were hoping he might entice younger viewers away from CBS’S Walter Cronkite and the NBC duo of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. Jennings took the anchorman reins from Ron Cochran — by coincidence, also a Canadian — on February 1, 1965. Critics were scathing, calling him a “glamorcaster” and complaining that he was too young and inexperienced. He once jokingly asked the ABC makeup artist to draw bags under his eyes so he would look his age.

  He lasted three years in the anchor seat before being sent back to the field as a roving correspondent — a decision he never regretted, for it was the making of him as a news broadcaster. Beginning in January 1968, he spent most of the next ten years abroad, working first in the Middle East, where he became an expert on the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict. His program Palestine: New State of Mind, for the ABC News half-hour documentary series Now, was considered by many observers to be the most thoughtful analysis of the confused political situation in that area.

  As head of the newly established ABC News Middle East bureau in Beirut in the early 1970s, he conducted the first U.S. televised interview with Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat. Two years later he won a George Foster Peabody Award for his dual roles as chief correspondent and co-­producer of Sadat: Action Biography, a candid profile of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat that aired on December 19, 1974. Among his other scoops was his behind-the-lines coverage of the civil war in Bangladesh in 1971, for which he received a National Headliner Award.

  By 1978, Jennings, who was based in London, was chief correspondent and anchor of the foreign news segment of World News Tonight. Because he was stationed overseas, he often arrived at events, such as the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981, long before his America-based counterparts, and his local knowledge gave depth to his reports. He was one of the few reporters to detect in the usually demonstrative Egyptians’ subdued reaction to Sadat’s death a sign of the former president’s estrangement from his countrymen.

  His long-standing interest in Middle Eastern affairs prompted him to interview Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — then a relatively obscure Iranian cleric living in exile in France — several months before he returned to his homeland in triumph after the overthrow of the shah of Iran. He reported on those world-shaking events from the scene early in 1979 and returned to Tehran the following November, when militant supporters of the ayatollah seized control of the U.S. embassy there, taking some sixty hostages.

  He was also on hand for the hostages’ release in Frankfurt, West Germany, on January 20, 1981, filing eleven special reports in addition to performing his usual anchor chores. During his tenure as the foreign-desk anchorman for World News Tonight, Jennings also personally covered the Falkland Islands war between Britain and Argentina and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, as well as Pope John Paul II’s historic visit to Poland in June 1983. His penchant for reporting the most important international stories himself annoyed some ABC field correspondents, who resented the repeated invasions of their turf by what they called “Jennings’s Flying Circus.”

  In September 1983 Jennings succeeded Frank Reynolds, who had died of cancer, as anchor of a revamped nightly newscast and also became senior editor for the program. He was now competing head-on with CBS’s Dan Rather and NBC’s Tom Brokaw. Jennings, who reportedly earned an estimated $10 million annually, outlasted his rivals: Brokaw retired in December 2004 and Rather stepped down in March 2005.

  He also wrote two books with Todd Brewster. The Century, a bestseller that provided a breezily informative if egocentrically American perspective on key events, was accompanied by a multi-part documentary series hosted by Jennings. The duo also produced a much more personal book, about values, called In Search of America, which became the basis of a television series.

  Like many veteran journalists, Jennings was a reformed smoker. He had started sneaking puffs at eleven and it soon became compulsive. He consumed three packs a day until he quit in 1980, after his first child was born. He relapsed for a few months after the terrorist at
tacks in 2001, but conquered his addiction for a second time. In the spring of 2005 he appeared frail and was said to be suffering from a cold and then an upper respiratory ailment when he didn’t travel to Rome to anchor ABC’s coverage of the death of Pope John Paul II early in April. Then, looking weak and speaking in a raspy voice, Jennings appeared at the end of the newscast on April 5 to tell viewers he was undergoing treatment for lung cancer. He died at home in his New York apartment, surrounded by his family, four months later, on August 7. He was sixty-seven.

  Eight days before his death, Jennings was informed that he had been inducted into the Order of Canada; his daughter, Elizabeth, represented him at the posthumous ceremony in October 2005. After cremation, Jennings’s ashes were divided, with half resting at his home on Long Island and the rest at his summer home in the Gatineau Hills outside Ottawa. It was a more than symbolic commemoration of his dual citizenship.

  Service

  Real versus Pseudo Events

  UNAWARE THAT HE had been declared dead in the national media, Gordon Lightfoot emerged from his dentist’s office on a Thursday afternoon in February 2010, climbed into his car, and turned on the radio. That’s when he heard he had departed this mortal coil, possibly as long ago as the previous night — an ingenious way to avoid the dentist’s drill.

  “I was quite surprised to hear it myself,” the singer-songwriter of such iconic tunes as “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” and “If You Could Read My Mind” joked in calls to media outlets. “I’m fine. I’m in great health. I’ve been doing just fine. The whole thing’s a hoax,” he said, noting with pleasure that “all of a sudden, my music is in heavy rotation.”

  The hoax began with a prank call to musician Ronnie Hawkins’s management from a person claiming to be Lightfoot’s grandson. The caller solicited some tributes and then broadcast them on Twitter. Other outlets re-tweeted the news, adding fillips and details, spurring on the hoax until it went viral and was reported on several national news sites. Few, with the notable exception of the Globe and Mail, bothered to ask the fundamental questions: Is this true? What is the source?

  The spiral from “Lightfoot is dead” to “Lightfoot is alive” took about an hour. The aftermath was huge as analysts questioned how the hoax could have been perpetrated and the gulled fell all over themselves in the blogosphere, trying to justify how and why they had been pranked.

  David Akin, then a national affairs correspondent for the CanWest News Service, explained at length in a blog that he had merely tweeted an alert that had caught his eye: “Ontario-born singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot has died, according to sources close to the singer.” Akin argued that because he hadn’t included a link to another source or an attribution, people wrongly assumed that he was the source of the bulletin, when in fact he hadn’t done any reporting. He had merely passed on something he had seen in the blogosphere. That used to be called gossip.

  Lightfoot is not the first nor will he be the last person to be killed off prematurely. Former Quebec premier Lucien Bouchard was reported dead in September 2005, when he was in hospital suffering from flesh-eating disease. Former Toronto Maple Leafs hockey coach Pat Burns was declared dead in several media outlets before he phoned the Toronto Star, one of the culprits, and said in a frail voice, “I’m alive and kicking. I’m hanging in.” Comedian Bob Hope was twice reported dead and his advance obituary was posted on the Internet, while Pope John Paul II’s death was pronounced three times in the media — a record — before his actual demise on April 1, 2005. Mark Twain, who was twice declared dead, is famous for his quip “reports of my demise are greatly exaggerated.”

  The frequency of these false reports will probably increase in the age of 24/7 news and the cut-throat competition for viewer hits by reporters who bypass traditional editorial safeguards to claim bragging rights for breaking news on Twitter feeds and websites. It is all part of media outlets’ attempts to prove to advertisers and subscribers that news “happens” first on their websites.

  I’m not the the only one to bemoan the hair-trigger journalism of unsourced hits and manufactured events. Daniel J. Boorstin, the American historian, librarian of Congress, and author of The Creators and The Discoverers, wrote a book fifty years ago called The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream. It was published later as The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. The book is about the melding of perception and reality in American culture. On one level it’s a history of public relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; on another level it’s a prediction of a future in which invented, packaged, and massaged news takes precedence over the real thing, so that “newsworthy” events gradually become products that are manufactured like soap. If the trend continues, Boorstin points out, there will come a time when journalism and entertainment will merge, where the goal is no longer to tell the truth but to get and maintain the attention of an audience. Boorstin first made that argument in 1962, after watching television coverage of the presidential debates between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

  One of the concepts Boorstin talks about in The Image is the pseudo event: the hyped press conference or anniversary story that really isn’t news at all but is staged to look like it is by flashy massaging and catchy headlines. You have no idea how many end-of-year and end-of-decade retrospective pieces I have written over the years. The purpose is to have stuff in the bank over Christmas so that journalists can have time off and publishers don’t have to pay double overtime on statutory holidays. Of course, every so often real news does happen and throws the system into spasm — the tsunami on Boxing Day 2004; the death of Oscar Peterson on December 23, 2007; the assassination of Benazir Bhutto four days later, on December 27, 2007.

  The fact that the news spiral about Gordon Lightfoot’s supposed death collapsed within an hour shows that pseudo events have no staying power — “no legs,” as we used to say about a puff piece. The very same day that a prankster invented the death of this cultural icon, another newsworthy Canadian really did die: John Babcock, the last surviving veteran of the First World War.

  There had been a huge push, led by the Dominion Institute, to recognize the passing of an era — the death of the last Canadian veteran of the First World War — by giving him a state funeral. There were three contenders: Lloyd Clemett, Dwight Percy Wilson, and John Babcock, all of them old men who had lied about their ages to go overseas to fight for king and country. The problem was that none of them made it to the front lines before the fighting stopped and none of them wanted to win the tontine of a state funeral.

  As early as 2006, the Dominion Institute, an organization dedicated to arousing interest in and knowledge of our collective past, launched a petition (eventually signed by ninety thousand Canadians) lobbying the government to “honour” the last veteran with a state funeral. Parliament was easily persuaded. Not so the veterans and their families. They all valued Canada and its valorous military tradition, but they didn’t want to call attention to themselves as heroes based merely on longevity. They had too much respect for the concept of the Unknown Soldier, in which an unidentified body symbolizes all those who fought, with none claiming precedence or glory over the others.

  The pressure mounted on John Babcock and his family after Lloyd Clemett died in February 2007 and Dwight Percy Wilson a few months later in May 2007. “I just happened to be at a certain place at a certain time,” Babcock said at the time, brushing off the clamour to turn him into a symbol. There was another complication. Babcock had relinquished his Canadian citizenship many decades earlier, when he moved to the United States looking for work, and had actually volunteered for the American armed forces in the Second World War. No problem. In a special ceremony, his Canadian citizenship was reinstated. Still he and his family balked at becoming the focus of a pseudo event, showing the quiet dignity and unassuming integrity that we like to boast is the backbone of our national character.

  Foiled, the Dominion Institute, which m
orphed into the Historica-Dominion Institute as the years passed, retreated from insisting on a state funeral to urging that one be “offered” to Babcock and his family. Again they said no, politely but firmly. How about a day of commemoration? How about giving the next gold medal won by a Canadian athlete to Babcock’s family? The suggestions escalated like something out of a Mad Men advertising campaign, while Babcock quietly lived out his days in Spokane, Washington, finally dying, ironically, on the very day that the media had whipped itself into a frenzy about the non-death of cultural icon Gordon Lightfoot.

  There are many ways of serving your country. Lyle Creelman, a nurse who cared for the survivors of Nazi concentration camps; Kay Gimpel, who monitored the safety of Allied agents behind enemy lines during the Second World War; and Smoky Smith, the last surviving Canadian winner of the Victoria Cross, fit the traditional narrative of volunteering in times of war. But not all forms of service occur on battlefields. The ten lives I have written about in this chapter include Helen Allen, a journalist who helped children find adoptive families, and Anna Maria de Souza, who raised millions of dollars for medical research through her annual Brazilian Ball. Some, like Donald Marshall, Lucien Saumur, Israel Halperin, and Rudolf Vrba, were victims themselves — of a racist justice system, of religious persecution, of Cold War paranoia, and of the German genocide of European Jews — but they surmounted their own suffering to help others. Finally, John Weir, like Babcock, was a kid seeking adventure and glory. Unlike Babcock, though, he endured more than he could possibly have imagined, as a fighter pilot and a prisoner of war.

  The lesson of these lives is that life is what you make of it: each of them refused to succumb to tragedy, happenstance, or fate. And in doing so, they made society a bit more tolerant, a bit more caring, and a lot better for the rest of us.