E-mail a friendKayce Freed Jennings
airdate December 17, 2007
Kayce Freed Jennings is co-founder and exec VP of The Documentary Group. She's also co-editor of a book about her late husband, ABC News anchor Peter Jennings. She previously co-founded PJ Productions, where she was senior producer of several documentaries, including the Peabody Award-winning Out of Control: AIDS in Black America, and has been a producer for Nightline and the prime time news magazines Day One and 20/20. Jennings began her career—and first worked with her future husband—at ABC News in London.
Kayce Freed Jennings
Tavis: Kayce Freed Jennings is the executive vice president and co-founder of the documentary group whose previous documentary work includes a project on AIDS in Black America. Her latest project is a poignant collection of memories and stories about her late husband, Peter Jennings. The book is called "Peter Jennings: A Reporter's Life." Kayce, nice to have you here.
Kayce Freed Jennings: Thank you for having me.
Tavis: A book like this is therapeutic, difficult to do, what?
Jennings: Both. I didn't do it for it to be either. It turned out to be sort of therapeutic in that Peter was such a life force that in going back and revisiting his life it was an exhilarating adventure in itself. The last couple of chapters about when he got sick and his legacy were obviously a lot more difficult. And after we got them pretty close to finished I let other people go back and cross the T's and dot the I's on those chapters.
Tavis: First of all, the breadth of contributors, as I said earlier, you've got friends, you've got colleagues, but even competitors - Brokaw and Rather. How cool is that, to get them to be a part of the project?
Jennings: It was great. These interviews were - we considered the book sort of a conversation about Peter amongst his friends and competitors and colleagues. The interviews were all done in the two days after Peter died for the ABC News special. So there's a real sort of rawness to them and a real honesty and a real - something that's very alive and very immediate about them, which is why it struck us that this should be a book, because of the feeling these interviewees had that were quite extraordinary because of the time they were done.
Tavis: What, for you - and this would be, knowing Peter's idea, it would be a strange question to get an honest answer from Peter. He wouldn't give you an honest answer to this; he'd demur and shift in his seat. But what for you made him connect with the American public?
Jennings: I think a few things. One, I think he was genuinely, genuinely interested in people and ideas. I think his curiosity was infectious. I think that when he went out to report a story, it was done with such excitement and he was so excited to bring it back in to people to tell all of us.
And it was the same with the viewers as it was when he came home and told me, or if he called me from the middle of, as he put it, the first century, when he was roaming around the Middle East and he'd call and say, "I've just spent all day in the first century." And he had that same quality of excitement, and I think that's what really connected. He really was a great communicator.
Tavis: When you say he had a great curiosity, indeed he did, which is always fascinating for me. And he and I had a number of conversations about this. I was always fascinated by the fact that this guy has a high school education.
Jennings: Not even.
Tavis: Not even, exactly.
Jennings: Not even.
Tavis: Not even - does not have a high school diploma, not even a high school education, and yet he was one of the smartest newsmen on television, a voracious reader, wonderful curiosity. I think in part it was his curiosity that led him, even without a high school degree, to be such a regarded news anchor.
Jennings: Oh, I think so. There's nothing - Peter once said he didn't think he'd ever bored for more than 30 minutes. I honestly don't think he ever had been bored for more than 30 seconds. He didn't know how to be bored. Everything to him was interesting. And not only was everything interesting, he knew how to find what was most interesting about anything.
He'd find this glass fascinating. In 30 seconds, he'd know what the compound was that created this glass and why it was blue and why it was different, and why it was made in Indonesia instead of New York.
Tavis: Part of what you get, though, when people are earnest and honest about Peter, as they are in this text, is that he was tough to work with. Tough not in a mean way, but would perfectionist be the right word?
Jennings: It would be, and there's some wonderful stories in the book, as you know, of his colleagues and competitors, but mostly his colleagues talking about how difficult he was sometimes because he expected so much from them and was so demanding, and he wanted everything kept so fresh all the time.
But he also demanded no more of anyone else than he demanded of himself. He would call me during the commercials every night to find out how he was doing. Not how the broadcast was, necessarily, but could he be better? He wanted to know, was his energy level good enough? Should he do something again if there was another feed?
So he didn't like - he wanted people to be their very best, as he wanted himself to be the very best. So he challenged them constantly. He hated intellectual laziness, he hated conventional wisdom. So yeah, he challenged his colleagues.
Tavis: For a guy who feels that way - again, just from my talking to him - one of the great disappointments, though, has to be calling the election the wrong way on election night. And of course everybody got bamboozled the same way, but for a guy who feels the way he feels, I suspect that's not a good night to be around Peter. You tell me what it was like when he came home early in the morning. He was up all night, of course.
Jennings: Well, I think when he'd come home from something like that he was so pumped up and so wired, as I'm sure you appreciate. But no one, least of all Peter, ever wants to get it wrong, and Peter firmly believed that it's better to be late than wrong. So being wrong was - all you could do is apologize and move on and figure out how you were so wrong and not do it again. But no, that wasn't a happy experience for him.
Tavis: I was about to ask, when he came home, I'm sure he was not in a good mood that day.
Jennings: No, can't say.
Tavis: His curiosity, as I said earlier, I think we agree, informed in part by not having a high school degree and never wanting to not be on top of his game. I think the other thing that informs his career, in my reading of the text and my talking to him, is having a chance to cover the South, to start his career in the Civil Rights era. What do you make of how that impacted his career and his work?
Jennings: Well, I think it was a stunning time for him. Remember, he came up to the States very young. He was about 25 and was made anchor -
Tavis: From Canada.
Jennings: From Canada - I mean down to the States from Canada where he had been a broadcaster since he was 9 years old and had a lot of success. And he came down to ABC and was made anchor at age 26, and failed. As he said, he was too green, he didn't know enough, he hadn't been anywhere, he never should have had the job, but they gave it to him.
And so he failed, and he said it didn't take him long to pick himself up, dust himself off, and go on to have the best time of his life. And part of that era was indeed covering the Civil Rights movement. And I think it was a world he had never seen, it opened his eyes up to things that he had never seen. I think Peter - I don't know if he became at that point, but certainly he was a hugely compassionate man. He believed in fairness, he believed in justice, and I'm sure some of that came from his upbringing, but I'm sure it was reaffirmed by covering that time.
Tavis: What do you make of - because again, the most fascinating part of his experience - the high school stuff is fascinating, being the anchor of ABC News -
Jennings: The baby anchor?
Tavis: Yeah, baby anchor at 26 is fascinating. But all of that for me personally pales in comparison to the likelihood of being able to come back years later. That just doesn't happen. You don't get a chance to be anchor and then go off for a few years and then come back later in your career and get to do it again, and then go on to be number one.
Jennings: Well, I think it has a lot to do with - I say it's a great story because it's a story about early success, early and public failure and redemption. Before the redemption, Peter went out and worked incredibly hard as a reporter and honed his skills as a reporter and he became a first-rate reporter. And a lot of that was done in the Middle East, where he learned something really, really important, which was that there is not one truth; that there are competing truths, and that the truth is really, really complicated.
And so there are no easy answers, and I think that set him up to become the anchor he became because he understood how complicated things were, and also understood how to take something that was terribly complicated and communicate it in a simple and powerful way. And so I think he was very fortunate that he got a second chance and I think we were very fortunate that he got a second chance.
Tavis: Let me get a little personal, if I can. What did Peter privately make of the fact that he had cancer? We all remember - I remember vividly, as long as I live, his coming back on the ABC News and saying to us that, "I've got cancer." Saying to us that he used to be a smoker and that he'd stopped for years, but the pressures of 9/11 -
Jennings: And weakness.
Tavis: - and weakness helped him pick up the cigarettes again and start smoking again. And of course, he passed away of lung cancer. So the question I want to ask is, for a guy who was as smart as he is, a guy who was as disciplined as he is, a guy who is as professional as he is, who just takes pride in everything he does, how did he feel about the fact that his behavior, in part, brought this back? Since you used the word weakness.
Jennings: We never - yeah. Because he used it on the air when he talked about beginning to smoke again after 9/11. And in fairness, he only smoked for a couple of months and maybe had the very odd cigarette after that. So for all practical purposes, he quit again.
But the truth is we never discussed it. It was irrelevant at that point. Once he got sick, it was really irrelevant. I asked the doctors later whether his resumption of smoking had had a triggering affect or something like that, and they told me it didn't. But a lot of us smoked. A lot of people still smoke. The tobacco companies do everything they do to keep us smoking.
So just at that point, it wasn't important what had happened, that it had happened. And I think Peter felt that he had had such an incredible life. He felt that he was the most fortunate man in the world, he had a life full of adventure and joy and passion and learning that he wasn't about to begin feeling sorry for himself and he never felt sorry for himself, ever.
Tavis: That's the Peter I know, never feeling sorry for himself. Well, you certainly know, and we've spent time together, but I got a chance to meet and to befriend and interview all the big three of the big anchors during his era - Jennings and Brokaw and Rather have all been guests on this program - but for me personally, Peter was the one that gave me the most respect, bringing me on to ABC and allowing me to do coverage on election night.
Jennings: Well, he had good taste.
Tavis: Well, he was a nice guy. But Peter was very, very kind to me, and I will never forget him as long as I live. And I'm delighted to have you on the program.
Jennings: Thank you so much for having me.
Tavis: The book is called " A Reporter's Life: Peter Jennings," compiled and edited by his wife, Kayce Freed Jennings.
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