But his dream was still as it had been when he was in Beirut to retire to
But his dream was still, as it had been when he was in Beirut, to retire to a ranch in the Canadian mountains and raise animals.I remember one night in the seaside garden of an old house in Beirut, where we were having dinner in the early 1970s. A man who lacked the self-confidence that nature should have awarded him realised for the first time that he might be as talented as everyone told him he was.They were the reigning couple of New York’s social, political and musical scenes; their house in Long Island became the site of an annual jazz festival, where no one was turned away. With Kayce, he came to relax and enjoy himself as he never had before It was the happiest I had ever seen him. But he refused to feel sorry for himself for long.Some time later, he met his fourth wife, Kayce Freed, a talented television producer in her own right and a beauty, in New York She adored him and let him know it.
When ABC broadcast a tape of me confessing at gunpoint to being a spy, Peter – for almost the only time in his career – lost his professional detachment and cried on air. His wife was leaving him that summer, and mine left me shortly after my escape in August Peter had been best man at my wedding in 1977. He and I spent a long time drinking as we used to in Beirut and lamented what fate had prepared for us. When I quit ABC in 1987 to write a book on the Middle East, I was kidnapped in Lebanon.
It was the worst summer of my life and, coincidentally, of Peter’s. They had two children, Elizabeth and Christopher, and Peter was often named by American magazines “Father of the Year”. The formula was abandoned only when Reynolds died in 1983, and Jennings went to New York as sole anchor. His influence at ABC meant that it consistently devoted more air time to international stories than its competitors at CBS and NBC.After Peter and Annie divorced, Peter married Kati Marton, an ABC correspondent who had worked in Bonn. He became the international anchor for World News Tonight, in a three-man team that included Frank Reynolds as national news anchor in Washington and Max Robinson in Chicago anchoring stories from the heartland. He expanded his incomparable galaxy of overseas contacts to include the Washington ?te of two administrations and demonstrated his skills as an on-air performer: cool, detached and informed.ABC transferred him back to London in 1978 to pioneer an original format in evening news broadcasting.