As the world said good-bye to Peter Jennings this week, HUMAN EVENTS' John Gizzi recalled his one and only meeting with the late ABC anchorman. On the Sunday before the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston, Gizzi patiently waited his turn to meet Jennings, and, upon exchanging handshakes, said, "John Gizzi of HUMAN EVENTS." Jennings repIied: "I know who you are. I read you."
"Speechless" was how Gizzi described his reaction to learning that the anchor long accused of left-of-center bias actually read his column. But it confirmed that Jennings was himself a political "junkie." "Your story doesn't surprise me in the least," Ted Koppel, host of ABC's "Nightline" and longtime colleague of Jennings, told Gizzi this week. Recalling their first assignment together covering Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign in 1964, Koppel told Gizzi, "Neither one of us knew diddly about American politics, Peter being from Canada and me from Great Britain." But Jennings, Koppell added, "realized how little he knew and did something about it. By the time he had returned from the Middle East and been here a little longer, he became a political junkie."
