I’VE LIVED MY ADULT LIFE surrounded by men who run toward trouble when they think they can make a difference. Cameramen, firemen, soldiers, cops—I have a lot of friends who are calm and collected under fire. I’d always looked up to them, not sure how strong I’ve been in a crisis. That incident at the traffic light in Baghdad made me realize I could be courageous. And I think I have been, later in life: covering the war in Afghanistan, for instance, and taking real risks with my career, including substantial pay cuts, to do the kind of work I really want to do.
But as my career at GMA blew up, I did not feel courageous. If hiding out at home for a few weeks had been an option, that’s what I would have done. Humiliation felt more dangerous to me than actual danger ever had. I could (and did) rationalize what was happening: the show had been in trouble when I started, it was poorly run, I wasn’t being coached or mentored—just made over. At the end of this litany, though, I still felt the same. I hadn’t measured up.
My sense of my own masculinity allowed no room for mistakes, failure or emotional vulnerability. It was, in other words, still tenuous, linked so strongly to what other people thought of me that a TV executive could confer it on me by offering me a big job—or take it away by ordering me to act more like a quarterback. In my own mind, manliness boiled down to a mess of clichés about not showing weakness or fear, especially when you felt weak or fearful. Masculinity was all in the eye of the beholder, ratified by other people’s perceptions of me rather than how I felt about myself.
Once I learned I was being replaced at GMA, I started to realize that the quest for approval was what had got me into trouble in the first place. It was why I’d taken a job I thought I was wrong for: I’d put more stock in other people’s opinions than in my own judgement. The money had been attractive (very), but what I’d really been after was the prospect of approval, writ large, in the form of Nielsen ratings and smiles on the faces of network executives. Knowing that they didn’t think I was good enough ate away at me in a way that being broke never had. That’s why I’d tap danced to please managers I hadn’t trusted and, in some cases, hadn’t even respected. And because their focus had been my ability to play to type, whether the type was football player or heartthrob, the experience had felt like a referendum on my masculinity.
Ultimately, it was. That experience helped me to recognize that my problem wasn’t a lack of testosterone. My problem was that I had let other people define for me what kind of person I was, or should be. I wasn’t my own man. And I would not be happy until I was.
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Even at the best of times, there’s a strange decompression period in those first few silent, empty moments after a TV show goes off air. You’ve received no audience reaction, good or bad, though you’ve been performing for two hours, so you feel drained, not pumped. You slump back in your chair, blankly, while the crew quietly moves the cameras back into their storage positions and people in the control room rise from their chairs and stretch, throwing that day’s script in the garbage and wandering off to the bathroom, now that they finally can. It’s completely anti-climactic.
Before my last broadcast as co-host of GMA, I knew those post-wrap moments would be something else, too: strained and tense. There wouldn’t be goodbye cakes or speeches. No one would know quite what to do. Many of the crew had been having trouble making eye contact for several weeks, not because they didn’t respect me, but because the “dead man walking” factor made the situation exquisitely awkward for all of us.
Having Cathy and the kids join me on the set as soon as the red light went out made the situation easier for everyone, not just me. See, he’s got a loving family, they’ll take care of him. They’d waited in the wings while we were still on air—Cathy knew that if I saw them, it might trigger emotions I was fighting to hide from viewers—then the kids bounded on set, full of smiles and energy, and Cathy (not for the first or last time) whispered in my ear how proud she was of me for getting through it. Erica jumped into my lap, Alex scored Elizabeth Vargas’s big cushy chair, and my family just hung out and kept me occupied during those first few emotionally delicate moments.
Both kids knew I’d lost my job. I hadn’t told them—didn’t even get a chance. The schoolyard grapevine took care of it. They’d been teased because their dad had been fired; it must have been the topic of conversation at multiple dinner tables in Summit after the news was in the papers. Sitting with them on my last day, I felt bathed in love, and I remember telling myself, “This is the best luck, to have these two. I’m going to focus on them now.”
But I’m not a Pollyanna. Along with love and gratitude, I also felt anger, the cold, steely kind that has been building for months and can no longer be swallowed. Right on cue, the GMA hairstylist appeared. I was still sitting in the same chair where, just minutes before, I’d broadcast my goodbyes. Erica slipped off my lap, and the hairdresser put a smock on me and proceeded to cut my hair. Short. Then shorter. Cathy looked a little puzzled by this public shearing—why the sudden, urgent need for a haircut?—and so did the crew. Someone turned a camera on me so people in the control room, a fair distance away, could see what was happening on the studio floor. I don’t know if anyone up there was watching, but I like to think they were—even now, years later, when I recognize that what I did was probably a little childish. But at that moment, chopping off my focus-grouped, side-parted hair seemed necessary and urgent. The fact that I viewed a haircut as a brave move tells you everything you need to know about my experience in morning television.
I didn’t want to be Optimal Kevin, didn’t want to be told to impersonate someone else. I was no longer going to ignore my own instincts. I wasn’t sure exactly what I should do next, but I knew that the only person I could count on, professionally, was me. I had to take control of my career or it wouldn’t be rescued.
Freshly shorn, I asked ABC for three weeks’ vacation. I still had more than two years left on my contract, but there were emotions I had been holding at bay for a very long time, and I needed space and time to let them bubble up and reveal themselves. I was a little afraid of how powerful they might be. I wasn’t sure if I was going to have a breakdown or what. I just knew that I needed to let whatever was going to happen, happen.
So, despite having just vowed to myself that my family was now going to be my number one priority, I asked Cathy if it would be all right with her if I took a road trip by myself. Did I feel guilty? Self-indulgent? Like a deserter? All of the above. However, Cathy’s MS was not progressing. She was fatigued, but holding steady in terms of her overall health. I’d become an honourary ambassador for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, helping to raise awareness and money, but I was beginning to doubt that Cathy actually had the disease. She seemed to need the certainty of the diagnosis, but I’d started to focus on the neurologists’ uncertainty and disagreement about the results of her MRIs. The only thing that would prove she had full-blown MS would be an actual attack. We were in limbo, waiting for something awful to happen, but I was starting to hope that maybe nothing ever would. At any rate, I was pretty certain that I could safely vanish for a few days.
Cathy understood, as she always has. She’d likely been worried about my mental health for some time, the same way I’d been worried about her physical health. “Where will you go?” she asked. I explained that I only knew where I needed to start from: home.
So, with her blessing, I loaded up my BMW Z3 (my one extravagant gift to myself during those high-flying years) and headed toward the Delaware Water Gap, then up the New York Thruway to Buffalo, where the familiar highways of my youth led to Toronto. It was about a ten-hour drive in all, enough time to play music, loud, and let my mind wander. I knew my first stop had to be to see my mother, Sheila, who’d be worried about me. But I also stopped on the road to call my dad, George, to ask if he would meet me for lunch the next day. In the twenty-five years since his marriage to my mother had broken up, I’d never asked to see him one-on-one. As a teenager, I’d seen him with my sisters every other week for the visits outlined in the divorce settlement, and also at Christmas and for a week or two during the summer, at his cottage.
Our relationship was cordial but distant. He didn’t really know me and seemed to have little curiosity about my life and how I viewed the world. It was his approval, I finally saw, that I’d always been after. I had questions I’d wanted to ask for years, and the emotional numbness I felt post-GMA made me brave enough to ask them. I didn’t fear his answers anymore. The worst had already happened, both in terms of my career and the uncertainty over Cathy’s health.
That it took me until I was almost forty to have a frank conversation with my father probably says more about my reluctance than his willingness. Growing up, I had been too afraid of his judgement. After he left our family and immersed himself in his new relationship with his girlfriend and her family, our relationship stopped evolving. I was fourteen years old, trying to step up and be the man of the house by protecting my mother and doing the yard work and not being a source of more trouble. I blamed my father for the divorce but I grieved the loss of him—and beat up on myself for being the kind of kid he could walk away from so easily. Now, as an adult, I needed to hear what he had to say, even if it confirmed my fear that he’d never really loved me. Or even cared about me.
We met just west of Toronto, at one of those mid-level chain restaurants with booths and happy-hour cocktails. After exchanging a few pleasantries and ordering lunch, I quickly broached the subjects I’d wanted to raise for years. Why had his marriage to my mother ended? Why had he so enthusiastically embraced his new wife’s family and seemingly left ours behind? What, really, did he think of me?
He was not at all defensive, just puzzled that any of these things still bothered a forty-year-old man. Still, he was prepared to oblige me. He didn’t go into a lot of detail about the end of his marriage, and he was practical and unemotional answering my other questions, too. He reminded me that he had provided child support until my sisters and I were eighteen and that money from his parents’ will had funded our university education. From his perspective, his responsibility to us was pretty much wrapped up by the time we finished high school.
It hurt to hear him define the obligations of a father in purely financial terms. But it freed me, too. The issue wasn’t me or my worth as a human being. My dad was a product of his own disciplined upbringing, and his reticence was likely the result of his restrained relationship with his own father, which he rarely spoke about. He did have an emotional side and he’d shown it when my sister died. I remembered how he’d wrapped his arms around Debbie and me as we’d looked at Kelly for the last time, how devastated he was. He did care for us, in his way.
I left the lunch knowing it was time to stop waiting for him to become someone he was incapable of being. Affectionate approval and affirmation weren’t his style and never would be. Continuing to carry a chip on my shoulder about that would hold me back from becoming who I needed to be.
Back in the car, driving with no particular destination in mind, I thought about the power I’d given to authority figures at ABC, the lengths I’d gone to try to please them. Had I been seeking paternal approval from them, too? Looking for them to validate me in a way my father hadn’t? Maybe. Probably.
One thing I knew for sure: I didn’t ever want my own children to be in that situation, looking elsewhere for validation they should have received from me. But I had an uneasy feeling that it could happen. I was more like my father than I wanted to admit. Like him, I saw being a provider as my most important role. Like him, I believed a father should promote his children’s independence and encourage them to feel self-sufficient. Yet I also wanted my kids to feel supported, loved and understood—and after that meeting with my father, I pledged to do better on all three fronts. Yes, I had always been affectionate with Erica and Alex, but how well did I really know them?
Alex, in particular, puzzled me. A lone wolf, introverted yet opinionated, he was sometimes tentative, other times steely in his determination to do things his own way. As his parent, this was sometimes maddening. But to a man who now regretted having been a pleaser, Alex’s tough, uncompromising streak seemed admirable. He wasn’t a badass—I still wished he’d stand up to boys who bullied him—but he didn’t crave approval and he didn’t seem to care much what other kids thought of him. I just needed to figure out a way to give him the guidance I’d longed for at his age.
Still longed for, to tell the truth. For years, I’d been too busy for self-reflection, but now with nothing else to do except think and allow myself to feel, the patterns were becoming clear. I gravitated towards friendships with men who seemed to have the being-a-man thing figured out, looking to them almost as coaches. Before I started at GMA, a senior executive who’d championed me at ABC said, “On most people, the camera adds ten pounds, but on you, it seems to subtract weight. You should bulk up a little.” I did, with the help of Mike Bronco, a personal trainer in New Jersey, who became my friend. Bronco, as everyone called him, fascinated me because he was so completely comfortable in his own skin, more so than any man I’d ever met. He was the ultimate guy’s guy: he’d built a log cabin with his bare hands and could fashion a fishing kit out of some reeds, a bird-bone hook and some fish-gut glue. But he didn’t have the swaggering machismo that belies deep insecurity, nor was he arrogant or overbearing or inauthentic in any way. He didn’t need to advertise his self-confidence because it was absolutely unshakeable. I admired that about him, along with his unwavering personal loyalty, Jersey-boy roughness, passion for the military and total devotion to his family. His starting place, the foundation of everything he was, was being a father and husband. His business was personal training, but what he was really teaching was how to be a good man.
I wanted to learn. I think a lot of men learn the way I did, from men who are not our fathers. As a man now approaching sixty, I feel lucky to be surrounded by many Broncos—friends who watch out for each other, invest in each other’s success, and are determined to keep trying to do and be better. Very few of the men I’m close to are journalists, but we share the common ground of failures and fuckups, a hunger for physical activity and a taste for brutal text messages that make us laugh out loud.
I wanted Alex to have both: a dad who taught him about being a good man, and friends who kept him true to himself. I didn’t want him to wait until he was nearly forty to try to have a real conversation with me, didn’t want him to question whether I really cared for him. I knew I had work to do.
But I wasn’t ready to return to New Jersey and my family. I still felt too raw. I realized that I’d been driving east, automatically seeking the familiar roads of my childhood, heading up to the lake where I’d spent every summer swimming, canoeing, exploring. My sacred place. The cottages had grown more opulent and the roads were straighter and better paved since I’d last travelled them, but the place remained as I remembered it, peaceful and still. I wanted this for my children: a place they viewed as theirs. I was going to buy a cottage on this same lake. I realized, too, that if I was thinking about the future and about what my family needed, I must be coming out of my funk.
From there I drove to Ottawa, where I’d spent many years as a parliamentary correspondent. It seemed to have grown up in my absence, even developed a nightlife. Continuing eastward I drove through Quebec and on to New Brunswick, and at some point I decided to aim for the tiny island province of Prince Edward Island, where Cathy and I had vacationed with the kids for several happy summers. In the five years since we’d left the country, PEI had been connected to the mainland of Canada by an eight-mile bridge, an impressive structure I drove across to reach the Island’s familiar roads, framed by red-tinged soil. I checked into a motel in Charlottetown and made my way to the nearest pub. It’s what I’d done at every stop, not wanting to reach out to old friends, preferring to be the anonymous guy on a barstool, drinking beer. Usually a few too many.
No one recognized me with my nearly shaved head and patchy beard. For the first time in years I was invisible, and that felt like a gift. I listened to the conversations of everyday working men, occasionally joining in and telling them I was a writer named John (my real first name). I hardly knew what was going on in Canada anymore, but over those ten days I noticed something interesting. I was starting to feel more connected, both socially and geographically, than I had in a long time. I’d become used to being the “hidden Canadian” in New York, someone who could pass for American. There was something tremendously reassuring about not feeling like an outsider. I knew these people in a way I’d never fully known Americans or understood what motivated them. I felt I belonged.
Ten days of anonymity stripped me down to someone close to who I’d been before I became a TV host or husband or father. Just me. And it helped me make a big decision, one I hoped Cathy would agree with: I wanted to try to rebuild my career in Canada. I was lucky I had Canada to come back to. Most hosts who’ve been bounced from American morning television (and there are many more of us than there are of the other breed, the ones who succeed) have never regained their career trajectory. But in Canada, I wasn’t viewed as a loser—at least I’d played in the big leagues. No other Canadian had ever hosted an American morning show, and I was one of very few who’d ever substituted for the anchor of a flagship evening newscast. My currency in Canada was higher than it was in the US. I needed to figure out a way to come home.
Heading south past the magnificent coastal scenery of New England, I thought about my family, how much more they mattered to me than any job ever could, and how much I owed them. My career had taken up way too much energy, time and mental real estate.
Back in New Jersey, with a bit of time left before I had to return to work, I tried to help Cathy with the everyday routines her fatigue was making more difficult. I drove the kids to school and picked them up afterwards, helped with food shopping, and tried to have the calm family life I had aspired to on my road trip. I knew I needed to establish a different routine or I’d risk falling back into old habits. Spending a week focused on my family forced me to recognize just how out of touch with my children I’d become. I’d known that Alex was being bullied again, but when I picked him up from school I could see it was worse than I’d imagined. He was always the first kid out of the least-used door in the school, which told me he was on the run from a real threat. When he slipped into the seat beside me for the ride home, there was relief in his eyes, and hurt, too. I spent more time with him at night trying to coax out of him what was going on, just how bad things were. He wouldn’t say much. When I pressed, he’d shut down. I wasn’t sure if he was protecting me or himself.
When he and another boy were suspended for fighting, I knew that Alex couldn’t really have been at fault. The other kid was much larger, a troublemaker. Turned out he had cornered Alex in a stairwell and punched him, and Alex, for the first time, stood up for himself. But the school’s policy was to suspend kids who fought, whether they were instigators or just trying to defend themselves. That night I went to Alex’s bedroom, feeling crushed by what he’d been enduring, and also feeling horrible that I hadn’t been there to help him. Mostly, though, I felt proud of him. I told him that while he might be embarrassed about the suspension, I was not—and it would send a clear message to his tormentors that he was going to fight back, which might deter them. I think it did. Later that week, his teachers sent an equally clear signal that they knew the score: they named Alex “Student of the Week.” I e-mailed his homeroom teacher that Friday, thanking her for supporting my son in the best possible way.
Erica was enduring her own humiliation at the time, but it was online and therefore much less obvious to us. Those were the early days of chat rooms, and she was among the first generation to endure the anonymous and vicious bullying teenage girls reserve for each other. Overwhelmed with fear about what others might say about her if she logged off, Erica couldn’t pull herself away from her computer. I tried imposing a complete ban, but that left her feeling defenceless and certain she was being attacked. Eventually we negotiated time limits, so Erica could calm down and focus on other things for awhile, knowing that eventually she’d be allowed to jump back into the digital viper pit her so-called friends were creating.
Watching my children going through so much emotional turmoil helped me put my own career humiliation into perspective. Yes, I felt bad. But I’d be all right. I had the strength that comes from experience and self-knowledge, including knowing my own weaknesses. They were being victimized in a much more serious way than I had been at their age, and it was happening before they fully knew who they were and they were therefore less able to combat it. I’d been too preoccupied to notice—and they’d been so worried about Cathy’s health that they hadn’t wanted to burden her. They’d been protecting us while they felt their own lives were disintegrating. It was a sharp, sobering reminder of my responsibilities and also of my ignorance. I needed to know my children better, to protect them better, to love them better.
And so I returned to work, this time in Washington, DC, with a different perspective. Going forward, I vowed to focus only on the quality of my work, not whether I was rising or falling in the eyes of others. It was important to me to do well, but my job was not the ultimate test of my worth—that would happen at home, with my family.
The environment at Nightline was the antithesis of GMA. Ted Koppel and his executive producer Tom Bettag had created a small and passionate unit dedicated to providing the context for a deeper understanding of current events. Everyone at Nightline was driving toward the same goal: meaningful features that would open viewers’ eyes to uncomfortable truths. It was as close to journalistic heaven as I’d ever been. All of us, I soon learned, shared common ground: we’d all been screwed over somehow in our previous jobs, and felt so thankful to have found safe haven in a caring and intellectually serious environment that Ted and Tom didn’t have to do much to get the best from us. My first assignment was to create a documentary on the killing of an unarmed black man in New York—a full-hour show, and we had just a few days to turn it around. I borrowed a few techniques that had worked for me at the CBC and threw myself into the story like it was my last chance to save my reputation. After the piece aired, Dan Rather called Ted and told him it was “spectacular.” Ted kindly relayed that review from his CBS competitor to me. Hearing that others in my industry still had some respect for my work buoyed and healed me more than I would have believed possible.
My tenure at Nightline lasted only six months. Tom was upfront about why: his budget couldn’t absorb my outsized anchor salary any longer, and the bean-counters at ABC News couldn’t see a way to move the lines on their ledger. But that was the happiest six months I’d had to date in television news. Working on serious issues in a place where journalistic depth was expected as a matter of course had restored my faith in my own profession.
Next, I was assigned to a bigger-budget broadcast, World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. It meant a return to the ABC studios near Lincoln Center where, inevitably, I was going to run into people who knew all about my decline and fall at GMA. I wasn’t looking forward to that.
But it turned out better than I’d feared. I was given one of the most prestigious office spaces, right next to the editorial hub of World News Tonight, which, in the Kremlinesque pecking order at ABC, meant I still had status. Peter Jennings was warm and welcoming, and apparently the producers on his broadcast had competed to be assigned to me. In spite of my very public defeat, inside the ABC News offices at Columbus and 67th Street, I still had a reputation as a decent person and a good journalist.
No one there ever mentioned the GMA experience to me, but I’d also perfected a bluff, hearty manner that discouraged questions. I didn’t want to come off as self-pitying or bitter. On several occasions, though, I found myself alone at an Irish bar at lunchtime, drinking. It was pathetic, sure. But also, briefly, anaesthetizing and therefore consoling.
I was paired with Joanne Levine, a very talented producer, and we were assigned to the “Closer Look” feature unit; it was one of Peter’s favoured segments, and it tended to keep me out of the daily grind of chasing breaking stories. Peter further helped resuscitate my career by inviting me to fill in for him when he was away—an honour in the network news world and, in this case, an act not just of generosity but courage. Instead of distancing himself from my failure, he invested in my future success. It was what everyone at ABC News hoped for, because if Peter didn’t respect you, you wouldn’t be there long.
My work at WNT was noticed by critics, this time favourably. Ratings didn’t drop when I substituted for Peter, the way they usually do with a substitute. I earned two Emmy Awards and shared in the news division’s Peabody Award for its Millennium Broadcast, and was given more high-profile opportunities of the sort I could only have dreamed of several years before. Two years after crashing and burning on morning TV, the network wanted to extend my contract, giving me another shot at the brass ring.
My hours were more predictable, and work and life were in better balance than they’d been since Midday. I was able to go out to dinner with my wife and I made it to all of Erica’s dance recitals; I taught Alex how to make little movies in the backyard (and how to stay calm when actors forget their lines). Life was, in many ways, very good.
But I wanted more. I wanted to be a better man, and that wasn’t going to happen if I stayed at ABC. At a relatively young age, I had reached my career peak. What was the point of striving to get back there? Even before my slide, I’d been unhappy. The environment seemed conducive to unhappiness. Even Peter, brilliant as he was, didn’t seem particularly happy. He had his game face on every day; after a broadcast, he’d agonize that he hadn’t used the right word or asked the best question. Once I’d bumped into him in the lobby and casually asked how everything was going, and he’d unloaded: ABC was asking him to take a pay cut, they didn’t respect the contribution he was making to the network, he felt like a pawn in a corporate game. I could hear the hurt in his voice. That was instructive. If things like that happened to a guy like him, my ride was never going to be smooth.
Peter’s office was surprisingly modest given his importance to ABC News. The only evidence of his status was the door leading to a small private bathroom. Unlike most of us, he didn’t display his many awards in his office, which was in any event too cramped to hold them all. Instead, there were books—his passion for Lebanon was well represented on the bookshelf under his window—and a clutch of substantial Inuit stone carvings, acquired on his regular summer trips back to Canada. There weren’t pictures of the luminaries he’d interviewed, just photos of his son and daughter canoeing, travelling, hanging out with their famous father. In those shots, he looked happier, more open and more alive than I’d ever seen him.
The guy I knew was mercurial, unpredictable, and sitting across from him on this particular day in early 2001, I was nervous. I expected him to be disappointed in me. It had happened before on a few occasions: without warning, he’d dismissed my writing or reporting with withering scorn. I’d learned to rehearse my lines before any lengthy encounter so I wouldn’t be reduced to spluttering helplessly if the conversation went south. I was afraid this one would, just as soon as I told him I was leaving ABC News.
I wanted to make the most of these years while Cathy was still mobile and our kids were still at home. I also wanted to risk a leadership role again, under conditions where I felt I had a better chance of success. Looking to be a bigger fish in a smaller, more familiar pond, I’d accepted a job in Vancouver; Global Television, my first employer, had finally acquired enough stations to broadcast coast-to-coast in Canada, and wanted to build a national newscast to compete with CBC’s and CTV’s. Secretly, I had been flying to Toronto to meet with Global’s vice-president of news, Ken MacDonald, to discuss how to build an innovative and modern evening news program. I’d be anchor and executive editor, running the show—and, more important, the hours would be family friendly. Global wanted to base it in Vancouver, so, thanks to the Pacific time zone, I’d be home for dinner every evening.
There were drawbacks, of course. The salary was less than half what ABC News would pay me to stay, and moving would be a sacrifice for Cathy, who loved Summit and had many close friends there. Montreal, where her mother lived, was only an hour’s flight away from New Jersey, which made visits easy; in Vancouver, we’d both be very far away from our parents. But Cathy was ready to embrace a fresh start, not just for my sake but for the kids’, who seemed very ready for a change of scene socially. She also knew the day might come when I’d need to be around more to take care of her. It was hard to imagine how I could do that if I were still at ABC.
I’d decided to start my conversation with Peter with the headline “I want to go home.” There was no sense burying the lede with one of the world’s top journalists. I also wanted to frame my decision as coming from my heart, not my head—no one who was thinking logically about his journalistic career would turn down the chance to stay at ABC News. “I need predictable hours in order to be the kind of husband and father I want to be, and haven’t been,” I continued, sticking to my script. Softly, Peter asked whether my decision was driven by Cathy’s MS diagnosis. I told him that was a big part of it, but also, I wanted my children to grow up knowing their father. I added that I loved New York, but in my heart, I felt Canadian, and I wanted to live and work where I felt I belonged.
Peter listened, saying nothing, then he did the one thing I was completely unprepared for. He cried. As his eyes filled with tears, he said he fully understood and supported my decision. He’d reached a point in life, he confided, where his family was his passion, in the way his career had once been, so how could he stand in the way of another father who was trying to find the same balance? The pull of Canada, too, he understood well. He’d never given up his citizenship (later, after 9/11, he pledged allegiance to the US as well, but remained a dual citizen). I think this was the Peter Jennings only his family and closest friends ever saw: gentle, sentimental, patient, understanding.
Knowing I had his blessing made it easier to let go of the past and start thinking about the future. Over the next few months, every time I got stuck in Manhattan traffic I let my mind roam ahead. No one had reinvented the format of network news for generations (it’s still largely unchanged) and Global National was an opportunity to dream up new ways of doing things. They didn’t want the same old, same old; success depended on creating something truly new. During those traffic jams I thought about ways to tell stories differently. I wanted to use new digital technology to change how we shot and edited the news, and to capitalize on iTunes as a distribution platform. I was excited by the prospect of hiring a young team and basing them in Vancouver, instead of Toronto, for a fresh perspective on the country and the world. The more I thought about it, the more energized I felt.
There would be obstacles, of course. Global wanted to create an American-style, dinner-hour national newscast, but the tradition in Canada was late-night national news viewing. We’d have to find a way to change long-established viewing habits. More problematic, Global’s national infrastructure was nascent and weak, and its local news broadcasts were generally ratings losers.
But there was the promise of more creative freedom than I’d ever dreamed of. Best of all, it was a desk job, meaning little travel and a more typical Monday to Friday routine. All of us went to Vancouver to look for a house, one with hallways large enough for a wheelchair, in case Cathy’s disease progressed. We found a beautiful place on the North Shore: wide halls and spacious rooms, tall cedars all around, and a small waterfall in front, so at night, we’d fall asleep to the sound of rushing water. All of us were excited about the house, the city, this new life we’d have.
In April, when I was leaving the World News Tonight newsroom for the last time, Peter stopped me, saying he had a going-away gift. A few people gathered to watch, and he carefully laid a perfectly folded American flag, one that had flown on the US Capitol dome, across my arms. It sent a jolt through my body, almost like an electric shock. “Did you know it would do that to me?” I asked. Peter smiled and said, “I wasn’t sure, but I thought it might.” He knew that after nearly seven years, I might feel Canadian, but I had learned to love America, too. That flag is one of the most meaningful gifts I’ve ever received.
Another is the long letter Charlie wrote me on GMA letterhead when he heard I was leaving. He wished me all the best, he wrote, but felt a “personal sense of loss and regret.” He was sorry that he hadn’t warned me not to take the GMA job “at a time when probably Walter Cronkite in his prime couldn’t have saved it.” In 1998, he explained, “I was convinced it was time for me to go, and that you were the right person to take over this broadcast. I still think I was right about both things. Would that you had not been saddled with the burdens that existed at the time. You were, I guess, presented with a hill too steep for anyone to climb.” As Charlie wrote those words, he and Diane Sawyer were still struggling up that steep hill. It was a hellishly hard climb and while they quickly improved the ratings of GMA they never overtook Today. (That didn’t happen until NBC’s own clumsy anchor change, adding then subtracting Ann Curry, gave Good Morning America an opening in 2012.)
When reporters asked, my standard line was that I didn’t regret hosting Good Morning America because it had been a rare opportunity and I’d learned many invaluable lessons from it. Charlie knew this was horseshit. I could have learned those same lessons in much less public and painful ways, and I wish I had. It took me years to get over the scars and writing about them now, I realize they will always be with me. It meant a lot to me that Charlie wished I hadn’t gone through that particular trial by fire, and that I still had his support and respect.
There wasn’t much time for a going-away party, but my producer Joanne kindly arranged a farewell dinner for me and Cathy, and asked who I’d like to invite. I gave her a list of a dozen names of women and men I’d worked with, all people I felt had been overlooked by management because of their race and/or gender. ABC News executives were enamoured of Ivy League grads and people with good connections, and tended to promote them higher, faster. I was an obvious exception, and so was Peter, but I wanted to celebrate people who hadn’t been so lucky. We had a wonderful last evening together at a restaurant on the Upper West Side, and after we said goodnight, Cathy and I walked hand in hand down the leafy streets near Central Park. On my first day in the city I felt I’d arrived on a movie set—the street names and scenes were so familiar. I’d never stopped feeling that way. As our American adventure came to a close, I felt blessed that I’d spent seven years working in New York.
But I was ready to start a completely new chapter, one where I measured success using my own yardstick, not anyone else’s. For the first time, I was thinking strategically about my career, trying to tailor a job to fit my strengths rather than trying to tailor my personality to fit a job—or trying to tailor my life to achieve someone else’s definition of success. I had my own definition now.
I was forty years old. I wanted to set a different pattern for my next decade. Ambition had returned to me, but it was tempered now by realism as well as a keen appreciation of the cost of success. And failure.
For better or worse, I was now my own man.