Jennings, a cool, urbane presence who described the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 9/11 terror attacks, the millennium celebrations, and more than a few skies as the longtime anchor of ABC's World News Tonight, died Sunday in New York, a little more than four months after announcing he'd been diagnosed with lung cancer. He was 67.

In a statement, Jennings' wife, Kayce Freed, and his two adult children, daughter Elizabeth and son Christopher, said "Peter died with his family around him, without pain and in peace.

"He knew he'd lived a good life."

ABC News president David Westin called Jennings "our colleague, our friend, and our leader in so many ways." "None of us will be the same without him," he said in a statement.

News of Jennings' death prompted a tribute from President Bush. "A lot of Americans relied upon Peter Jennings for their news," Bush told reporters Monday in Texas. "He became a part of the life of a lot of our fellow citizens, and he will be missed."

Not quite looking or sounding himself, Jennings last anchored World News Tonight on Apr. 1. Days later, on Apr. 5, after he'd conspicuously not flown to Rome to cover the final days of Pope John Paul II, as would be typical of the frequent-flier network news anchor, he disclosed he was battling lung cancer. Although he hadn't been feeling well for months, Jennings called the diagnosis a "surprise." In a taped message that aired that night on World News Tonight--his final on-air appearance--Jennings noted he was a relapsed smoker who'd resumed his longtime habit in 2001 in the wake of 9/11.

On Apr. 29, ABCNews.com posted a note from Jennings to his viewers. It thanked them for their "anecdotes, mementoes, home recipes and general all-purpose guidance and concern." And it revealed that the unflappable anchor was facing his toughest challenge. "Yesterday I decided to go to the office. I live only a few blocks away. I got as far as the bedroom door," Jennings wrote. "Chemo strikes.

On Sunday, Westin said Jennings underwent "aggressive chemotherapy treatment." "He knew that it was an uphill struggle," the network news chief said, all but confirming early speculation that Jennings' course of treatment meant his cancer had been caught in the late, not early, stages.

"He faced it [his diagnosis] with realism, courage and a firm hope that he would be one of the fortunate ones," Westin said. "In the end, he was not."

ABC News colleague Barbara Walters summed up the loss simply: "He just died too young."

Ted Koppel, as much a fixture for his late-night work on ABC's Nightline as Jennings was on the evening news, said he'd last visited his ailing friend a few days ago. "He and I joked...that between the two of us, we'd put in 83 years at ABC News," Koppel said on ABC.

According to the New York Times, Jennings, looking 20 pounds lighter and speaking with a soft voice, made his way back to the ABC News newsroom around May. There, he thanked Charles Gibson, the Good Morning America host who had taken to pinch-hitting as a World News Tonight's substitute anchor, for the nightly sign-off, "For Peter Jennings and all of us at ABC News."

"That means so much to me," Jennings said, the newspaper reported.

Jennings first anchored for ABC's then-fledgling network news operation in 1965, at the age of 26. His 1965-67 stint as host of Peter Jennings with the News made him the youngest network news anchor in broadcast TV history. Critics were tough on Walter Cronkite's new, unwrinkled competition; Jennings was tougher.

"It was a dreadful mistake, a foolish experiment," Jennings told Columbia Journalism Review in 1995. "I'm the classic example of how not to do it. I'm glad it didn't hurt me more than it did.

Following seasoning in the field as a foreign correspondent, a 39-year-old Jennings returned to the anchor desk for the July 1978 launch of World News Tonight, ABC's latest attempt at nightly news legitimacy following its historic, but ill-fated pairing of Harry Reasoner and Walters, the first male-and-female network anchor team.

On World News Tonight, the London-based Jennings was part of a team that included Frank Reynolds from Washington, D.C., and Max Robinson, network TV's first black anchor, from Chicago. Among the trio, it was the gray-haired Reynolds who was considered the primary anchor.

The format shifted with Reynolds' own bout with cancer in 1983. With Robinson already on the outs at the network, Jennings was moved to New York and installed as the show's sole anchor. Of the original World News Tonight threesome, Jennings would live the longest, although all would meet arguably untimely ends--Reynolds at age 59 in 1983; Robinson at age 49 in 1988.

Even as a solo anchor, Jennings would become part of a triumvirate. For more than 20 years, from the early 1980s through the early 2000s, the far-flung network news business was built and centered on three names: Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings.

The trio were rivals--for stories and for ratings. Rather was the erratic, compelling force of the CBS Evening News; Brokaw was the mainstay at NBC Nightly News; and, Jennings was the anchor who finally took for ABC.

On Monday, Brokaw called Jennings both competitor and friend--"I feel as if I've lost a member of my family," he said in a statement.

Rather remembered Jennings as someone who took his work, but not himself, seriously. "He was a little uncomfortable--very uncomfortable--with the word 'star,' and a little uncomfortable with the word 'anchor' because he really did think of himself as a reporter," he told ABC.

Even before Jennings' death, the era of Rather-Brokaw-Jennings was passing. Brokaw, 65, retired after the 2004 presidential election; Rather, 73, vacated the anchor desk in March amid the fallout from a repudiated story about President Bush's National Guard years.

Less than a month after Rather left the air, Jennings would receive his cancer diagnosis, and leave the air himself.

Born July 29, 1938, Jennings became a respected chronicler of the American experience despite starting out with two apparent strikes against him: For one thing, he was a high-school dropout. For another, he was Canadian.

Growing up in Toronto, Jennings was immersed in broadcasting from an early age. His father Charles, whose "Describe the sky" assignment Jennings would write about in his 1998 book, The Century, cowritten with Todd Brewster, was a news announcer and executive for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Before he was even a teen-ager, the younger Jennings had his own radio show, Peter's Program.

More jobs were in the offing, including an anchor gig on Canadian TV at the age of 24; a high-school diploma was not. Jennings, the rising broadcast star, left school at age 17. Jennings, the reflective adult, dealt with the repercussions.

"For the rest of his life, and I do mean the rest of his life, he always regretted the fact that he had dropped out of school," Koppel recalled for ABC News.

On his frequent trips overseas, Koppel said, Jennings would pack an extra suitcase, the better to tote around a pile of books. "He was a student the rest of his life, even though he had dropped out so early," Koppel said of his friend.

But it was Jennings' youth, good looks and Canadian-speak, not his lack of a formal education, that were attacked by critics of his early years at ABC. Time took care of the youth problem, and the tendency to slip in Canadian pronunciations. (He received dual U.S. citizenship in 2003.) As for the good looks, Jennings was stuck with them.

The most glamorous of the network news stars of his era, Jennings married four times, all but the last ending in divorce.

As Rather suggested, Jennings was not one for talk of glamour and stars. To his final days, Michael Clemente, a former producer for World News Tonight, said Monday in an online chat on WashingtonPost.com, Jennings preferred to talk journalism.

"He was managing editor of the program," Clemente said. "There was hardly a word or phrase that got on without him approving it. He wrote or rewrote practically everything...He was playing his role as editor almost to the very end."

In the end, Jennings' career with ABC News spanned 40 years and eight U.S. presidents, earned him 16 Emmys and taught him something about himself that was readily apparent to viewers.

"The worse things got around me the cooler I tend to be," Jennings once said. "I tend to focus very hard under pressure."