The first time we met Peter Jennings was at a party in Princeton that included a pre-dinner soccer game full of adults and children at which a 5-year-old of our acquaintance took a hard kicked soccer ball right in the stomach and was carried halfway down the field, only to land at Jennings’s feet. As, from a distance, we watched the mighty newsman comfort the crumpled, if gritty, tyke, we turned to the host and remarked, “Jennings is an awfully nice guy, isn’t he?”

Indeed he was, a fact of which we were reminded again some years later when, a few weeks before the launch of The New York Sun, he and his wife, Kayce Freed, hosted a dinner party for its editors. They gathered at their home the CEO of a rival network, the editorial page editor of the New York Times, both the chairman and the editor of the Wall Street Journal, the chairman of Hollinger International, and a host other glitterati.

It was an extraordinary gesture for a man at the top of journalism to make on behalf of a newspaper that was thought of by many at the time – if they had thought of it at all – as a quixotic venture. All the more so because Jennings did not share our views on politics, either those of America or of the Middle East. What he did share, it turned out, was a love of the news business, be it broadcasting or newspapers, and of what we would characterize as the American spirit.

This, no doubt, was a quality that enabled the high school dropout from Canada to emerge not only as the embodiment of the American Broadcasting Company but as an erudite and elegant leader of his profession. Conservative advocacy groups complained of liberal bias at ABC News, but Jennings’s private views, so far as we could divine, were sympathetic to freedom. It came through in the two wonderful books he wrote with Todd Brewster – “The Century” and “In Search of America.”

Jennings may have been a top executive in a broadcast television news industry that was shrinking and increasingly dominated by huge conglomerates, ABC itself being owned by Disney. Yet he was once described to us by a former colleague as one who inspired partly by having fun at his job. He was not only handsome but also an intellectual; he didn’t just read the news but edited it and made judgments about it. He consumed a half-dozen newspapers each morning.

Including, we were gratified to discover, the Sun he’d helped embolden. As Josh Gerstein reports on the opposite page, he was a reader of The New York Sun and occasionally found in it stories that made their way onto “World News Tonight.” Plenty of journalists have ambitions to be something else – a celebrity, a policymaker. Jennings liked news. His death robs from Americans a trusted voice in journalism and from this newsroom, no doubt like hundreds of others, a friend.