John Chancellor, who covered 20 political conventions, a dozen space shots and a handful of wars in 41 years at NBC News, died Friday at his home in Princeton, N.J. He was 68.
The cause was stomach cancer, said his daughter, Mary Chancellor Gregory.A college dropout who left his newspaper reporter's job and broke into broadcasting just as the television age was dawning, Chancellor was an anchor of "NBC Nightly News" from 1970 to 1982.
He appeared first with David Brinkley and Frank McGee, by himself from 1971 to 1976, with Brinkley again from 1976 to 1979 and alone again until 1982. For most of that time, "NBC Nightly News" was a solid No. 2 in the ratings, behind Walter Cronkite and the "CBS Evening News."
It was not apparent from his pancake-flat Midwestern intonation, but he said he found presiding over a tightly timed and rigidly formatted newscast profoundly dissatisfying. He stepped aside in 1982 and became the program's senior commentator, delivering news analyses three times a week until he retired in 1993.
"I had money and I had fame," he said when he gave up the anchor's chair, "but the last thing I wanted was to be a 65-year-old anchorman. So I decided it was time to take control of my life." He also said he had realized that "I don't want to measure out my life in 30-second introductions to other people who do the reporting."
Still, being an anchor gave him a chance to say his name the way he wanted it said: "Chance-cell-LORE." "In the past," he said, "I was always introduced by someone else, who used the conventional pronunciation, something like `CHAN-cell-er.' " Drawing out the final syllable matched his conservative-looking image, with his owlish-looking glasses and dark sack suits.
"The look," he once said, "of a man who worked for the State Department in the mid-'50s and didn't need the money."