Commentator Eric Sevareid of CBS Dies

Eric Sevareid, whose crusty evening news commentaries punctuated the workdays of millions of Americans, and who perhaps will be remembered best for his impassioned oratory during the Vietnam and Watergate eras, died early Thursday of cancer at his Washington home.

Tom Goodman, a spokesman for CBS, the network Sevareid served for 38 years, said the retired newsman was 79 and had undergone surgery for stomach cancer late last year. He was hospitalized in January for therapy.

“Eric was one of the best of that small number of news analysts, commentators and essayists who truly deserved to be called distinguished,” retired CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite said on learning of his former colleague’s death.

“He did for (broadcast) journalism what Walter Lippmann did for the newspaper column in this country,” said his longtime friend James Reston, the New York Times editor and columnist, shortly before Sevareid’s retirement from CBS News in 1977.

Sevareid had always fashioned himself more essayist than performer. He prided himself on elegant prose, lucid arguments and moral conviction, and would frequently chide the glitzier, superficial aspects of electronic journalism.

Although he was on the air regularly through four decades, he said he never overcame his nervousness. “A lot of people start blooming when that little light goes on,” he once told a reporter. “I start to die.”

As a young Paris-based reporter for United Press and the New York Herald Tribune, he suggested to the late Edward R. Murrow, who was recruiting him for a radio job, that his voice was not appropriate for broadcasting.

Sevareid accepted the position, however, and from that time on was known as one of “Murrow’s boys,” a group of newspapermen assembled in Europe by the CBS producer on the eve of World War II.

Many who knew the tall, rangy man with a craggy face said he was shy, often to the point of aloofness.

“I am cursed with a somewhat forbidding Scandinavian manner, with a restraint that spells stuffiness to a lot of people,” Sevareid wrote in a 1965 article for Look magazine. “Inside I am mush, full of a lot of almost bathetic sentimentality about this country, the Midwest, Abraham Lincoln and the English language.”

Nevertheless, on camera, he was somber and stony. On especially weighty commentaries, he would pensively suck in his cheeks, jaw jutting forward. Technicians joked about “one-gulp” or “two-gulp” Sevareid pieces.

His detractors accused Sevareid of being too wishy-washy, and called him “Eric Severalsides.” He was often criticized for rambling and for failing to make clear what he wished to say.

But even those who disagreed with him were often awed by him. An aide to former President Richard M. Nixon once said that Sevareid was never attacked by the Nixon White House during Watergate because the broadcaster “looked and dressed exactly like God.”

In fact, Sevareid had humble beginnings. His America was symbolized by a wheat-growing village called Velva, N.D., where he was born, the son of a small-town banker. His grandfather had immigrated from Norway a half-century earlier.

The Sevareids lived in a bungalow, and he and his two brothers went to “the old red-brick schoolhouse with the white belfry and the bell rope to swing out upon in summer’s idleness,” he would recall later.

Sevareid’s interest in journalism was sparked by the editor of the weekly Velva Journal, who let the boy sit in the office and read books.

When drought turned the crop-rich Midwest to a dust bowl in the 1920s, the Sevareids moved to Minneapolis. According to his autobiography, “Not So Wild a Dream” (1946), he graduated high school “having learned nothing except how to put the school paper to press.”

At 17, he ventured with a school friend on a 2,200-mile canoe trek from Minneapolis to York Factory on Canada’s Hudson Bay to prove that it was possible to travel, entirely by water, straight through the heart of the continent.

From that odyssey came a 1935 book, “Canoeing With the Cree.”

The Minneapolis Star paid Sevareid $100 in advance to write of his triumphs and misfortunes on the voyage. Soon after returning, he was hired there as a cub reporter for $15 a week.

Adventure beckoned again in the summer of 1932 when Sevareid hitchhiked to California to mine gold. Penniless by autumn, he returned to Minneapolis by hopping freight cars. Sevareid went to school full time, becoming involved in campus politics.

After graduating from the University of Minnesota, Sevareid returned to the Minneapolis Journal, only to be let go, the victim of a bad economy and a labor dispute. Sevareid went to Europe, where he studied at the London School of Economics and the Alliance Francaise in Paris.

In 1938 he took the job with the Herald Tribune. A year later, he received a call from Murrow, who was in London. “I don’t know very much about your experience,” Murrow later recalled saying, “but I like the way you write and I like your ideas.”

Sevareid traveled through Belgium, France, Holland and Luxembourg, broadcasting war news to the United States. He was the last American to broadcast from Paris before it fell to the Germans and the first to report that France was about to surrender.

Afterward, he joined Murrow in London, and broadcast from there during the bombing raids. Homesick, he returned to the United States in 1940 and was assigned to the CBS bureau in Washington, where he stayed until 1943.

In August of that year, he set off for China, also spending several months in Burma and India. It was on a trip to Burma that he was forced to bail out of a crippled plane and live for several weeks with villagers he would later describe as “headhunting savages.”

Toward the end of the war, he returned to Europe, reporting on Marshal Josip Broz Tito’s partisans in the hills of Yugoslavia and the Italian campaign, and crossing the Rhine into Germany with the Americans.

In 1946, he began serving mostly in the CBS Washington bureau, part of the time as chief correspondent. His caustic analysis and wit made him a regular during radio coverage of the 1948, 1952 and 1956 presidential elections .

His emphasis switched to television in the 1960s and he was seen on such notable programs as “The Great Challenge,” “Town Meeting of the World,” “Where We Stand,” and “Years of Crisis.” He also was a regular participant in “CBS Reports” documentaries.

In November, 1964, Sevareid became a regular on the “CBS Evening News With Walter Cronkite.” His two-minute commentaries touched on everything from national and world affairs to Madison Avenue to the Farmer’s Almanac.

On Vietnam, he said he advised President Lyndon B. Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk that it was of little critical interest to the United States. “We have no obvious and simple reason for being there,” he said.

On the Watergate scandal, the Nixon Administration’s troubles “do not lie in the press. They lie in the facts,” Sevareid said in a May, 1974, commentary. “It has indeed been terrible to know these facts. The only thing worse would have been not to have known them.”

He grew more conservative in his later years, noting what he termed the failure of classic liberal solutions to complex problems, finding fault with the press for “chewing everything to bits, every . . . policy line or program, before they have any real chance to mature.”

A mandatory retirement policy forced a reluctant Sevareid to retire on his 65th birthday. For his last broadcast, he avoided “all the sobbing and handshakes” by taping his commentary rather than reading it live, as he usually did.

“By my time of life, one has accumulated more allegiances and moral debts than the mind can remember, or the heart contain,” he began. Sevareid said he found that the listening public applies only one consistent test--a perception of honesty and fair intent.

“Rightly or wrongly,” he ended, visibly moved, “I have the feeling that I have passed the test. I shall wear this like a medal. This was Eric Sevareid in Washington. Thank you and goodby.”

In 1979, two years after retiring, he married Suzanne St. Pierre, then a 42-year-old producer for “60 Minutes.” It was his third marriage. He had married Lois Finger in 1935, and the couple had twin sons, Michael and Peter. That marriage ended in divorce in 1962.

A year later, he married Belen Marshall, a Cuban-born composer, and the couple had a daughter, Cristina. They divorced in 1974.

Among the awards he won were the Overseas Press Club Award, the George Polk Memorial Award (three times), two Emmys and the Brotherhood Award of the National Conference of Christians and Jews.

After his retirement, Sevareid lived in suburban Washington, continuing as a consultant to CBS but spending more time at his 44-acre farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

He turned down what he said were potential millions to do testimonials for various products. He said he decided to “leave my children with a name with no tarnish on it,” rather than “a name with a little bit of tarnish and some sustenance.”

Private funeral services were planned and a memorial service will be held in Washington in September, CBS said.

AN APPRECIATION: Rick Du Brow remembers a standard-bearer for trust and grace. F1