Eric Sevareid Biography Quotes 10 Report mistakes

Early Life
Arnold Eric Sevareid was born on November 26, 1912, in Velva, North Dakota, to a Norwegian-American family that soon moved east to Minneapolis. He grew up in the upper Midwest's immigrant communities, where thrift, reserve, and a respect for books formed an early foundation for his future as a writer and observer. He began calling himself Eric, the name by which audiences would later know him, and gravitated toward newspapers while still young, filing copy and learning the craft in a city whose press culture prized clean prose and hard facts.

Adventures and First Book
As a teenager he set out with a school friend, Walter Port, on an audacious canoe journey from the Minnesota River to Hudson Bay. The expedition, carried out with minimal money and great tenacity, honed his taste for risk, narrative detail, and endurance. He chronicled the trek in Canoeing with the Cree, published in 1935, a spare and vivid account that revealed his disciplined voice and a reporter's eye for landscape and character. The book also hinted at a lifelong habit of testing himself on the margins of events and then shaping those experiences into clear, durable prose.

From Newspapers to CBS
Sevareid worked in Midwest newsrooms before heading to Europe in the late 1930s. He joined CBS News in 1939 as part of the transatlantic reporting team built by Edward R. Murrow. Among the colleagues around him were William L. Shirer in Berlin, Robert Trout in New York, and later Charles Collingwood, Richard C. Hottelet, and Howard K. Smith. Together they formed the nucleus of the reporters who came to be known as "Murrow's Boys", a cohort that helped define broadcast journalism's standards of accuracy, courage, and restraint during an era of cascading crises.

War Correspondent
Posted to Paris as Europe descended into war, Sevareid reported the unraveling of the Third Republic and the German entry into the French capital. He escaped to London and continued broadcasting through air raids and shifting fronts, giving American listeners a sober sense of scale rather than theatrics. His reporting emphasized verified fact and cool cadence, complementing Murrow's own signature dispatches from London rooftops. The cast of voices around him, including Shirer and Collingwood, gave CBS a polyphony of on-the-ground perspectives that made radio news indispensable to the public.

Burma Ordeal and Return
In 1943, while covering the Asian theater, Sevareid survived one of the war's most dramatic journalist rescues. After the aircraft carrying him developed engine trouble over remote country in Burma, he and others parachuted into the jungle. Kachin tribesmen sheltered the group and, with help from the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, guided the party to safety. The episode, which became a legend within the profession, deepened his respect for the precarious line between witness and participant. It also reinforced his belief that the journalist's first debt is to truthfully relate what happened, not to ornament his own role.

Postwar Writing and Public Affairs
After the war he returned to the United States and published Not So Wild a Dream, a reflective memoir of the 1930s and 1940s that braided frontline scenes with the moral questions raised by fascism, occupation, and democratic resolve. He resumed work for CBS in radio and then television, contributing to documentary and public-affairs programming shaped by the standards Murrow had set and producers like Fred Friendly helped institutionalize. Sevareid's scripts were constructed rather than improvised, and his language was chosen for precision; he believed television should clarify, not inflame.

Washington Commentator
In the 1960s he became CBS's most recognized on-air analyst from Washington. On the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, Sevareid's essays followed the day's reporting with a measured, sometimes elegiac summation. Cronkite's even delivery was a foil for Sevareid's deliberative prose, which resisted certitude and insisted on context. He examined the burdens of the presidency, the ordeal of Vietnam, the tensions of civil rights, and the press's obligations in a republic. Younger correspondents at the network, including those who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, absorbed his example of commentary that was interpretive but never casual with facts.

Style, Colleagues, and Influence
Sevareid's voice on air was unhurried, his sentences architected to carry qualification as well as conviction. He did not trade in zingers; he preferred the long view, often invoking history to drain fever from the moment. He credited Murrow for giving correspondents room to think and write, and he respected colleagues like Hottelet and Collingwood for maintaining high standards under pressure. The collegial friction of editors, producers, and anchors, figures such as Friendly and Cronkite, helped refine his essays into a form that audiences trusted during assassinations, marches, and foreign crises.

Recognition and Later Years
Over the course of his career he received major broadcast honors, including Emmy and Peabody awards, acknowledgments not of showmanship but of durable craftsmanship. He retired from regular commentary in 1977, his farewell notable for its gratitude and its caution about television's capacity both to enlighten and to distort. In later years he wrote, lectured, and occasionally returned for special broadcasts, drawing on decades that stretched from the fall of Paris to the American bicentennial, a span that gave him authority without the need for rhetorical fireworks.

Personal Life and Legacy
Sevareid married and raised a family while keeping his private sphere mostly beyond the camera's reach. He drew strength from books and from disciplined routines of writing, a habit born in those Minneapolis newsrooms and tested in wartime studios. To viewers and readers he left an example of how a journalist can witness calamity without theatricality and offer interpretation without partisanship. When he died of cancer on July 9, 1992, in Washington, D.C., colleagues across the profession marked the passing of one of the last great links to the original era of network correspondence. Eric Sevareid's legacy endures in the idea, practiced by those around him and those who followed, that careful words, set down with respect for fact and memory, are the surest instruments of public understanding.

Our collection contains 10 quotes who is written by Eric, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Wisdom - Leadership - Writing - Change.

Other people realated to Eric: William S. Paley (Businessman), George Herman (Journalist), Daniel Schorr (Journalist), Robert Trout (Journalist), Roger Mudd (Journalist), Edward P. Morgan (Journalist)

• Eric Sevareid Chicago Fire: There are no notable connections between Eric Sevareid and the Chicago Fire.
• Eric Sevareid children: Eric Sevareid had three children: Peter, Michael, and Christina.
• Eric Sevareid Pepperdine: Eric Sevareid did not have any direct connections to Pepperdine University.
• How old was Eric Sevareid? He became 79 years old

• 1974 In One Ear (Book)
• 1946 Not So Wild a Dream (Book)

• Wikipedia