Book: In One Ear

Overview
Eric Sevareid's In One Ear gathers a selection of his brief television and radio commentaries from the late 1960s and early 1970s, written for his "A Personal Opinion" segments on the CBS Evening News. Rather than a continuous narrative, it is a mosaic of reflections that track a turbulent American decade as it unfolded: Vietnam and its aftermath, the crises of confidence surrounding the presidency, generational conflict, civil rights and civic order, and the reshaping of foreign policy in a changing Cold War. The pieces are short, crafted for the spoken word, and the book preserves their rhythm while giving them the durability of print.

Scope and Subjects
The collection moves between Washington and the wider world, from Cabinet rooms to kitchen tables. Sevareid offers sketches of political conventions and campaigns, portraits of public figures, and meditations on leadership under pressure. He weighs the burdens borne by presidents, the limits of power in distant wars, and the fraying compact between citizens and institutions. Internationally, he pauses over Europe’s cautious integration, Asia’s shifting alignments, and the uneasy balance between ideals and interests. Interspersed are domestic notes on crime, courts, and the culture of protest, along with quieter pieces about holidays, memory, and the consolations of ordinary decency.

Themes
A central theme is the complexity of public life. Sevareid resists tidy binaries and quick cures, warning that impatience and certainty are poor guides in a republic built on restraint. He defends dissent as a democratic habit while critiquing zeal that corrodes civility. He marks the rise of television as both amplifier and distorting mirror, elevating the spectacular and shrinking attention spans, and he urges the press to keep a sense of proportion when politics becomes theater. Another recurrent note is the cost of leadership: how office magnifies character, how secrecy and siege conditions can warp judgment, and how the language of politics, slogans, euphemisms, promises, too easily substitutes for honest reckoning.

Voice and Method
The voice is literate and conversational, tinged with the melancholy of a reporter who has seen wars begin and end and knows that history seldom grants clean breaks. Sevareid likes to borrow light from history and letters, Lincoln, Tocqueville, and the Founders, to illuminate current predicaments without turning them into parables. He prefers the aphorism to the argument and often advances by juxtaposition: a headline next to a remembered face, a statistic next to a quiet moral. He is wary of ideology, sympathetic to moderation, and exacting about words. When he does praise, it is usually for steadiness, patience, and the mundane virtues that keep a nation’s machinery from grinding.

Era and Mood
Read together, the pieces chart a mood swing from confidence to disillusion and toward a tougher, chastened hope. Vietnam becomes a touchstone for the limits of American will and the dangers of strategic abstraction. The strains between generations and regions reveal not only conflict but also mutual incomprehension. Even as scandal and disappointment accumulate, Sevareid keeps a door open to renewal, arguing that constitutional habits, if tended, outlast the storms that buffet them.

Contribution
In One Ear preserves a form of public reasoning that television once carried nightly into homes: short, civil, historically informed, and personal without being confessional. As a book, it allows those fragments to resonate across pages, showing how a seasoned correspondent stitched sense from the noise of events. It is less a verdict on an age than a disciplined way of looking at it, grounded in the belief that clarity, humility, and memory are themselves acts of citizenship.