6 minute read
Long Thoughts Briefly Spoken
By Dan Rather
Dan Rather (left) and Eric Sevareid (middle) being welcomed to Vietnam, 1966.
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Next to power without honor, the most dangerous thing in the world is power without humor. -Eric Sevareid
Where does one begin when contemplating the life and times of Eric Sevareid? As the years
slide by since his death it doesn’t get any easier. What a man; what a life. And in this age of “news-lite”, news values succumbing to entertainment values, a widespread lowering of ethics and standards in journalism (to say nothing of the deterioration of good writing in general), how we miss him!
Eric believed in the power, the importance of words. To him, more than to any other person I have ever known, words mattered. He believed that words have consequences, even when only spoken. He considered writing to be a moral act. This was embedded in his head, heart and soul. It was deep in his id, in the core of the man. So to say that he never wasted words is an understatement.
His silence happened to me many times, driving with him up to fly fish or hunt birds over dogs in Virginia, or on some plane ride, or working a story.
That’s just the way he was. Eric Sevareid was eloquent on the air, but in person he was quiet. Given to silence. Long silence if he was thinking, or if he just didn’t believe he had anything worth saying, or if he didn’t feel like talking just then.
I remember the first time he invited me to go bird hunting with him, in 1967. I had not hunted anything for a while and the only gun I had in my Washington home was a 12-gauge shotgun with a choke. I had last used it years before on a Texas duck hunt. Too big a gun for quail, to say the least. This shotgun was in a carrying cover so Eric didn’t see it when he picked me up. We drove for two hours. Other than “Good morning,” he said nothing.
When we finally got out of his car and began preparing to walk, I unsheathed the big 12-gauge. He uncovered a little 28-gauge double-barrel. He spoke not a word. But he looked at me like I was a hitchhiker with pets, looked at me with that big Nordic glare. Then he smiled, shook his head, and mumbled, “C’mon.”
I felt foolish but forgiven. Eric always forgave you. We went on to have a great afternoon in the outdoors. I was constantly early and too far out front with my shots. “Patience,” he counseled softly. “Patience.” Pause. “And concentration.”
He was even better when it came to pursuing trout.
He was out of Velva, North Dakota, by the way of the University of Minnesota, Paris, and a thousand datelines long since forgotten. He had been many places, but he came home.
And he came home to Georgetown, to his own house, to die.
He knew he was dying. You could never fool Eric; he was too smart, too observant, too sensitive.
Like Edward R. Murrow, who hired him at CBS, Sevareid was a lifetime scholar. Murrow was the best reporter and
broadcaster in the history of over-the-airwaves news. He was the classic scholar-correspondent. So was Sevareid. Eric also grew into being a philosopher-correspondent, the only one broadcast news has produced. And he is unquestionably the best writer to come out of electronic journalism.
The proof is not just in Not So Wild a Dream, one of the best autobiographies of his time and perhaps his defining work. There are also his essays, read on radio and television for almost half a century. No one of his generation wrote more or better essays–no one, print or broadcast. And they have stood the test of time. Much of what he wrote about America and what it meant to be an American in the post–World War II era is as interesting and instructive today as it was the day he wrote it. Sevareid is the only broadcast journalist I know who was a combat correspondent in the Spanish Civil War, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. When I visited him for the last time, he sipped tea and told me how he wished he could have gone to the Persian Gulf. “Sort of,” he added, “but I guess I’ve seen enough wars.”
My mind went back to a place near Hue, early in the Vietnam fighting. Sevareid was the first of the big-name American broadcasters to come and see for himself, firsthand, what we were getting ourselves into.
“I don’t like it,” Eric told me. “I don’t like it partly because I don’t believe anyone has thought this damn thing through.”
Sevareid always thought things through. And partly because of that, he knew about an incredible range of things: how to lead quail, how to mend a fly-line, how to converse with a monarch or a showgirl, and how to stay alive in tight places.
Like Hemingway, he loved the outdoors. Like Hemingway, he was a man’s man when that was still something you said, when that still meant something. He and Hemingway had a northern-midwestern stoicism, determination, and intellect. He went to Paris and Hemingway did (they knew each other there). And the two wrote in similar spare, lean styles. For my money, Sevareid did it better.
The man and his writings had a quiet authority, and the beauty of simplicity.
The excellence of his writing is part of the reason people who came late remember Eric Sevareid the elder statesman, the sage. But he was a combination of thought and action. Like Andre Malraux, the French philosopher, writer, and journalist whom he knew and admired, Sevareid traveled the world, seeing for himself, engaged, taking chances. And then he tried to think things through, write about them and philosophize about them.
He always seemed taller than he was, although he was well over six feet. He dominated rooms, seemed to dominate any landscape he occupied. He had charisma, and he was a star. But he was a quiet star, and he was not so much glamorous as he was compelling. When you heard him speak on the radio, where I heard him first, and later on the television or in his office, you listened, and you thought.
There was, in person as over the air, a brooding quality about him. But his wife for the last thirteen years, Suzanne St. Pierre, brought him calmness within and a happiness that had always seemed to have eluded him before. He also took great joy in his twin sons and a daughter from previous marriages.
When I saw him that last time, in his Georgetown house, with the sun shafting through the windows over a fountaincentered, small back garden, he seemed at peace. He knew, in that way that Eric always knew everything, that his work was done, his place secure. In the pantheon of broadcast journalism, only Ed Murrow himself ranks above Sevareid.
When Murrow died, Sevareid wrote (as usual) the best line: “He was a shooting star; we will live in his afterglow a very long time.”
Now, the same can be said of Sevareid himself. But I prefer to think of him as a Northern Star, the Great Northern Star: constant and clear, the big, bright, quiet one.
Dan Rather served as anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News from March 9, 1981, to March 9, 2005, the longest such tenure in broadcast journalism history. He has covered virtually every major event in the world in the past 50 years including the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; the civil rights movement; the White House and national politics; wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, Yugoslavia and Iraq. In 2006 Rather founded the company News and Guts and became anchor and managing editor of HDNet’s Dan Rather Reports, which specializes in investigative journalism and international reporting.
