27 Facts About Eric Sevareid

Arnold Eric Sevareid was an American author and CBS news journalist from 1939 to 1977.

Eric Sevareid followed in Murrow's footsteps as a commentator on the CBS Evening News for thirteen years, for which he was recognized with Emmy and Peabody Awards.

Eric Sevareid was adventurous from a young age; several days after he graduated from Central High School in 1930, he and his friend Walter Port embarked on an expedition sponsored by the Minneapolis Star, from Minneapolis to York Factory, on Hudson Bay.

At age 18, Eric Sevareid entered journalism as a reporter for the Minneapolis Journal while he was a student at the University of Minnesota in political science.

Eric Sevareid continued his studies abroad, first in London, and then at the Sorbonne University in Paris, where he worked as an editor for United Press.

Eric Sevareid wrote about the Plains influence on his life in his early memoir, Not So Wild A Dream.

Eric Sevareid grabbed a bottle of Carew's gin before he parachuted out of the plane.

In Yugoslavia, Eric Sevareid later reported on Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslav Partisans.

Eric Sevareid had begun his own program, Eric Sevareid and the News, on June 27,1942, on CBS; it ran for five minutes, starting at 8:55 on Saturdays and Sundays.

Eric Sevareid always considered himself a writer first and often felt uneasy behind a microphone and even less comfortable on television.

Eric Sevareid served as the head of the CBS Washington bureau from 1946 to 1954 and was one of the early critics of Joseph McCarthy's anticommunism tactics.

Internal FBI documents declassified in 1996 show that the agency took an active interest in Eric Sevareid's reporting and activities in the 1940s and the early 1950s.

The files alleged that while working for the school newspaper at the university, Eric Sevareid participated in an active campaign against the ROTC.

The files note a May 17,1945, report in the Daily People's World, which stated Eric Sevareid was a scheduled speaker at the Committee's banquet.

The FBI called the Daily People's World a West Coast communist newspaper and claimed that Eric Sevareid was identified as a radio commentator in its reports.

The information received by the FBI about Eric Sevareid's purported Communist activity was provided by "a representative of another governmental agency" and was never confirmed by investigations.

The information contained in the bureau's files was circulated during March 1953 while Eric Sevareid anchored a CBS news program, A Report to the Nation.

Eric Sevareid contributed stories to CBS Reports during that time and served as moderator on a number of CBS series such as Town Meeting of the World, The Great Challenge, Where We Stand, and Years of Crisis.

Eric Sevareid appeared in or on CBS coverage of every presidential election from 1948 to 1976, the year before his retirement.

On November 22,1963, Sevareid joined Walter Cronkite on CBS television with a commentary about the assassination of John F Kennedy and the road ahead for the new president, Lyndon Johnson.

Eric Sevareid said that as he had grown older, he had tended to become more conservative in foreign policy and liberal in domestic policy.

Eric Sevareid's commentary touched on many of the day's important issues.

Eric Sevareid helped keep alive another Murrow tradition at CBS that began with the interview show Person to Person.

On Conversations with Eric Sevareid, he interviewed such famous newsmakers as West German Chancellor Willy Brandt and novelist Leo Rosten.

In 1981, Sevareid hosted a documentary series on PBS, entitled Enterprise, a profile on how America portrays business.

Eric Sevareid made a guest appearance as himself in a 1980 episode of the sitcom Taxi and played himself in the 1983 space flight film The Right Stuff.

Eric Sevareid died of stomach cancer in Washington, DC, on July 9,1992, at age 79.