Calm, cool, collected, and just slightly irascible, Eric Sevareid was the uncle who cuffed your ear instead of giving you a nickel. That was because he’d earned his bona fides the hard way: as one of Edward R. Murrow’s boys, Sevareid was in the thick of it during World War, from the fall of France, to the Battle of Britain, to the Pacific theater, where he once parachuted from a crashing airplane, then helped rescue the survivors. Reporters, and Americans, were made of sterner stuff back then.
As a kid, the Norwegian-American from North Dakota once paddled a canoe 2,250 miles from Minneapolis to the Hudson Bay; after the war he served as CBS’s bureau chief in Washington, took on Sen. McCarthy and had his own youthful leftist past investigated by the FBI. He spent the last part of his career providing two-minute commentaries about world affairs on the CBS Evening News.
What a contrast to the giggling pretty boys and tough but perky dames who currently sit in anchor and commentary chairs both on broadcast and cable.
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