Sevareid, who died last week of cancer at 79, was an eyewitness not only of world history, but of the evolution of broadcast journalism. He started out in the age of Edward R. Murrow, when words mattered most. And he was still going strong at the dawn of the Dry Look, though he was clearly out of sync with a business measured in sound bites. " You do not realize how terrible it can be to do an analysis instantly after the event," he told The New York Times two years after he retired, in 1979. Sevareid said that he “couldn’t find the words” after Richard Nixon made his resignation speech in August 1974, and wound up sounding sympathetic. He was roundly criticized for his troubles. “I felt shame and sadness for him,” he said. “[Cronkite, Dan Rather and I] thought the audience felt the same way. They didn’t. They were all so damned mad. You can damn well ruin yourself with a false step.”
That hardly seemed likely, given his status as a fixture on the electronic landscape. Sevareid grew up in Velva, N.D., and in Minneapolis–a youth recounted in his much-praised 1946 memoir, " Not So Wild a Dream." He took his first reporting job while at the University of Minnesota and was already an ace newspaperman when CBS hired him to cover the looming war in 1939. His legendary colleague Murrow, four years Sevareid’s senior, managed to both mold and intimidate the newcomer, who saw himself as just “a callow, awkward kid from the Midwest.” Murrow, Sevareid said, had a natural radio voice and “a sense of theater” that he could never duplicate. " I am cursed with a somewhat forbidding Scandinavian manner," Sevareid said, “. . . with a restraint that spells stuffiness to a lot of people.” Philip Roth lampooned the newsman in his 1971 novel " Our Gang" as “Erect Severehead.” But Rather, writing in The Washington Post last week, called his old colleague “a philosopher-correspondent… a man’s man … when that still meant something.”
In his later years Sevareid seemed to grow crusty and conservative, criticizing antiwar protesters and complaining that ,,ethnic groups are becoming economic demand groups." But journalism, he said, was “more educated, more responsible” than it used to be-and it was all right,, and probably best for America, he wrote in Commentary magazine four years ago, if the press was “on occasion, a loose cannon on the deck of the ship of state.” About one thing, Sevareid seems to have remained forever young.
