Eric Sevareid, a newsman whose globe-trotting assignments for CBS radio and TV ranged from the fall of France to Watergate and the Vietnam War, died Thursday of cancer, CBS said. He was 79.
He died at his home in Washington at 3:45 a.m., said Tom Goodman, a network spokesman. Sevareid had undergone surgery for stomach cancer late last year. He was hospitalized again in January for therapy."Eric was one of the best of that small number of news analysts, commentators and essayists who truly deserved to be called distinguished," retired CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite said.
Dan Rather called him "a philosopher, writer, reporter and teacher, with no equal in the history of broadcast journalism."
In his 38-year career at CBS, Sevareid's sonorous voice became known to millions.
In 1940, on his first foreign assignment for CBS, Sevareid scored a huge scoop as the first newsman to report that France was about to surrender to the Germans and seek an armistice.
Sevareid's televised political commentaries began in 1948, and became a mainstay of the network's national political coverage.