Sign-Off for Sevareid

The CBS evening muse delivers a farewell message

Broadcast historians can record that Eric Sevareid spent much of the final day of his career as a TV commentator shopping for a pair of fleece-lined slippers. "I plan to sit around this winter and read a lot," he explained from his Chevy Chase, Md., home. Sevareid has earned a rest. For the past 13 years he has tried to make sense of the days' events--in 2 1/2 minutes, four nights a week. Having reached 65, the network's mandatory sign-off time, he is not entirely unhappy to slow down. "The deadline was remorseless," he says. "You wake up with a clock in your head."

There is, of course, much more crammed inside that Mount Rushmore noggin. Sevareid was among the most articulate, most literate and most judicious of television sages. In a farewell address last week, he summed up some of the lessons he has learned in a half-century as a journalist. Prominent among them: "To retain the courage of one's doubts, as well as one's convictions, in this world of dangerously passionate certainties."

He strode into that world from the fruited plains of Velva, N. Dak., where his father, the son of a Norwegian immigrant, worked as a local banker. As a boy, Sevareid would gaze out a window of the Velva schoolhouse at vast, monotonous fields of wheat and dream of the distant cities pictured in his geography book. He escaped: to Minneapolis, where his family fled when drought hit Velva and where he went to the University of Minnesota; to Europe, where Edward R. Murrow hired him in 1939 for CBS's illustrious wartime team; to Washington, where he was the network's national correspondent and began his commentary on Walter Cronkite's nightly newscast.

Much of Velva still clings to Sevareid --his wheatfield-flat monotone, his Scandinavian ponderousness, his Midwestern faith that folks can get along if they listen to each other, and especially his chapbook belief in America's innate strengths. "No other great power has the confidence and stability to expose and face its own blunders," he wrote last year in a new introduction to his 1946 autobiography, Not So Wild a Dream. "We are a turbulent society but a stable republic. The mind goes blank at the thought of a world without one such power."

To some, Sevareid's world view was naive, his evenhandedness mere equivocating. Even fans jokingly called him Eric Everyside, and he was easy to caricature. In Philip Roth's 1971 novel Our Gang, "Erect Severehead" delivered this commentary: "Yet madmen there have been and madmen there will be, and still this nation has endured. And, I daresay, endure it will... leaving us in the end, if not stronger, wiser; and if not wiser, stronger; and if, alas, not either, both."

Sevareid grew more conservative with the years, denounced many young Americans who protested the Viet Nam War, and wasted little sympathy on the Third World. "I refuse to feel guilty about their poverty," he said in a radio chat last month with Cronkite. "Look at black Africa. There's very little there that's worth much in 20th century terms."

The journalist is a man of easy humor but almost painful shyness. He finds it easier to catalogue his shortcomings than his gifts. "I've gone on the air exhausted and done badly," he confesses. "I've missed stories. I've fumbled stories." Many colleagues think otherwise. "Eric never told people what he thought, but what he learned," says NBC's John Chancellor, who confirmed last week that he will give up anchoring for commentary himself in the not-so-distant future. "No one wants someone up there just babbling his own opinion."

Sevareid will still be visible after his official retirement. Beginning in April, he will narrate a 16-part TV documentary on the interwar period, and he is contemplating a series based on Not So Wild a Dream. Bill Moyers has turned down a CBS offer to take over the commentary. So, for the time being at least, Sevareid's slot will be filled with news. No doubt Sevareid will be watching, book in hand, snug in those fleece-lined slippers. qed

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