Eric Sevareid was one of the earliest of a group of intellectual, analytic, adventurous, and sometimes even controversial newspapermen handpicked by Edward R. Murrow as CBS Radio foreign correspondent. Later, Sevareid and others of this elite band of broadcast journalists, known as "Murrow's Boys," distinguished themselves in television. From 1964 until his retirement from the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) in 1977, Sevareid carried on the Morrow tradition of news analysis in his position as national correspondent for the CBS Evening News. There. His somber, eloquent commentaries were either praised as lucid and illuminating or criticized for sounding profound without ever reaching a conclusive point.

     Sevareid's image as a scholarly commentator on the CBS Evening News was believed to have an early career in which he was something of a swashbuckler. Sevareid was working at the New York Herald Tribune's Paris office when his writing abilities caught the eye of Mur­row, who offered him a job. Sevareid would later say of those early years. "We were like a young band of brothers in those early radio days with Murrow." In his final 1977 CBS Evening News commentary, Sevareid referred to Murrow as the man who "invented me."

     As one of "Murrow's Boys" during World War II, Sevareid "scooped the world" with his broadcast of the news of the French surrender in 1940. He joined Mur­row in covering the Battle of Britain, he was lost briefly after parachuting into the Burmese jungle when his plane developed engine trouble while covering the Burmese-China theater, he reported on Tito's partisans, and he landed with the first wave of U.S. troops in southern France. accompanying them all the way to Germany.

     In 1946, after reporting on the founding of the United Nations, Sevareid wrote Not So  Wild  a Dream. which appeared in 11 printings and became a primary source on the lives of the generation of Americans who had lived through the Depression and World War II. For the 1976 edition of the book, he wrote, "It was a lucky stroke of timing to have been born and lived as an American in this last generation. It was good fortune to be a journalist in Washington, now the single news headquarters in the world since ancient Rome. But we are not Rome; the world is too big, too varied."

     Always considering himself a writer first, Sevareid felt uneasy behind a microphone and even less comfortable with television; nevertheless, he did such early Sunday "news-ghetto" programs as Capitol Cloakroom and The American Week and served as host and science reporter on the CBS series Conquest. As head of the CBS's Washington bureau from 1946 to 1959, Sevareid was an early critic of McCarthyism, and, in one of the few even mildly critical comments he ever made about his mentor, he observed that Murrow came to the issue rather late.

     Serving as CBS's roving European correspondent from 1959 to 1961, Sevareid contributed stories to CBS Reports as well as serving as moderator of series such as Town Meeting of the World, The Great Challenge, Where We Stand, and Years of Crisis. In addition, he also contributed to the coverage of every presidential election from 1948 to 1976. However, one of Sevareid's scoops of those years, his 1965 exclusive interview with Adlai Stevenson shortly before Steven­ son's death, for which Sevareid won a New York Newspaper Guild Page One Award, was not broadcast over CBS, appearing instead in Look magazine.

     From 1963 until his retirement, Sevareid appeared on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. During that period, his Emmy and Peabody Award-winning two-minute commentaries, with their penchant to elucidate rather than advocate, inspired those who admired him to refer to him as the "Gray Eminence." On the other hand, those who were irked by his tendency to overemphasize the complexity of every issue nicknamed him "Eric Several sides." Sevareid himself said that as he had grown older, his tendency was toward conservatism in foreign affairs and liberalism in domestic politics. Despite this perspective, he commented after a trip to South Vietnam in 1966 that prolonging the war was unwise and that a negotiated settlement was advisable. His commentary on the resignation speech of President Richard M. Nixon ("Few things in his presidency became as much as his manner of leaving the presidency") was hardly as perceptive.

     In addition to sustaining the Murrow tradition of news commentary at CBS, Sevareid, in keeping with another Murrow tradition, interviewed noted individuals such as West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, novelist Leo Rosten, and many others on the series Conversations with Eric Sevareid. In something of a spoof of this tradition, he also had a conversation with King George III (played by Peter Ustinov) titled The Last King in America.

     After his retirement, Sevareid continued to be active as a CBS consultant and narrator of shows such as Between the Wars (syndicated, 1978), a series on U.S. diplomacy between 1920 and 1941, Enterprise (Public Broadcasting Service [PBS), l 984), a series on American business, and Eric Sevareid's Chronicle (syndicated, 1982). His final appearance before his death in 1992 was on the 1991 CBS program Remember Pearl Harbor. Needless to say, Sevareid's presence at CBS was a link to the Murrow tradition, long after Murrow himself and many of his "Boys" left the network and after that tradition ceased to have significant practical relevance at CBS News.