Eric Sevareid - Post-war Career

Post-war Career

After the war, Sevareid's continued to work for CBS. In 1946 he reported on the founding of the UN and then penned Not So Wild a Dream. The book, whose title comes from part of the closing passage of Norman Corwin's radio play "On a Note of Triumph", appeared in eleven printings and became one of the primary sources on the lives of the generation of Americans who had lived through the Great Depression only to confront the horrors of World War II. In the 1976 edition of the book Sevareid 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."

Sevareid always considered himself a writer first and often felt uneasy behind a microphone, even less comfortable on television. Nonetheless, he worked extensively for CBS News on television in the years following the war and the decades after. During the mid to late 1950s Sevareid found himself on television as the host and science reporter of CBS' Conquest. He also served as the head of the CBS Washington bureau from 1946–1954 and became one of the early critics of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communism tactics. It was during the early 1950s that Sevareid caught the attention of the FBI in their attempts to identify and root out American Communists.