Sevareid was the first to report the Fall of Paris in 1940, when the city was captured by German forces during World War II.

[2][3] Sevareid followed in Murrow's footsteps as a commentator on the CBS Evening News for thirteen years,[4] for which he was recognized with Emmy and Peabody Awards.

[6] After the failure of the bank in Velva in 1925,[7] his family moved to nearby Minot, and then to Minneapolis, Minnesota,[8] settling on 30th Avenue North.

[6] He received many personal threats of physical force in response to the story, but believed that the people issuing them were too cowardly to follow through.

[citation needed] Sevareid broadcast the Fall of Paris and followed the French government from there to Bordeaux and then Vichy before he left France for London and later Washington, D.C.

The book is still in print and covers his life in Velva, his family, the Hudson Bay trip, his hitchhiking around the U.S., mining in the Sierra Nevada, the Great Depression years, his early journalism, and (especially) his experiences in World War II.

"[14] On August 2, 1943, Sevareid was on board a Curtiss-Wright C-46 Commando that, having taken off from Assam in India, developed engine trouble over Burma while it was on a Hump airlift mission.

The operatives parachuted in, located the party, and evacuated them safely to India, for which John Paton Davies Jr. later won the Medal of Freedom.

Davies was a U.S. diplomat who, having been a passenger himself, initially led the group away from the crash site and out of harm's way before the rescuers arrived.

He had begun his own program, Eric Sevareid and the News, on June 27, 1942, on CBS; it ran for five minutes, starting at 8:55 (ET) on Saturdays and Sundays.

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.

He also served as the head of the CBS Washington bureau from 1946 to 1954 and was one of the early critics of Joseph McCarthy's anticommunism tactics.

[14] On November 22, 1963, Sevareid joined Walter Cronkite on CBS television with a commentary about the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the road ahead for the new president, Lyndon Johnson.

From 1964 to his 1977 retirement from the network,[4] Sevareid's two-minute segments on the CBS Evening News (anchored by Cronkite) inspired his admirers to dub him "The Grey Eminence.

On Conversations with Eric Sevareid, he interviewed such famous newsmakers as West German Chancellor Willy Brandt and novelist Leo Rosten.

In 1981, Sevareid hosted a documentary series on PBS, entitled Enterprise, a profile on how America portrays business.

[citation needed] He made a guest appearance as himself in a 1980 episode of the sitcom Taxi and also played himself in the 1983 space flight film The Right Stuff.