Sydney H. Schanberg Is Dead at 82; Former Times Correspondent Chronicled Terror of 1970s Cambodia
Source: The New York Times
Sydney H. Schanberg, a correspondent for The New York Times who won a Pulitzer Prize for covering Cambodias fall to the Khmer Rouge in 1975 and inspired the film The Killing Fields with the story of his Cambodian colleagues survival during the genocide of millions, died on Saturday in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. He was 82.
His death was confirmed by Charles Kaiser, a friend and former Times reporter, who said Mr. Schanberg had a heart attack on Tuesday.
A restive, intense, Harvard-educated newspaperman with bulldog tenacity, Mr. Schanberg was a nearly ideal foreign correspondent: a risk-taking adventurer who distrusted officials, relied on himself in a war zone and wrote vividly of political and military tyrants and the suffering and death of their victims with the passion of an eyewitness to history.
In the spring of 1975, as Pol Pots Communist guerrillas closed in on the capital, Phnom Penh, after five years of civil war in Cambodia, Mr. Schanberg and his assistant, Dith Pran, refused to heed directives from Times editors in New York to evacuate the city and remained behind as nearly all Western reporters, diplomats and senior officials of Cambodias American-backed Lon Nol government fled for their lives.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/business/media/sydney-h-schanberg-is-dead-at-82-former-times-correspondent-chronicled-terror-of-1970s-cambodia.html?smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0
shenmue
(38,506 posts)avebury
(10,952 posts)NNadir
(33,541 posts)...modern history.
Schanberg's role in bringing the tale before the world was a great achievement for all of humankind.
Cooley Hurd
(26,877 posts)Cross gently Sydney...
no_hypocrisy
(46,160 posts)Stellar journalism on topics not covered by MSM.
no_hypocrisy
(46,160 posts)ET Awful
(24,753 posts)Thank you for telling a story that may have otherwise gone under the radar.