Famous graves in Jax.

[stjr]

When I was a kid, I remember Walter Cronkite coming to Jax for the funeral of one of CBS's top reporters that was killed during combat in Southeast Asia. He was on the nightly news, almost weekly, reporting from the front lines of the Viet Nam war, so he was very famous at the time of his death  (remember, only three networks at the time, CBS was #1, and EVERYONE watched the nightly news).  Below is an article I found on him from the Beaches Leader to add to this thread:

Justice for George Syvertsen
Former CBS correspondent buried at Jacksonville Beach cemetery
by JOHNNY WOODHOUSE, Associate Editor


CBS News correspondent George Syvertsen in Vietnam. (photo courtesy of the NEWSEUM)
“As newsmen, we should not be embarrassed to ask if a news story is worth a human life. The answer is no.”   â€" Walter Cronkite

George Syvertsen’s grave marker in Warren Smith Cemetery is an unceremonious block of polished granite.

The marker reveals little about the former CBS News correspondent, who was killed May 31, 1970, while on assignment in Cambodia.

Ike McBride, a former caretaker at the city-owned cemetery in Jacksonville Beach, once pointed to Syvertsen’s grave and told a visitor, “This guy used to work with Walter Cronkite at CBS.”

Syvertsen, a correspondent for CBS News from 1966 to 1970, was 38 when he gunned down by enemy forces in Cambodia.

That the veteran New York City-bred reporter is buried in virtual anonymity, in a nondescript plot in a city where he never lived, raises questions about his legacy as a journalist.

Was he, as some believe, a bold news hound who put himself and others unwittingly â€" but recklessly â€"in harm’s way, leading to the first Vietnam War-related deaths of CBS crew members?

Or was he, as others believe, a thoughtful, independent-minded journalist whose memory has been unjustly besmirched because of his decision to follow a story into a known hot zone?

“Everyone has their own take on George,” said former CBS News cameraman Skip Brown in a phone interview.

Point man of convoy

In “Lost Over Laos,” a 2003 book by Associated Press reporter Richard Pyle that recounts the careers of four combat photographers who were killed in 1971, Syvertsen’s death in eastern Cambodia and those of seven other newsmen was called “the war’s bloodiest single incident involving journalists.”

As the point man of a three-vehicle convoy of newsmen, Syvertsen unwittingly led his colleagues, including rival NBC correspondent Welles Hangen, into enemy territory 30 miles south of the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh.

Eight of the nine unarmed men were executed by the Viet Cong or Khmer Rouge rebels. NBC’s Cambodian driver managed to escape.

In “A Cambodian Odyssey,” a self-published book that recounts the ill-fated incident, co-author and former CBS News correspondent Jeff Williams, says, “With few exceptions, the journalists who died in Cambodia were not killed in the line of fire, a risk understood and accepted by most correspondents. Instead they were captured and brutally executed.”

Syvertsen’s bullet-ridden remains were among the first to be recovered after the incident and returned to the U.S.

At his June 17, 1970, funeral in Jacksonville Beach, CBS News personnel, including “CBS Evening News” anchorman Walter Cronkite, served as pall bearers.

Cronkite gave the eulogy.

“It is an irony of war that George Syvertsen should have been its victim,” Cronkite reportedly said.

“While abhorring war, he went to it. He went where the action was to help expose the folly of all war. He will be sorely missed by us.”

Scholarly corespondent

According to a June 4, 1970, news obit in The New York Times, Syvertsen, a Brooklyn native, spoke several languages, including Russian.

A graduate of Columbia (N.Y.) College, Syvertsen later studied at Columbia University’s Russian Institute.

He was an Associated Press correspondent in Warsaw, Poland, and Moscow before joining CBS in 1966.

Colleagues, such as former CBS News cameraman Kurt Volkert, who co-wrote “A Cambodian Odyssey” with Williams, remember Syvertsen’s scholarly approach to reporting.

“George, despite what happened in Cambodia that distant spring day, was an unusual and gifted guy, a true intellectual with a sense of adventure and an independent mind who didn’t suffer fools easily,” Volkert, now living in Germany, said in an e-mail.

“He was an excellent correspondent, complex, sophisticated and very thoughtful, probably better suited for in-depth newspaper reporting than TV.”

In his 2002 memoir “The Cat From Hue,” former CBS News correspondent John Laurence called Syvertsen “one of the best and brightest CBS News correspondents in Vietnam.”

Laurence, a CBS News war correspondent from 1965-70, also recalled Syvertsen saying, “No sense getting killed for something that’s going to end up on the cutting room floor.”

Syvertsen spent nearly a decade as a print journalist before joining CBS, where he briefly served as an associate producer for the “CBS Morning News.”

Phil Lewis, a former executive producer of the “CBS Morning News” and a pall bearer at Syvertsen’s funeral, recalled in a phone interview that Syvertsen volunteered to cover the war in late 1967.

“He wasn’t a big star, but he was starting to get known for his Vietnam pieces,” Lewis said.

During the Vietnam era, Laurence said CBS News was in a fierce battle with NBC News for war coverage. The pressure to get compelling battlefield footage was intense.

“CBS News management created a culture of aggressive, even reckless coverage of the war, especially the big battles,” Laurence says in “The Cat From Hue,” his 848-page memoir, “and most of us who worked for them answered the call.”

Ties to the Beaches

In 1951, Syvertsen was in his second year of college at Columbia when his Norweigen-born parents, Olav and Ingrid Syvertsen, relocated to Jacksonville Beach from New York City.

Olav Syvertsen was a dredge boat captain who helped dredge parts of the St. Johns River and the Intracoastal Waterway, according to George Syvertsen’s nephew, Steven Hall of Jacksonville Beach.

Hall’s grandmother, Ingrid Syvertsen, a former chairperson of the New York City chapter of the Girls Scouts of America, adored her oldest son, who often visited his parents at their 8th Avenue North home.

“My grandmother was devastated when George was killed,” Hall recalled. “He was her golden boy.”

The elder Syvertsens, who migrated to the United States from Norway in the early 1920s, also had two daughters, Marie and Evelyn, and another son, Clifford, all of whom are deceased.

In 1958, Evelyn Syvertsen was the valedictorian of her class at Fletcher High School. By then, her big brother had joined The AP in New York, a job that would launch his overseas career.

Under fire in the field

In 1960, Syvertsen, who studied Russian as an enlisted man in the mid-1950s at the Army’s Defense Language Institute, was appointed AP’s foreign correspondent in Warsaw.

In 1962, The AP posted Syvertsen in Moscow, where he spent the next three years covering more than a dozen trips abroad by former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.

Syvertsen’s first wife and their only child, Eric, accompanied him overseas.

In a phone interview from his Missouri home, Eric Syvertsen said his parents, both second-generation Norwegians, met at a church youth group while in high school and were married at Trinity Lutheran Church in Brooklyn.

“My mom had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis prior to their wedding,” Syvertsen, a retired Army captain who also suffers from MS, recalled.

Eric Syvertsen’s parents divorced in 1962. A year later, George Syvertsen married Gusta Bojmart, a woman he met in Poland. Eric Syvertsen said he saw his father sparingly after that, except on TV.

“The first time I heard about his death was on the ‘CBS Morning News,’ while I was getting ready for school,” said Eric Syvertsen, who was 13 at the time.

Bravery unquestioned

George Syvertsen arrived in Vietnam in November 1967 and his dispatches during the Tet Offensive, including one at the embattled Marine air base at Khe Sahn, were among the best of his career, according to one CBS News colleague.

“During the Tet Offensive, in Danang, Hue, Saigon and Cholon, George had displayed great courage as well as sound judgment when we were in the midst of some of the heaviest fighting of the war,” Volkert says in “A Cambodian Odyssey.”

“His bravery and concern for his crews were nearly legendary among the cameramen who had worked for him.”

Skip Brown, who worked with Syvertsen two days before his death, agreed.

“George had earned his stripes,” Brown said in a phone interview. “He was the first correspondent I worked with in Saigon. My first reaction to him was that he seemed taciturn and stern. Over time, I realized he was just very quiet and cerebral.”

One time in Warsaw, Syvertsen, who had a private pilot’s license, demonstrated steely nerves during a spiral dive maneuver, also known in flying vernacular as “the death spiral.”

“George mentioned that he was one of the very few westerners who was allowed to fly in Communist Poland,” Volkert, Syvertsen’s former CBS News cameraman, recalled in an e-mail.

“He took up a plane he wasn’t familiar with and the craft descended into an uncontrolled downward spin. George took his hands off the controls and the plane eventually recovered and he landed safely. This is aviator’s doctrine, but to actually do it takes a lot of cold-bloodedness.”

(See part II in next post)

http://www.beachesleader.com/articles/2007/10/26/beaches_leader/news/doc471e915af2cb7816495388.prt

[stjr]

(Part II of Beaches Leader article on George Syvertsen, CBS reporter)

Year of living dangerously

Journalists covering the secret U.S. military “incursion” into Cambodia in 1970 increasingly fell into enemy hands.

“By the summer of 1970, 25 journalists were captured and ultimately killed. Of this number, 20 died in April and May,” Williams says in “A Cambodian Odyssey.”

Among those presumed dead was freelance cameraman Dana Stone, a CBS stringer. On the day he was killed, Syvertsen was wearing a unique “cargo strap belt” that Stone had given him, according to Volkert.

All journalists took risks covering combat. It went with the territory and was part of their job description.

But prior to the Syvertsen incident, CBS News had never lost a a single reporter in combat, let alone an entire crew.

“The disappearance of George and the others was a dramatic shock throughout CBS News,” Sandy Socolow, the former director of news at CBS News, recalled in an e-mail.

“Everyone was hopeful they were prisoners, and alive. … And there was a tremendous letdown when their graves were discovered.”

In “Lost Over Laos,” Pyle says, “Journalists who flocked to Cambodia after the fighting spread there in 1970 found different rules for coverage and survival.

“No man’s-land began at the city limits. Traveling in groups did not guarantee safety.”

American military forces based in South Vietnam had crossed the Cambodian border to disrupt North Vietnam’s infamous supply line: the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

According to Volkert’s book, Syvertsen arrived in Cambodia  on May 1, 1970, crossing the border in an armored personnel carrier with Volkert and Thai soundman Thanong Hiransi.

The trio rounded out a 10-person CBS News crew in Phnom Penh that included producer and acting bureau chief Gerry Miller.

Miller, 42, was the least experienced correspondent of the bunch. A former overseas wire service reporter, Miller was new to network news gathering, but experienced enough to understand the bottom line.

According to “A Cambodian Odyssey,” Miller had the assumption that “the only show” his crew “had to make” was the “CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.”

Syvertsen, CBS News’s bureau chief in Tokyo, was an old hand in Southeast Asia who had made the Cronkite show numerous times.

Brown and Volkert differ in opinion on whether Syvertsen was feeling pressured by his superiors at CBS News to get “tougher in his reporting,” as Volkert contends in his book.

In “Nine Men Down,” a documentary produced for “The History Channel” in 2004, former CBS News foreign editor Bob Little said in an on-camera interview that “it was felt in New York, I felt in New York that there had been some hesitancy on George’s part to commit to that kind of coverage.”

Did pressure from New York force Syvertsen to take more chances than normal in Cambodia, which ultimately led to his death?    

Brown doesn’t think so.

“I don’t think he was trying to prove anything. He had proved himself under fire,” recalled Brown, who assisted in identifying Syvertsen’s remains in Cambodia and helped load his coffin on a plane headed to the U.S.

“Syvertsen chafed at the fact that he could not do more layered stories. Had he lived, he would have been a terrific ‘60 Minutes’ correspondent.”

Brown said Syvertsen had “requested a move” back to CBS’ Moscow bureau, where he could do more “think pieces.”

The controversial circumstances surrounding Syvertsen’s death have tainted his image, according to Brown.

“George was not into the fame of it as much as he was in being correct as a journalist,” Brown said.

“He was very observant. If he had an inkling of what was  ahead on that road, he would have turned around immediately. I’m convinced that nobody could have made any difference.”

Road of no return

Syvertsen, at the wheel of a canvas-topped French jeep, set out for Takeo on a Sunday morning in May to hunt down a story.

With him was Miller, who rode shotgun in the military-style jeep. Three other CBS staffers followed in another vehicle.

Trailing the CBS crew was a four-person team from NBC, led by Syvertsen’s NBC counterpart, Welles Hangen.

Hangen and Syvertsen were almost mirror images.

Both were New York City natives known for their scholarly approach to reporting.

Both were Army veterans  fluent in several languages. Each had taken courses at Columbia University, and each was well-versed in international affairs. Both had been stationed in Moscow.

They even shared the same birthday â€" March 22.

Hangen was NBC’s bureau chief in Hong Kong. Fearful of being “scooped” by CBS, Hangen, 40, “rounded up his crew and followed” Syvertsen down the unsecured road to Takeo,” according to Volkert’s book.

In “Lost Over Laos,” Pyle says Hangen, like Syvertsen, “also brushed off warnings” of possible enemy forces on the road to Takeo.

“If CBS goes, we go,” Hangen reportedly said after passing a checkpoint manned by Cambodian troops.

Although the area the journalists traveled into was under the tactical control of the South Vietnamese Army, according to U.S. State Department officials, that section of Cambodia was a virtual no man’s-land.

Syvertsen’s jeep was reportedly blown off the road by an enemy B-40 rocket. With the reflexes of a trained pilot, Syvertsen managed to exit the vehicle before the blast, Volkert says in his book.

“George rolled a few feet across the highway, then managed to get up and stagger toward his killers as if to fight them off. They put him down with a bullet in his back and dumped him into a hole dug beside a rice paddy,” the book says.

Miller, CBS stringer Ramnik Lekhi and Cambodian interpreter Sam Leng were killed in the blast. Hangen and his crew, along with CBS cameraman Tomoharu Ishii and soundman Kojiro Sakai were captured and executed.

‘Cronkite was like a God’

CBS’ response to the incident was swift. Gordon Manning, the senior vice president for news at CBS, spearheaded a search party that flew to Cambodia to recover the bodies.

Stuart Witt, Manning’s London-based assistant, said in a phone interview that he withdrew $25,000 in cash from a London bank and stuffed it into a money belt. Manning used the money to hire mercenaries to protect the search party and to make payoffs, according to Socolow.

“I got a call from New York telling me that four CBS people had apparently been ambushed somewhere outside Phnom Penh,” Witt recalled.

“CBS asked me to get on a plane and get out there with cash.”

According to “The Cat From Hue,” Manning’s presence in a war zone “was the most dramatic expression of concern from CBS News management for its people in the field.”

“Executives did not ordinarily display much care for their employees in Southeast Asia. Everyone was expected to be tough,” the book says.

Witt said he assisted in the cremation of Gerry Miller’s remains. Syvertsen’s body was flown to Saigon, where it was prepared for burial by U.S. Army morticians.

According to Lewis, CBS News president Richard Salant selected the six pall bearers who were flown to Jacksonville Beach for Syvertsen’s funeral.

Among them were Les Midgley, the executive producer of the “CBS Evening News,” Ralph Paskman, manager of news at CBS, and Bob Little, the foreign editor and one of Syvertsen’s immediate superiors.

Lewis said he was chosen to be a pall bearer because he had worked the longest with Syvertsen and because he would bring Cronkite up to speed on Syvertsen on the plane ride down in CBS’ company jet.

Cronkite spent the day with Syvertsen’s mother at her modest 8th Avenue North home, five blocks from the ocean.

“My dad picked them up at the airport,” said Steve Hall of Jacksonville Beach.

“Walter was like a God to my grandmother.”

CBS News cameras filmed  Syvertsen’s memorial service inside the chapel of Giddens-Griffith Funeral Home in Jacksonville Beach.

“There weren’t a lot of people at the funeral,” funeral director Ron Giddens recently recalled. “I remember them setting up the cameras. Cronkite rode in one of our limos to the cemetery.”

Syvertsen was laid to rest near the grave of his Norweigen-born father, who died in 1969. The Rev. John Roth of St. Andrews By-the-Sea Lutheran Church presided at the graveside service.

Eric Syvertsen, who flew down from Brooklyn to attend his father’s funeral, said Cronkite was very kind to him.

“He was awfully compassionate” Eric Syvertsen said. “He could see the loss in me. When I got back to Brooklyn, CBS invited me to watch one of Cronkite’s broadcasts.”

CBS also gave Eric Syvertsen all the transcripts of his father’s news reports. Just last week, Kevin Tedesco, director of communications for CBS News, and his staff put together a 16-minute DVD for Syvertsen’s son that features several of his late father’s TV clips.

Justice for George Syvertsen

But Brown believes CBS should have done something to honor the fallen correspondent’s memory.

Brown believes the deaths of four CBS staffers in Cambodia was “one of the most tragic events in the history of CBS News.”

Last year in Baghdad, CBS News lost two staffers, cameraman Paul Douglas, 48, and soundman James Brolan, 42, in a car bomb attack that also severely injured CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier, 39.

Hangen, who is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, has been memorialized by his alma mater, Brown University.

In 1992, Brown created the Welles Hangen Award for Superior Achievement in Journalism to honor   “distinguished  journalists whose service in the enlightenment of a free people has been marked by great courage and dedication.”

A similar award does not exist for Syvertsen, whose name is enshrined on a glass panel at the Freedom Forum Journalists Memorial in Arlington, Va.

According to the Newseum in Washington, D.C., the memorial, which rises above the Potomac River, pays tribute to more than 1,600 journalists who have died while trying to report the news.

“His memory,” Brown said about Syvertsen,” deserves at least that.”


http://www.beachesleader.com/articles/2007/10/26/beaches_leader/news/doc471e915af2cb7816495388.prt

[Bill Ectric]

I recently visited Evergreen Cemetary to locate the grave of writer Charles Wadsworth Camp, the father of Madeleine L'Engle (author of the famous children's sci-fi classic A Wrinkle In Time). Here's a link to the article I wrote about it.
http://www.metrojacksonville.com/forum/index.php/topic,8312.msg146418.html#msg146418