Sydney Schanberg obituary

Schanberg covered the massacres and the mass migrations of the war of 1971 that split Bangladesh from Pakistan.

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This article titled “Sydney Schanberg obituary” was written by Godfrey Hodgson, for The Guardian on Thursday 21st July 2016 12.23 UTC

Although Sydney Schanberg, who has died aged 82, was a gifted journalist – political reporter, foreign correspondent, columnist – he will be best remembered for a film, The Killing Fields (1984), based on his experiences in Cambodia covering the genocidal rampage of Pol Pot. The critic Roger Ebert called it “a film of an altogether higher order” than other Hollywood Vietnam-era thrillers, and it won three Oscars.

The film was made by the British director Roland Joffé, on the basis of Schanberg’s 1980 article for the New York Times magazine, The Death and Life of Dith Pran, later published as a book. It explored the moral dilemmas Schanberg faced when, as a foreigner, he was able to escape from Cambodia, leaving behind Dith Pran, his journalist colleague and friend.

It focuses as much on Dith as on Schanberg himself, and tells how, after four years, Schanberg discovered that Dith was not dead, but had survived by disguising himself as an illiterate peasant. Perhaps because the story had a “happy ending” – Schanberg was able to help Dith establish himself and his family in the US – Joffé could engage a mass audience with the monstrous reality of Cambodia.

In the Khmer Rouge years, 1975-79, between one and three million Cambodians, around a quarter of the population, were brutally hacked and bludgeoned to death (to save bullets, which were in short supply) on the orders of the communist tyrant, who wanted to purge his small Asian country not only of everything to do with the west, but even of literacy itself.

Schanberg was one of the most formidable of a new generation of journalists who flourished in the 1960s and the 70s in the US, particularly at the New York Times and the Washington Post. Typically, they came from modest, middle-class families and had been educated at Ivy League universities that their parents could not have dreamed of attending. They were inspired by the still untarnished ethics of American liberalism, although their perspective, formed by the cold war but critical of its chauvinism, was international. They shared a passionate belief in the importance of getting the news.

Schanberg was born in Clinton, a Massachusetts mill town, to Louis, who owned a grocery store, and Freda. He was educated in local schools, then studied at Harvard. He worked on an army newspaper in Germany before joining the New York Times, where he started as a copy boy and was soon promoted to reporter.

In 1964 he was sent to cover the New York state legislature in Albany and by 1967 he was the bureau chief there. He was next sent to be bureau chief in Delhi, a significant posting as he replaced his future nemesis, AM (Abe) Rosenthal, who went back to New York to become the powerful and irascible creator of the modern New York Times. Rosenthal was memorably described by Ben Bradlee, the great editor of the Washington Post, as “a weird bastard, but a whiz of a newspaperman”.

Schanberg covered the massacres and the mass migrations of the war of 1971 that split Bangladesh from Pakistan. Increasingly, he found himself reporting on events in south-east Asia, and in 1972 he met and hired Dith as his assistant and translator. In 1973 Schanberg was made south-east Asia correspondent and in 1975 he decided to write a story about the Khmer Rouge.

Defying orders to leave the country from his bosses in the US, he was threatened with instant execution by what he called Pol Pot’s “grim, robot-like, brutal” teenage soldiers, “dripping with weapons”; his life was saved by his translator’s desperate pleas. Schanberg was horrified that he was able to be evacuated by truck across the frontier into Thailand while Dith was left behind, so far as he knew, to be hacked to death like so many others. But Dith survived, eventually fleeing the country for Thailand, and then the US. Schanberg was awarded the Pulitzer prize.

His later career was less successful. In 1977 he was brought back to New York to be the “metro” editor, in charge of coverage of the New York region. From 1981 he was given a column to write about New York, which he did in sharply elegant prose with an angry moral intensity. He fell out with Rosenthal, however, when he used his column to call Westway, an ambitious plan for a great subterranean highway up the west side of lower Manhattan, a “boondoggle” – an unnecessarily wasteful, or even fraudulent, project.

Worse, he said that the project, supported by the great and good of the city, including a young real estate developer called Donald Trump, as well as by the New York Times itself, was being better covered by other papers. That was not to be forgiven by Rosenthal, and Schanberg lost his column. He was offered other work, but refused it and left the NYT after 26 years. He worked as a freelance magazine writer and lived quietly in New Paltz, a college town 80 miles north of New York City.

Schanberg is survived by his second wife, Jane, and by two daughters, Rebecca and Jessica, from his first marriage, which ended in divorce.

• Sydney Hillel Schanberg, journalist, born 17 January 1934; died 9 July 2016

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