Eric Sevareid, 79, CBS Newsman

NEW YORK - Eric Sevareid, a newsman for five decades whose worldwide assignments for CBS radio and TV ranged from the fall of France to Watergate and Vietnam, died today, CBS said. He was 79.

He underwent surgery for cancer of the stomach late last year and was re-hospitalized briefly when he contracted pneumonia. He was hospitalized again in January for therapy.

In his 38-year career at CBS, Mr. Sevareid had been a war correspondent, radio news broadcaster, television commentator and columnist.

In 1940, on his first foreign assignment for CBS, Mr. Sevareid scored a major scoop as the first newsman to report that France was about to surrender to the Germans and seek an armistice.

After the fall of France, he returned to London to broadcast, returning to the U.S. in October 1940 and assignment to CBS Radio's Washington bureau.

He was sent to the China-Burma-India theater in 1943. He then returned to Europe, covering the Italian campaign and the first wave of U.S. troops in Southern France.

"Only the soldier really lives the war," he broadcast from London toward the end of the war. "The journalist does not. He may share the soldier's outward life and dangers, but he cannot share his inner life because the same moral compulsion does not bear upon him."

After the war, Mr. Sevareid covered the founding of the United Nations. He returned to the Washington bureau from 1946 to 1959, part of that time as chief correspondent.

Mr. Sevareid's televised political commentaries began in 1948 and became a mainstay of the network's national political coverage.

He retired from CBS in 1977.

Mr. Sevareid was born Nov. 12, 1912, in Velva, N.D., but during the 1920s his family moved to Minneapolis, where he graduated from the University of Minnesota. He got his first job as a reporter, at the Minneapolis Journal, when he was 18. He went on to work for the Paris Herald and the United Press.

He turned an early adventure, a canoe trip he and a friend took just after high school graduation from Minneapolis up to Hudson Bay in Canada, into a 1935 book, "Canoeing with the Cree." Other books included "Not So Wild a Dream," 1946, and "This is Eric Sevareid," 1964.