The New York Times correspondent Sydney H. Schanberg, center, with Dith Pran, right, interviewing a government soldier about the American bombing of Cambodia in August 1973.CreditFrom “The Death and Life of Dith Pran” by Sydney H. Schanberg (Viking)

Sydney H. Schanberg Is Dead at 82; Former Times Correspondent Chronicled Terror of 1970s Cambodia

International New York Times | 9 July 2016

Sydney H. Schanberg, a correspondent for The New York Times who won a Pulitzer Prize for covering Cambodia’s fall to the Khmer Rouge in 1975 and inspired the film “The Killing Fields” with the story of his Cambodian colleague’s 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 of the suffering and death of their victims with the passion of an eyewitness to history.

In the spring of 1975, as Pol Pot’s 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 Cambodia’s American-backed Lon Nol government fled for their lives.

“Our decision to stay,” Mr. Schanberg wrote later, “was founded on our belief — perhaps, looking back, it was more a devout wish or hope — that when the Khmer Rouge won their victory, they would have what they wanted and would end the terrorism and brutal behavior we had written so often about.”

But when the guerrillas rolled in, after a brief period of calm, there was widespread shooting, looting and many executions. Mr. Schanberg and Mr. Dith were seized and threatened with death. “Most of the soldiers are teenagers,” Mr. Schanberg noted in his last dispatch. “They are universally grim, robotlike, brutal. Weapons drip from them like fruit from trees — grenades, pistols, rifles, rockets.”

Mr. Dith’s pleas saved Mr. Schanberg, and the two journalists took refuge in the French Embassy compound, a vestige of colonial rule. Later, Mr. Dith and other Cambodians were expelled from the compound and forced to join an exodus of civilians into the countryside.

It was the beginning of a monstrous social experiment: the expulsion of millions from cities and the suppression of educated classes to recast Cambodia as an agrarian utopia. The failed experiment over the next four years cost the lives of two million people to starvation, disease, slave-labor brutality and murder.

Two weeks after his capture, Mr. Schanberg and other foreigners were evacuated by truck to Thailand, where he filed the first account of the fall and emptying of Phnom Penh. He told of massacres and fires, of streets and roads littered with bodies, of forced marches that turned the city overnight into a graveyard.

Mr. Schanberg near Hue, Vietnam, in May 1972.CreditNguyen Ngoc Luong

“Two million people suddenly moved out of the city in stunned silence — walking, bicycling, pushing cars that had run out of fuel, covering the roads like a human carpet,” he wrote. “A once-throbbing city became an echo chamber of silent streets lined with abandoned cars and gaping, empty shops. Streetlights burned eerily for a population that was no longer there.”

Mr. Schanberg returned to New York. Overwhelmed with guilt over having to leave Mr. Dith behind, he asked for time off to write about his experiences, to help Mr. Dith’s refugee wife and four children establish a new life in San Francisco and to begin the seemingly hopeless task of finding his friend.

He was showered with awards, including the Pulitzer, which he said he shared with Mr. Dith. He also became a metropolitan editor and columnist at The Times.

For years there was no news of Mr. Dith, who had disguised his educated background and survived beatings, backbreaking labor and a diet of insects, rodents and as little as a tablespoon of rice a day. In 1978, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and replaced Pol Pot with a client regime. Mr. Dith escaped over the border with Thailand in 1979 and was soon reunited with Mr. Schanberg.

Mr. Schanberg, left, with Dith Pran in The New York Times’s offices in Manhattan in 1980.CreditThe New York Times

After moving Mr. Dith and his family to New York and helping him obtain a job as a photographer at The Times, Mr. Schanberg wrote “The Death and Life of Dith Pran,” a 1980 cover article for The New York Times Magazine, which was later published as a book. The story became the basis for Roland Joffé’s 1984 movie, “The Killing Fields,” starringSam Waterston as Mr. Schanberg and Dr. Haing S. Ngor as Mr. Dith. Dr. Ngor, who won an Oscar for best supporting actor, was a physician who had also survived the Cambodian holocaust.

The film was widely praised. “‘The Killing Fields’ emerges as an emotionally charged vision of hell on earth, a jolting reminder of the wanton destruction of a gentle people by another of history’s madmen,” Kathleen Carroll wrote in The Daily News. But Vincent Canby of The Times called it “diffuse and wandering,” adding, “Something vital is missing, and that’s the emotional intensity of Mr. Schanberg’s first-person prose.”

Sydney Hillel Schanberg was born in Clinton, Mass., on Jan. 17, 1934, to Louis Schanberg, a grocery store owner, and the former Freda Feinberg. Sydney attended Clinton schools and graduated from Harvard in 1955 with a bachelor’s degree in American history. Drafted in 1956, he served as a reporter for an Army newspaper in Frankfurt.

He joined The Times in 1959 as a copy boy and became a staff reporter in 1960, covering general assignments and government agencies. In 1964, he began covering the New York State Legislature, and in 1967, he was named Albany bureau chief, in charge of state government reporting.

He married Janice Sakofsky in 1967. The couple had two daughters, Jessica and Rebecca, and were divorced. In 1995, he married Jane Freiman.

Mr. Schanberg joined The Times’s foreign staff in 1969 and was named bureau chief in New Delhi. He covered India’s 13-day war with Pakistan in 1971. He met Mr. Dith on a trip to Phnom Penh in 1972, and as Mr. Schanberg’s reporting from Vietnam and Cambodia grew, The Times hired Mr. Dith as his aide and translator. As the Southeast Asia correspondent from 1973 to 1975, Mr. Schanberg focused increasingly on the Khmer Rouge insurgency.

After his foreign assignments, Mr. Schanberg was The Times’s metropolitan editor from 1977 to 1980 and wrote a column twice a week, with a focus on New York, from 1981 to 1985. It was discontinued after he criticized the Times’s coverage of the proposed Westway highway in Manhattan.

The Times offered him another assignment, but he left the paper after 26 years to write a column for New York Newsday, where he remained for a decade.

Mr. Schanberg in 1991. He was one of 16 writers and news organizations that filed a lawsuit challenging the Pentagon’s restrictions on news coverage of the war in the Persian Gulf. CreditMike Albans/Associated Press

Mr. Schanberg, who lived in New Paltz, N.Y., returned to Cambodia in 1989 and 1997 and wrote articles for Vanity Fair. He also wrote for Penthouse and The Nation and columns of media criticism for The Village Voice. “Beyond the Killing Fields,” an anthology of his reporting, was published in 2010. Besides the Pulitzer, he won two George Polk Memorial awards, two Overseas Press Club awards and Sigma Delta Chi’s distinguished journalism prize.

“I’m a very lucky man to have had Pran as my reporting partner and even luckier that we came to call each other brother,” Mr. Schanberg said after Mr. Dith died in 2008. “His mission with me in Cambodia was to tell the world what suffering his people were going through in a war that was never necessary. It became my mission too. My reporting could not have been done without him.”