Sydney Schanberg, Former New York Times Pulitzer Prize-Winning Correspondent, Dies at 82

Sydney H. Schanberg, the former New York Times correspondent who won a Pulitzer Prize for his tenacious and blunt reporting on the brutal fall of Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge and who inspired the movie "The Killing Fields," died Saturday in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. He was 82 and had suffered a heart attack Tuesday.

His longtime paper reported that Charles Kaiser, a former Times reporter and a friend to Mr. Schanberg, confirmed the death.

Mr. Schanberg's Pulitzer was earned when he, along with his assistant and translator Dith Pran, refused orders from Times editors to evacuate Phnom Penh in 1975 as as Pol Pot's guerrillas closed in on the city, the Cambodian capital.

Schanberg and Mr. Dith were captured, and the Khmer Rouge, never accused of being merciful, could have just as likely followed through on their threats to execute the two men than to let them live. It was Mr. Dith's pleas to spare Mr. Schanberg's life that saved him, he recalled.

The two men took refuge in the French embassy until the Khmer Rouge ordered millions of Cambodians to move from the cities to the countryside as part of an effort to create a farming class capable of feeding themselves and much of the rest of the country. Mr. Dith was among those expelled from Phnom Penh.

Mr. Schanberg remained in the embassy until he was evacuated to Thailand, where he filed his first account of the exodus from Cambodia's capital, describing it with his typical vividness, descriptions of dead bodies scattered around the city and all.

“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.”

The experiment with farming the countryside was a monumental disaster. Over four years, an estimated 2 million people, working as virtual slaves, died of starvation, disease and murder.

Mr. Dith survived. He was tortured, though, living for years on a diet of little more than insects and rodents until 1979, when a new government took over and he escaped over the border with Thailand.

In 1980, with Mr. Dith living in New York, Mr. Schanberg wrote a cover story for The New York Times Magazine, which was later published as a book. The story was titled "The Death and Life of Dith Pran."

"This chronicle, of all the stories I have written as a journalist, has become the harest for me to pull out of my insides," he wrote. "To describe a relationship such as Pran's and mine demands candor and frankness about self, not romantic memories.

"I feel exposed and vulnerable."

The story would inspire the 1984 film, "The Killing Fields."

Mr. Dith died in 2008.

Back in the United States after Cambodia, Schanberg spent a couple of years as Metropolitan Editor of the Times before being rewarded with a column.

He used the column to cover New York with the same sort of fearlessness he had demonstrated overseas.

His columns questioning Westway - a proposed $4 billion highway that would have tore apart portions of New York's West Side; a judge eventually ruled the highway could not be built - led to his column being yanked.

While Schanberg's reporting questioned the wisdom of the project, his paper's editorial page supported it.

"You have an obligation," he started one Westway column, quoting the judge overseeing the case, "to want the truth. You are not doing that."

Schanberg went on to spell out apparent conflicts of interest and questionable goings on when it came to how the project came to be.

"Consider what this boils down to," he wrote. "A biologist who was paid by a Westway advocate was used as the primary support for granting the Westway permit by an agency that was supposed to be reaching an independent judgment.

"If it sounds as if there's something wrong here, maybe there is."

The next week, without naming the Times, he launched an attack on them and other papers for not paying enough attention to Westway.

"Our newspapers, oddly, can't seem to find space for Westway and its scandal," he wrote, lamenting the lack of Westway stories while there seemed to be plenty of space for space for less serious fare.

"We all need trivia on our newspaper pages to leaven the serious stories that weigh down the mind," he said. "But if trivia begins to dominate, the mind can become air-headed."

He came from vacation two weeks later to be told his column had been canceled.

Schanberg then headed to New York Newsday and later the Village Voice.

At the Voice, Schanberg continued to write to challenge the powerful.

In one 2006 column, he wrote about a developer whose exploits he had often chronicled - Donald Trump.

Trump had filed a libel suit against New York Times reporter Timothy O'Brien over a book O'Brien had written about him. The reporter had allegedly so understated Trump's wealth that it had badly damaged the developer.

This is how Schanberg started his column:

"In a world of genocide, terrorism, global warming, and the Asian bird plague, what would the press do for levity without Donald Trump?' Schanberg wrote. "Take a look at his latest comedy routine.

"Trump—about whom the only certainty is that he lacks the tiniest smidgen of an acquaintance with the truth—has filed a libel and slander lawsuit against a reporter for writing a book that Trump says is untruthful."

Needless to say, Trump lost.

Schanberg was also generous with colleagues in the business, no matter how old - or young.

Dan Barry, a columnist at the Times, remembers after college, he had applied to be Schanberg's news assistant.

He went in for an interview with the person that he would replace.

And waited.

One night, he got a phone call at home.

"It was Schanberg," says Barry. "He told me NOT to take the job, no matter the good pay and the allure of the Times. He told me to get a real job at some small newspaper where I could learn the craft.

"I've been forever grateful for that gentle, encouraging rejection."

Another reporter remembers being in high school and meeting Schanberg who told story after story about the need to dig, to find the truth, to question what you are being told.

In the end, he said, there was one thing that more important than anything.

"Never back down," he said.

This report will be updated.

Main image via Shutterstock