Sydney Schanberg
| Sydney Schanberg | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
Sydney Hillel Schanberg January 17, 1934 Clinton, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Died | July 9, 2016 (aged 82) Poughkeepsie, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation | Journalist |
| Spouse(s) | Jane Freiman |
| Children | Jessica and Rebecca |
Sydney Hillel Schanberg (January 17, 1934 – July 9, 2016) was an American journalist who was best known for his coverage of the war in Cambodia. He was the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, two George Polk awards, two Overseas Press Club awards, and the Sigma Delta Chi prize for distinguished journalism. Schanberg was played by Sam Waterston in the 1984 film The Killing Fields based on the experiences of Schanberg and the Cambodian journalist Dith Pran in Cambodia.
Sydney Schanberg was born in Clinton, Massachusetts, the son of Freda (Feinberg) and Louis Schanberg, a grocery store owner. He was Jewish. He studied at Clinton High School in 1951 before receiving a B.A. in Government from Harvard University in 1955. After initially enrolling at Harvard Law School, he requested to be moved up the draft list and undertook basic military training at Fort Hood in Texas.
Schanberg joined The New York Times as a journalist in 1959. He spent much of the early 1970s in Southeast Asia as a correspondent for the Times. For his reporting, he won the George Polk Award for excellence in journalism twice, in 1971 and 1974. In 1971, he wrote about the Pakistani genocide in then-East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Upon being transferred to Southeast Asia, he covered the Vietnam War.
Following years of combat, Schanberg wrote in The New York Times about the departure of the Americans and the coming regime change, writing about the Cambodians that "it is difficult to imagine how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone." A dispatch he wrote on April 13, 1975, written from Phnom Penh, ran with the headline "Indochina without Americans: for most, a better life."
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