Schanberg's Score

From the beginning, Cambodia was Sydney Schanberg's story. He had covered the country's often baffling civil war from its first days in 1970 for the New York Times, and he was determined not to miss its end. Ignoring his editors' orders to leave Phnom-Penh last month, he chose to stay behind to report the city's fall. Last week Schanberg's considerably risky decision paid off impressively. Having emerged at the Thailand border after 17 days of suspenseful silence, he filed a remarkable retrospective on the Communist takeover that filled more than two pages in the Times and supplied the first really close look at Cambodia's extraordinary peasant revolution (see THE WORLD).

Schanberg, 41, learned the extent of the personal risk he had taken on the very first day of the Communist takeover. When he and some other journalists went to observe the grisly conditions at the city's largest civilian hospital, they were stopped by Khmer Rouge troops. "They put guns to our heads and, shouting angrily, threatened us with execution," Schanberg reported. "We thought we were finished." Luckily Dith Pran, a Cambodian employee of the Times, was able to talk the troops into freeing them. Schanberg got back to the Hotel Le Phnom just as it was being invaded by troops; he packed his bags and sprinted to the French embassy compound --his home for the next 13 days.

As many as 1,300 refugees were crowded into the compound, and it was not long before many of the foreigners began squabbling over the little food and few comforts available. That dissension continued up to the end of their three-day journey by truck to Thailand. Concluded Schanberg: "If the Communists were looking for reasons to expel us as unfit and unsuited to live in a simple Asian society, we gave them ample demonstration."

Last Convoy. After Schanberg reached Thailand, he sat down at a typewriter at the Times office in Bangkok and emptied his notebooks for 19 hours. He and other journalists in the first group to reach the border had agreed to embargo their reports until the last convoy of foreigners entered Thailand. Patrice de Beer of France's Le Monde broke the embargo, as did a number of other European journalists, but their reports did not begin to compare in volume, drama or detail with Schanberg's.

The day before Schanberg broke his silence, Revolutionary Government officials in South Viet Nam lifted their news blackout, and reports of relative calm in Saigon began trickling out from some of the 120 remaining foreign journalists in that city. There were no Times-men, among them. The paper's editors had made sure that its Saigon correspondents had not missed the evacuation there. "If we had to do it again tomorrow," said Assistant Managing Editor Seymour Topping last week, "we would say the same thing to Sydney. We would tell him to guard his personal safety above all." Yet, Topping added: "We understand what his compulsion was, and we wished him well. Sydney is not a novice; he is a professional."

Schanberg left Bangkok to join his family in Singapore late last week. A 16-year veteran of the Times who spent two years as Albany bureau chief before going to New Delhi in 1969, Harvardman ('55) Schanberg is due to report this summer for a new assignment as the Times's Warsaw correspondent. He is known to have been bitterly disappointed that his coverage of the 1972 India-Pakistan war did not win a Pulitzer Prize, and determined to win one for his Cambodia reporting. "An entire country was turned upside down and restructured by new rulers," Schanberg told TIME. "It was a spectacle of such proportions and such rarity that I would not hesitate to stay for it again."

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