Very few magazine pieces live with you forever: you can pick them up three and half decades later, and they still make you feel the same way as when you first read them. “The Death and Life of Dith Pran” by Sydney Schanberg, published in The New York Times Magazine on January 20, 1980, was a piece like that.

I re-read it recently because Schanberg died last weekend at 82, after a massive heart attack. A pro till the end, he had expired very early Saturday morning—the timing we all used to say we wished for, to insure a full run for the obituary in the Sunday print edition of the Times, the one that still has the largest circulation.

When I first saw that magazine piece in 1980, I had just quit the Times after eight years on the metropolitan desk. Schanberg, who was then the Metro chief, had been my boss, and our parting had not been a happy one. But the article reminded me, and everyone else who read it, of what made so many of us fall in love with him in the first place: his passion, his humanity, and his amazing prose.

There are only a handful of larger-than-life personalities in every generation of journalism. Back then, there were people like R.W. (Johnny) Apple, Michael Herr, Seymour Hersh, and Molly Ivins. But Schanberg and Ivins were the only ones I knew whose generosity was always as large as their ambition. Schanberg exuded electricity. He lit up every room he walked into. If you were a general or a politician, he could be a fearful presence. But if you were a fellow reporter, there was a warmth and an eagerness to help that were always astonishing.

Syd Schanberg started at the Times in 1959 as a copy boy for the editorial board. He was already 25. There he met Frank Clines. When he was still a copy boy, Schanberg wrote an essay for the editorial page, which quickly propelled him seven floors lower, to the third-floor newsroom at 229 West 43rd Street. “I was shocked,” Clines remembered this week. “I was shocked and I imitated him.” Soon Clines wrote his own essay and followed Schanberg downstairs. “You could see the seeds of his ambition,” Clines said, and you could also see what would make Sydney run: “One of his traits was to react against authority, inside the paper and outside the paper.”

After nine years writing for the city desk, Schanberg got his first foreign assignment, as New Delhi bureau chief, in 1969. Abe Rosenthal had been named the paper’s managing editor that year, and Rosenthal had also served in Delhi, so India was a good first assignment for a new foreign correspondent. (If it had mattered to Abe, it mattered.) In 1970, Richard Nixon launched his “incursion” into Cambodia, and Schanberg was sent to Saigon to help cover it. Soon after that he covered the war in Bangladesh, and then he was back in Saigon again. “My life, essentially, had turned into a war assignment,” Schanberg recalled many years later, and it would stay that way until the fall of Cambodia. It was his coverage of that catastrophe, and his connection to his Cambodian assistant, Dith Pran, that would make him an icon.

His dispatches in the spring of 1975 were full of what Clines called “that angry veracity—it was quite a trick in those days to get that into his stories.” Rosenthal was officially in favor of more colorful writing in the Times, but the vast editing bureaucracy beneath him always worked against elegant prose, and Schanberg was one of the very few whose sentences were powerful enough to vanquish the system. (Later, when Schanberg and his colleague, Martin Arnold, tapped Clines to revive the “About New York” column, Clines blossomed into perhaps the single finest newspaper writer of his generation. Six decades after he started, in my opinion, Clines still holds that title, as an editorial writer at the Times.)

Schanberg became famous because of leads like this one: “The spectacle of the Americans being evacuated from Cambodia—with helicopters dropping from the skies and stony-faced Marines armed to the teeth protecting the Embassy evacuees from nothing, with curious crowds of Cambodians watching another American spectacle they did not understand and with Embassy homes being ransacked by military police immediately after the officials’ departure—is perhaps a fair epitaph for American policy in Indochina, or at least in Cambodia.”

And when he defied his editors’ orders, and stayed behind to cover the fall of Phnom Penh, the deluge of copy he had been producing suddenly halted. He and his assistant, Dith Pran were forced to take refuge in the French Embassy, and there was no further communication with the outside world. In Albany, New York, where state legislators had already experienced Schanberg’s electricity, the state Senate unanimously passed a resolution expressing the “prayerful hope that he will emerge from this assignment safely.”

The day the Khmer Rouge swarmed into the capital, Schanberg had narrowly avoided death when he and two other foreign journalists, along with Dith Pran and their driver, were picked up by heavily armed troops who threatened them with immediate execution. Pran climbed into an armed personnel carrier with the others and then spent two and half hours convincing their captors that they were not their enemy, but merely foreign newsmen covering the story. They were finally released six hours after the ordeal began.

Later Schanberg asked Pran how he had managed the sangfroid to accomplish this. “Even if I get killed, I have to first try to say something to them. Because you and I are together,” Pran said. “I was very scared, yes, because in the beginning I thought they were going to kill us, but my heart said I had to try this. I understand you and know your heart well. You would do the same thing for me.”

A couple days after they entered the embassy, the French decided that all the Cambodians had to leave. The new Cambodian government had refused to recognize it as a diplomatic mission, so none of its citizens could take refuge there. As Pran left, Schanberg put his arms around him and tried to say something that would have meaning: “But I am wordless and he is too.”

Two weeks later, all the foreigners were allowed to leave the country. The first person to greet Schanberg in Thailand was a Cambodian reporter for the Associated Press who asked him about Pran. “He couldn’t come,” said Schanberg, and then they both collapsed in tears.

Back in the United States, he made endless phone calls around the world to find Pran, but learned nothing. “For long periods of time, I did not want to see anyone face to face, not even my own family… I could not bring myself even to visit Pran’s family”—who had been evacuated before Phnom Penh fell.

Unable to write the book he wanted to about the war, Schanberg finally returned to New York to be an editor at the Times. I met him when we went to lunch with Arnold. I knew about Pran from Schanberg’s dispatches, but I had no idea that he had never gotten out. In complete naïveté, I asked at the end of lunch, “What happened to Pran?”

Sydney drew himself up and said, “Someday, he will come out.” That was all. It was May 3, 1976. I know the date, because when we went back to the office, Sydney had won the Pulitzer Prize.

Almost the whole time I worked for Sydney as a reporter on the metro desk, he was in a terrible depression. The miracle finally began on the morning of April 18, 1979, when Andreas Freund called him from the Times Paris bureau. An East German correspondent based in Paris had been in Siem Reap in Cambodia, and he had met Pran. The message he carried had eight words—“the eight most exquisite words” Schanberg had ever heard: “Dith Pran survivor, living in Siem Reap Ankkor.”

Pran had taken the East German aside at the temple complex at Angkor Wat and asked him in French to take the message to Schanberg: “It will make him happy,” Pran said. At the moment Pran met the East German, the Vietnamese were invading Cambodia to expel the Khmer Rouge and install their own client regime. Ten months later, Pran finally escaped across the Thai boarder. In October, Schanberg got a message from Times man Henry Kamm in Thailand that Pran was in a refugee camp there. Schanberg called Pran’s son in San Francisco, who shouts to his sister and two brothers: “Hey, you guys! Our dad is out of Cambodia!”

A couple of days later, Schanberg had flown halfway around the world and reached the refugee camp in Thailand. When Pran finally saw him, he shouted, “You came Syd, oh, Syd you came.” And then, a few minutes later, “I am reborn. This is my second life.”

Schanberg recounted all this in that extraordinary magazine article, and four years later it became Roland Joffé’s great movie, The Killing Fields. There was a screening at Cinema 2 on Third Avenue, and Sydney invited me. I don’t think I had seen him since I had left the Times. When the movie ended, I walked out and saw Sydney greeting everyone on the stairs. I walked into his arms and our friendship was restored.

After repeated clashes with Rosenthal when he was metropolitan editor, Schanberg had become an op-ed columnist for the paper. But even then his war with Rosenthal continued, as Schanberg used the column to attack the way the Times was covering Westway, the proposed superhighway for the West Side of Manhattan. The attacks infuriated Rosenthal, and in 1985, he convinced Times publisher Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger to remove Schanberg from the column. “It was Punch, at the behest of Abe,” Max Frankel confirmed to me in an interview this week. Frankel, the future executive editor, was the editorial page editor at the time.

Sydney was offered another column at the Times Magazine, but he saw it as a demotion, and soon left the paper to write a column for New York Newsday. There, he mentored dozens of younger journalists—and met his second wife, Jane Freiman, who also wrote there. He, too, had been reborn.

For three more decades, our friendship continued to flourish, grounded in our love of journalism, a mutual disdain for authority, and a love for The New York Times that never died.

Charles Kaiser is the author of 1968 In America, The Gay Metropolis, and most recently, The Cost of Courage.