Dead Celebrity Alert

March 26, 1923 - July 4, 2008

The doyen of BBC foreign correspondents, Charles Wheeler earned a permanent niche in television history through his coverage of the Watergate scandal during his years as the corporation’s chief correspondent in the United States. Often ahead of the American press corps, he exploited the contacts he had built up during seven years in Washington to provide the fullest and most comprehensive reporting available in the British media — and more than matching in quality, though not in quantity, that of the American networks. …

He enjoyed a particular triumph at the 1972 Republican convention which renominated President Nixon, getting hold of the convention chairman’s teleprompter script which covered everything down to the meticulously timed pauses for “spontaneous applause” — and resisting all the efforts from the party high command to make him surrender it. It was just the kind of coup that Wheeler enjoyed. It was not at all that he disliked politicians — merely that he thought it was a journalist’s duty to expose humbug whenever it surfaced.

That made him particularly qualified to cover the Watergate scandal. … Read full obituary

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