This is taken from The Times, July 5, 2008:

Sir Charles Wheeler: veteran BBC foreign correspondent

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.

When he returned to Britain in 1973 — the BBC pulled him out before the denouement of the story — he was taken aback and not entirely gratified to discover that he had become a national celebrity. A modest, diffident, wiry man, Wheeler never had any desire to be a TV personality, seeing himself first and foremost as an old-style reporter who happened to work in the visual medium.

Significantly, the efforts that the BBC regularly made to transform him into an omniscient studio presence as the anchorman of such programmes as Panorama and Newsnight ended in failure. Wheeler had no appetite for such work, regarding the role of a presenter with its built-in smiling geniality as essentially fraudulent. He was always happiest working with a film crew in the field — which he continued to do, latterly for Channel 4.

Selwyn Charles Cornelius-Wheeler was born in 1923 in Germany, where his father, who had served with the Canadian Army in the First World War, worked as a shipping agent in Hamburg. His early years in Germany meant he had excellent German, which was to be useful both in broadcasting and to British Intelligence (his first foreign posting was a BBC External Services one to Berlin in the year after the airlift).

Before that, he had had a conventional enough education, being sent home to school at Cranbrook in Kent, which he left in 1940 at the age of 17. Too young to join the Forces, he took a job as a copyboy with the Kemsley-owned Daily Sketch, progressing from there (after his elder brother had been killed with Coastal Command in 1940) to enlist in the Royal Marines.

Wheeler talked very little about his war service but he was engaged in some of the bloodier engagements in the North West Europe campaign, rising to the rank of captain and being mentioned in dispatches. He was also used for intelligence and interrogation purposes in postwar Berlin.

Demobilised at the age of 23, he found it impossible to get a job, as he had hoped, in newspapers and in desperation turned to the BBC External Services, which initially put him to work as a sub-editor in its Latin American section (the fact that he had a fluent command of German and pretty good French as well clearly counted for nothing). Eventually, however, he was transferred to the German service and it was this department in Bush House that eventually had the sense to send him back to his old stamping-ground of Berlin.

Wheeler stayed there until 1953, covering the Soviet repression of the East Berlin uprising of that year before, to his regret, being summoned home to write talks scripts for the European service. Entombed once more in Bush House, he not surprisingly got itchy feet and in 1956 made the first of a number of unorthodox moves by switching, at the invitation of an old friend Michael Peacock, to join current affairs television and Panorama as a producer.

It was the golden age for that old BBC warhorse, and Wheeler found himself a member of a classic company which included such figures as Richard Dimbleby, Robin Day, Ludovic Kennedy and Woodrow Wyatt. His place, of course, at that time was behind the camera rather than in front of it — and it was probably in part a desire to reverse that position which led Wheeler in 1958 to apply for a post with BBC News.

At the time such an action was tantamount to treason — those working in current affairs regarded news reporters as their deadly enemies and vice versa. Despite efforts to intimidate him into staying with Panorama, Wheeler insisted on leaving and was rewarded with the post of South Asia correspondent, based in Delhi.

His principal work there was for radio — television stories outside Europe at that stage had to be filmed, placed in a canister and then flown home. But the BBC’s new South Asia correspondent soon proved himself a master of words, always taking great pains, quite incapable of writing a dull script and rather tending to show up his lazier colleagues on programmes such as From Our Own Correspondent. Wheeler remained in India until 1962, before returning to Berlin, after the building of the Wall, this time for the mainline BBC domestic services.

The year 1965 first brought Wheeler to Washington, initially to join Gerald Priestland (later the BBC religious affairs correspondent) in what was not always an easy partnership. But from 1969 onwards, with his appointment as chief American correspondent, Wheeler came very much into his own. Active, energetic and ubiquitous, he soon became one of the best known members of the overseas Washington press corps.

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. Wheeler stuck with the story tenaciously, and now that satellites (beginning with Early Bird in 1965) had started transmitting instant images across the Atlantic neither the various BBC news desks nor the differing audiences of BBC viewers for particular programmes could get too much of him. For the British public he became not just the reporter but the arbiter — his authority, if anything, enhanced by the obvious rights of access he enjoyed, even to such a figure in the eye of the storm as the Nixon White House aide, John D. Ehrlichman, with whom he obtained the first exclusive interview.

Wheeler left Washington with reluctance in 1973, though probably not foreseeing that the curtain would fall on the Nixon presidency within nine months. The blandishment that had tempted him to leave was the knowledge that the new Director-General, Charles Curran, had formed a high opinion of him (he had never, for some strange reason, got on with Hugh Greene) and wanted to apprentice him to the corporation’s executive ladder.

In 1973 he was sounded out about the BBC controllership in Northern Ireland but eventually (he had not only a wife but two young daughters) turned the idea down. Instead, and perhaps not so wisely, he fell in with Curran’s suggestion that, now that Britain had joined the European Economic Community, Brussels was bound to become the fulcrum for meaningful political and economic news. Wheeler and his family went to live in Brussels for three years but it cannot be said that even he succeeded in producing much in terms of palatable coverage of the essentially rarefied and arcane procedures of the EEC.

By the end of 1976 — and before even Roy Jenkins had formally taken up office as the first (and so far only) British President of the Commission — Wheeler had prudently decided to cut his losses. He returned to Britain, first to take up a fireman’s role with BBC Television News and then, in 1977, to take over from David Dimbleby as the frontman for Panorama. It was he himself who said at the time that he was the last person who should have been given the job — and that proved a prophetic utterance.

For all his facility in doing a 40-second piece to camera in the course of a news report from some far-flung danger spot, Wheeler never felt or looked at home sedately addressing a camera in a studio. And that went, too, for his experience a few years later with Newsnight, where originally he was meant to be, along with Peter Snow, one of the programme’s anchormen holding the show together.

Newsnight, however, did get extremely good value out of Wheeler, who rapidly became the star among its reporters, covering all the top stories ranging from Ronald Reagan over Irangate to the Gulf War. Having long since left the BBC’s staff and gone freelance, Wheeler continued working for Newsnight well past the normal BBC retiring age of 60, only ending his association with the programme at the age of 72 in 1995 (and even after that returning to do occasional reports on such events as the US presidential conventions).

In the latter part of his career he concentrated more and more on doing special series, of which his 1989 eight-part The Road to War commemorating the start of the Second World War in 1939 was perhaps the best known. But there were a number of others, including his memorable D-Day: The Battle for Normandy (1994) and his one-off programme for Channel 4, Hello, Mr President (1997), vividly covering, with the aid of presidential tapes, LBJ’s first hundred days.

Wheeler himself would probably have seen his major series as his five-part Charles Wheeler’s America (1996) but this, in fact, was disappointing, largely because of his modest refusal to give pride of place to his own personality. (Not for nothing was he one of the harshest critics of Alistair Cooke and his 1972 megaseries on America.)

Charles Wheeler was essentially an old-fashioned gum-shoe reporter who thought it was the business of preachers or teachers — and not of journalists — to pontificate or philosophise. That did not stop him from being an excellent stylist and, as he grew older, he took great delight in book reviewing, something he did (often covering events which he himself had lived through) with considerable distinction.

His relations with the John Birt BBC were never cordial — he was once forced by the then deputy director-general to apologise for something he had written about him in The Listener — but he was idolised by most active practitioners of his own craft. He received virtually every professional award open to a broadcast journalist — including the accolade of TV Journalist of the Year at the hands of the Royal Television Society in 1988 — and, in 2001, highly unusually for a journalist, was appointed CMG. His knighthood came five years later in 2006, an official tribute all the more striking because while still remaining very active particularly in BBC Radio, he was already 83.

Wheeler was twice married, first in 1958 to Catherine Dove, a fellow BBC producer when he was on the staff of Panorama. The marriage was dissolved and he married in 1962, while he was still in India, Dip Singh, from a distinguished Sikh family, by whom he had two daughters — the elder, like her father, working for the BBC and the younger, a solicitor specialising in European law, being married to Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London.

Wheeler is survived by his wife and daughters.

Sir Charles Wheeler, CMG, journalist and broadcaster, was born on March 26, 1923. He died on July 4, 2008, aged 85

This is taken from the Independent:

Sir Charles Wheeler: Distinguished foreign correspondent who exemplified the best in BBC reporting for more than 60 years
Saturday, 5 July 2008

In the comparatively brief history of broadcasting, only a handful of news correspondents have become household names. Charles Wheeler, knighted in 2006, was incontestably one of them. In a career with the BBC that lasted more than 60 years, he reported from the most troubled and significant parts of the world with measured judgement and sometimes laconic aplomb that listeners and viewers found reassuring, however dire the story he was obliged to tell.

He seldom employed superlatives, believing fervently that the reporter's job was to remain a detached observer on the sidelines. It was for this reason that a 2004 BBC profile of him was subtitled "Edge of Frame". Richard Tait, a former editor of BBC2's Newsnight – a programme with which Wheeler was associated – said in 1993: "Charles is one of the greatest broadcasting journalists of the television age." Yesterday Mark Thompson, director-general of the BBC, praised "his integrity, his authority and his humanity". John Tusa, another former colleague, commented: "He didn't tart it up with fancy words and didn't strike postures. . . He wanted you to know and hear and see what was going on."

Wheeler's career spanned what many now regard as the golden ages of both radio and television news. He was equally at home on both, distinguished by his silvery voice – clipped, precise but in no way affected – and, in later years, by his shock of thick, white hair.

He was born Selwyn Charles Cornelius-Wheeler in Germany in 1923. His father was a shipping agent in Hamburg and he spent much of his boyhood there, watching the inexorable rise of the Nazis. He was educated at Cranbrook School in Kent, leaving at 17 because he was attracted by what he saw as the glamour of journalism.

His first job was on the tabloid Daily Sketch, where his principal task was to rip news-agency reports from teleprinters and rush them to the editors' desks. In 1943 he joined the Royal Marines and, because he spoke fluent German, was soon recruited by the special intelligence unit formed by Ian Fleming (later the creator of James Bond), playing an important role in the preparations for the D-Day landings. Sixty years later he went back to the Normandy beaches to take part in a BBC documentary commemorating the anniversary.

In the aftermath of the Allied victory he was assigned to Berlin, where his job was to make sure that German officers with technical know-how, such as U-boat commanders, did not end up in the Soviet zone. In 1947 he joined the BBC Overseas Service as a sub-editor on the Latin American desk and after three years he was given his first reporting assignment, as a correspondent for the German service in Berlin.

There, as he revealed to The Independent in 1997, he continued his relationship with the security services. They would give him information gained from sources in the east, which he would use in his broadcasts, and in return he would share snippets from his own sources. "It was all done on an old boys' basis," he said. "I knew that the stuff I was sending back was being used in the propaganda broadcasts into eastern Europe. That was the job in those days. That didn't mean it was lies. . . I suppose I was a Cold War warrior."

In 1956 he moved to television as a producer on Panorama, the long-running current affairs programme. Almost as soon as he arrived, he was involved in a controversy when he arranged a studio interview with Brendan Behan, the Irish playwright, who was palpably drunk after an extended visit to the hospitality room. Wheeler was threatened with disciplinary action but was reprieved when he explained that he had prevented a worse fiasco by pouring the reserve stocks of whisky and gin down the sink.

One of his earliest successes on Panorama was to get a camera into Hungary to cover the ill-fated anti-Soviet uprising, sending the film back to London every day through Austria. But as Michael Peacock, his fellow producer, recalled in 1993: "Producers are midwives and he is not a natural midwife. He was put on earth to be a reporter, to make sense of the world. He wanted to get as close as he could to events."

So in 1958 he left the programme to return to his more natural role. His first assignment was as South Asia Correspondent, based in Delhi. There he met Dip Singh, whom he married in 1962 after the failure of his first marriage, which he was always reluctant to discuss. He and Dip had two daughters – one of whom, Marina, is married to Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London.

The year of his marriage saw him posted back to Berlin – with the Cold War at its height – and in 1965 he went to Washington, which was in many respects the high point of his career. He stayed there until 1973, embracing turbulent times that included the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, civil-rights campaigns and protests against the Vietnam war, culminating in the Watergate affair. His cool, reflective coverage of these sensational events cemented his reputation and contributed greatly to Britain's understanding of our seemingly headstrong transatlantic cousins.

Wheeler became European correspondent in 1973 and for the next 30 years he enjoyed what was in effect a wandering brief, making countless series and single programmes about the world's most important people and places, collecting numerous industry awards along the way. His reporting of the plight of Kurdish refugees from Iraq, during and after the 1991 Gulf War, won particular acclaim.

Although for the most part a man of modesty and courtesy, he did not mince his words when it came to issues on which he had strong feelings. He was famously out of sympathy with the guidelines for news coverage promulgated by John Birt, the future director-general of the BBC, when he was deputy director-general in 1990. Wheeler was then working on BBC2's Newsnight, and the techniques employed by its interviewers were singled out by Birt for criticism.

"You would have thought they would have consulted some of us before drawing it up," Wheeler complained in an interview. "We don't need to be told to be polite. We don't need to be told to be searching. Anyone who did need to be told those things wouldn't have done more than one interview."

And in a fractious meeting with Birt and his colleagues, who were calling for more analysis in Newsnight, Wheeler fumed: "Can you spell out precisely what form your idea of analysis would take and how it would contrast with what we are now doing?" Any other BBC employee might have thought twice before making such an assault on the senior management, but such was Wheeler's reputation that he was effectively unassailable, and he continued to snipe away at the Corporation's changing culture, saying in 2000 that the news agenda was far too influenced by personalities and the tabloid culture. He was still making superb programmes in his eighties .
Michael Leapman

Charles Wheeler was, quite simply, the best news correspondent the BBC has employed during its 85 years of existence; which was only fitting, given that he and it were almost exactly the same age, writes John Simpson.

He possessed in large measure the finest qualities of a first-rate foreign correspondent: clarity and calmness of judgement, sharpness of vision, breadth of understanding, and a lively interest in the world. An instinctive radicalism of approach, too. This had nothing to do with his personal politics (whatever they might have been; after working alongside him for years, I still have no idea how he voted), and everything to do with an instinctive alignment with the poor and weak against the powerful.

The grandeur of his reputation made ambassadors and cabinet ministers of many different countries rise deferentially when he came into the room, yet he never turned into an establishment figure. He was always an outsider, looking quizzically at the world from under those expressive bushy eyebrows of his. The magnitude of the events he reported on never interested him as much as the effects on ordinary people.

Some of his finest reporting was done in 1991, when he was in his late sixties. He went to northern Iraq and then on to Kuwait for Newsnight in the final stages of the first Gulf War. On a bitterly cold hillside he interviewed two Kurdish refugees, whose articulate, bitter, bewildered plea for help made people in the BBC newsroom weep openly when it was broadcast.

A second unforgettable broadcast came soon afterwards, when he went to Kuwait to investigate reports that some Kuwaiti doctors, returning from exile, were using their medical skills to torture people who had collaborated with the Iraqi invaders. Charles and his crew headed for the ward where these things were happening, and, in the finest foot-in-the-door tradition, he refused to go away until the doctor who had answered his knocking admitted, on camera, that prisoners were indeed being tortured there.

Charles Wheeler's judgements could be very fierce, but that was in private. "I think you could afford to leave that last sentence out," he once said to me when I shared an office with him in Brussels in the 1970s, and showed him a despatch on something I felt strongly about. "The audience will come to the same conclusion without needing to be told."

He was the last, best exemplar of a magnificent tradition.

Selwyn Charles Cornelius-Wheeler (Charles Wheeler), journalist and broadcaster: born Bremen, Germany 26 March 1923; sub-editor, Latin American Service, BBC 1947-49, German Service correspondent 1950-53, Talks writer, European Service 1954-56, Producer, Panorama 1956-58; South Asia Correspondent 1958-62, Berlin Correspondent 1962-65, Washington Correspondent 1965-68; Chief US Correspondent 1969-73, Chief Europe Correspondent, 1973-76, Chief Correspondent, BBC Television News 1977, Chief Correspondent, Panorama 1977-79, Chief Correspondent, Newsnight 1980-95; CMG 2001; Kt 2006; twice married, secondly 1962 Dip Singh (two daughters); died London 4 July 2008.

This is taken from Ariel, w/c July 7 2008:

Obituary: Charles Wheeler
tribute by: David Sells

Charles was a jewel in the crown of the BBC. He hated fuss, so would have snorted in disbelief at such a statement, but he was a journalist and broadcaster of true distinction.

And how the trumpets have sounded at his demise - a fanfare of praise for his achievements, particularly in foreign reporting over long years with the corporation.

National newspapers, both serious and tabloid, have printed obituaries.  Charles would simply have shrugged, but his decades in the field of broadcast journalism had made him a national celebrity. He accepted his knighthood two years ago with some reluctance, for he believed that working journalists should not be seen to receive state honours. His family and friends helped to persuade him. Some colleagues made the point that he was our doyen, so we felt his knighthood in a way honoured us all.

When I told a BBC journalist recently about Charles's fatal illness, he was shattered. I know, I said, I feel the same: he is our doyen. 'No,' came the reply, 'he is our icon.'

Yet with all his achievements, awards and celebrity, he was always one of us. A down-to-earth, no-nonsense, working journalist. A reporter's reporter.

Charles was ever his own man. Tough as a boot, silver-haired and craggy-faced in his final years, but tenacious and humane. He had a magic voice and was a master of words, so radio and television grew to love him. This didn't stop him lashing out at BBC management when he felt the need arose, as it sometimes did. He stopped John Birt in his tracks on one famous occasion. Producers occasionally had a hard time too, because where stories and scripts were concerned Charles was boss.

For years he smoked like a chimney, so no surprise really that it was lung cancer that got him in the end. But what a survivor! He was 85 and still working. He recorded a radio documentary on the Dalai Lama just a month ago, with his daughter Marina giving him oxygen at intervals.

Schooled in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, Charles the youngster slipped bread to Jewish neighbours hiding in the woods. This sympathy for the underdog was to colour much of his reporting. Charles Wheeler remained fearless and anti-authoritarian.

The current BBC masters have summed up his journalistic qualities. 'Simply a legend,' said Mark Thompson, speaking of 'his integrity, his authority, and his humanity' that had graced the BBC's airwaves. Mark Byford termed him 'the greatest broadcast journalist of his generation', while Mark Damazer, Radio 4's controller, said that 'everything he did was shot through with his compassion and wisdom. He was magnificent'.

And, what is more, to some of us he was also a dear friend.

Another tribute came from Tim Gardam, who had worked with Charles on Panorama and Newsnight, among other programmes.  This is the text of his remarks:


To remember Charles Wheeler here in Westminster Abbey must be to acknowledge him as a national figure, but I would like to recall him close up, as he was to those many of us who knew him as a colleague, and then as work crossed into friendship.

Whenever I see Charles in my mind’s eye, he is poised in motion- a blue striped shirt, open at the neck, his sleeves rolled up, that gnarled, wiry body, just like his mind, his hands darting across a key board. Beneath his sweep of hair, very bright eyes focused, behind his glasses, on the script in front of him. The commentary emerging in sharp bursts. And then his stillness before the microphone as he prepared to deliver each wild track crystal clear.

And of course I hear his voice – first, his broadcasting voice; for a man whose magnetism, when you worked with him, came from his restlessness, the authority of his voice on air came from how measured and calm it was, each sentence as tight as it was  clear; no journalist I have ever known was more concise. The cadence softened in later years but its signature never changed.  I never missed it more than on Election Night in Washington last November. Amidst all the images and the noise, there was this absence, the one reporter whose insights would have connected us directly back to Martin Luther King and LBJ and would have placed the night in history.

And his voice will be in our heads later this afternoon.
 
Charles’s broadcasting voice was known to millions; but then there was the slightly different voice of Charles, the colleague in the news room, chipping in at a morning meeting, coming on the phone just before a deadline - more exercised, more challenging, the edginess of a reporter with a story that he was not going to let some editor back in London second guess.

And then there was Charles outside work; the sheer zest of seeing him enter the room at a party, with his wife Dip alongside him, hearing that “Hi” as he saw you, and knowing now what fun the evening would be; his delight in the gossip, his tart judgements on the latest political blunder, curious about who was up to what, and what was new.

People say that Charles was fierce - fierce with his producers, and fierce with his editors when fighting for a story; and indeed he was. But he was above all fierce in friendship and in solidarity. He once told me that he turned down being Editor of Panorama in 1959 – he was offered it again some fifteen years later and still said No- and the reason was, he said, “because I never really wanted to be responsible for anybody but myself.” Maybe so; but, in demonstrating that independence, Charles treated all those around him as equals; in a BBC culture so often defined by authority and hierarchy, Charles was the most egalitarian man I ever knew. His was a tough generosity but you never felt better than when you knew you had his respect.

He was the least sentimental of men, but, in the tough moments of a life, the most kind.

Charles was a radical – passionate about racism, state authoritarianism and petty injustice; it was part of the richness of his career that in the last ten years he brought his uncompromising belief in civil rights, forged first in Eastern Europe and then in the United States, back to Britain. The humanity that was at the core of his work, was shaped, I always supposed, by the sights he saw as a young man in the War but seldom talked about. On this part of his life he had the reticence of the soldier, and it was courage I think that he admired most as a virtue. Charles was a great interviewer of the powerful; one remembers the gravity of his engagement with Helmut Schmidt and his somewhat scary, combative flirting with Margaret Thatcher, but at the centre of his most memorable reporting were people whose everyday existence had been wrenched out of joint by the events he was covering. Dip, of course worked at Amnesty International, Charles often spoke of what she was working on, and I do not think you can understand Charles’s moral view of the world that is at the heart of his programmes without understanding how, with Dip, there was a profound, shared sense of the dignity owed to human beings whoever they are. I always remember a different edge and urgency that was in his voice when he rang me from Kuwait to brief me on what he had uncovered about the torture of Palestinians there. “Tim, it is really very bad out here”.  One only had to see Charles in the quiet of his garden in Sussex, the care he took pruning his roses, to know how deeply he valued the calm security of a home as a fundamental human right.

No-one can forget him as he faced the camera, but look at the most memorable of Charles’s reports and you will find at the critical moment he has absented himself from the screen; he knew when to let the witnesses speak for themselves. At the centre of the story, there was so often someone unknown, under stress, but given dignity by the way Charles talked to and listened to them.

Once many years ago, in a Newsnight cutting room, Charles and I, his producer, were arguing with the programme editor about the length of a film. The editor had allocated it 10 minutes. Our version was 18; after an hour of heated dispute, we had reluctantly given way on one cut of 23 seconds. Charles, much enjoying the chaos we were causing, scribbled me a note. It read: “Fight the big ones”.  

And, when I remember him now, it seems to me that through all the great events of history which he reported, “Fighting the big ones” was the principle by which Charles Wheeler lived out his life, and he never stopped.