Charles Wheeler - Witness to the Twentieth Century

A Life in News. Foreword by Christiane Amanpour

Shirin Wheeler

• Publisher: Manilla Press
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786581761
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies

Charles Wheeler, the BBC's longest-serving foreign correspondent, was one of Britain's greatest news reporters. For more than four decades, he reported for radio and television from most of the world's trouble spots. Present at many of the key episodes of the twentieth century, he had - as a BBC manager noted after the shooting of George Wallace, Presidential candidate and Governor of Alabama, on 15 May 1972, 'a knack of being in the right place at the right time'. It was typical of Charles that he ran towards the sound of the gunshot while the crowd was running in the opposite direction.Wheeler's investigative skill and sense of judgement made him one of the most authoritative reporters of his generation. But what was it like to have been witness to the events that shaped our modern world? In this book - part memoir, part history, part reflection - his daughter, Shirin Wheeler, examines her father's journalistic legacy and brings her personal knowledge to bear on the project. She will tell the story of her father: a patient listener and forensic interrogator who was driven by curiosity and passion to report and expose injustice, and above all to give a voice to people ignored or unheard by many.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Christiane Amanpour
• 1. Beginnings: Shaping the Man
• 2. Cold War Warrior
• 3. One Cheer for Democracy
• 4. Berlin Revisited: In the Shadow of the Wall
• 5. Protest and Uprising in 1960s America
• 6. Conspiracy and Cover-Ups: The Undoing of American Presidents
• 7. Remaking Europe: The Brussels Years
• 8. Home Front: Friends and Neighbours
• 9. Voices from the Edge
• 10. New Horizons
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Copyright
• Plates