Edward Sheehan

The foreign correspondent who immersed himself in turmoil

Edward Sheehan

1930–2008

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No hotspot was too hot for Edward Sheehan, an adventurous freelance foreign correspondent known for his coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the brash rule of the young Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya, the rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the political turmoil in Uganda. He has died from an allergic reaction to medication.

Sheehan grew up in the Boston suburb of Newton, attended the local Catholic school, and for five years “was the regular altar boy for the parish pastor, Bishop (later Cardinal) Richard Cushing,” said The New York Times. “Jesuit teachers drilled him in Latin and Greek” at Boston College High School. After graduating from college, he spent two years in the Navy, and later joined The Boston Globe as a foreign correspondent, “roaming far and wide in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.” In 1957 he joined the foreign service, working for U.S. embassies in Cairo and Beirut as a press officer. That experience led to a novel, Kingdom of Illusion, about a corrupt playboy.

Sheehan was 31 when, in 1961, he turned to freelance journalism, said The Boston Globe. Over the next 47 years, his far-flung byline appeared in such publications as The Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books. A 1976 article in Foreign Policy on Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East formed the basis for his book The Arabs, Israelis, and Kissinger. That “fly-on-the-wall account” of confidential conversations among Nixon, Kissinger, and Middle Eastern leaders caused a controversy when Sheehan revealed that Nixon favored the return of all Egyptian territory and “substantial restitution” of land on the Golan Heights and on the West Bank that Israel had seized in the 1967 war.

Sheehan also wrote a play and several novels that served as pulpits for his staunchly conservative Roman Catholic views. Catholicism, he claimed, served as a counterweight to what he called the “engulfing decadence” of modern Western culture. “I see the sorrows of Central America as a religious mystery,” he once said, “and I believe that all human problems, in the end, are theological.”