Ed Walsh, former Washington Post and Oregonian reporter, dead at 71
Updated Jan 10, 2019; Posted Feb 15, 2014
By Joseph Rose | The Oregonian/OregonLive
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Journalist Ed Walsh in 1999.
(Courtesy of Michelle Walsh)
Edward Walsh, who covered many of the late 20th century's most important political figures for The Washington Post and finished his distinguished journalism career at The Oregonian, died Friday night. He was 71.
He was a White House correspondent for the Post during the Carter administration. Once, as Jerusalem bureau chief, he took a harrowing, passport-juggling ride over the Jordan River at night to interview Yasser Arafat.
But ultimately, Walsh's favorite story was a piece that he wrote about a basketball team from a tiny town in Indiana.
"The line about Ed Walsh was, 'Get Ed to do it!'" said Walsh's wife, Michelle. "He could cover anything, no matter how complicated. No matter the subject, he'd do it."
Walsh died of cancer, which spread from his lungs to his brain during the last 18 months of his life. He passed away under hospice care at his Southwest Portland home at 11:59 p.m., surrounded by his wife, their children, Michael and Catherine, their spouses and a granddaughter.
Modest with a tender smile, Walsh's persona, especially in the current era of 24-hour cable news commentators and brand-building reporters, might seem like an odd fit for the giant egos and subjects that filled 44 years of notebooks. It wasn't, said Dan Balz and Karen DeYoung, former colleagues at The Washington Post.
Within that quiet, skinny shell was a journalistic force of nature that could take on any story, they said.
"I use this term in a flattering way: He was an old-fashioned reporter," Balz said. "He wouldn't accept spin. He wanted people to be straight with him and he would report straight. His work was fast, thorough, accurate and cleanly written."
Said DeYoung: "Ed was the most laid-back person, so calm – but he just got it done."
Ed Walsh in front of the Nieman House where he was a Nieman fellow at Harvard University in 1981, a year that was meant to inspire mid-career journalists to broaden their perspectives. He became The Washington Post's Jerusalem bureau chief the next year.
Born Edward Joseph Walsh on March 5, 1942, in Chicago, Ill., Walsh met Michelle Heisler at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wis.
In August 1971, he took his first assignment with The Washington Post, covering Maryland politics.
In 1975, in the wake of Watergate, Maryland Gov. Marvin Mandel was indicted on mail fraud and racketeering charges in a case that made national headlines. Walsh was the reporter who broke the story.
Michelle Walsh shared, with permission, an email expressing condolences from Frank DeFilippo, Mandel's former press secretary.
DeFilippo's email recalled how Walsh called him at home one night as the former governor's legal problems were heating up.
"My daughter, Daniella, then 3, loved to answer the phone, as she did that night," DeFilippo wrote. "The first thing I heard out of Daniella's mouth was, 'Guess who was here last night?' The next words I heard were, 'Arnold Weiner and Al Figinski.' From out of the mouths of babes often come headlines."
Weiner and Figinski were Mandel's lawyers. That's partly how Walsh got the story of how the governor was under investigation and lawyering up, DeFilippo wrote. "Ed, of course, conferred with me first about the ethics of the situation," he said. "From then on, whenever Ed called me at home and Daniella answered, the joke was, 'Daniella, who was there last night'"
Jimmy Carter's run for the White House in 1976 was the first of several presidential campaigns that Walsh covered for the Post and, later, The Oregonian. (Balz recalled Walsh refusing to hit a single key on his typewriter until the first vote was counted in the 1980 Illinois Democratic primary, even though the exit polls showed a Jimmy Carter landslide.)
After writing about the Carter years, Walsh moved his family to Jerusalem, where he worked as a correspondent for the Post from 1982 – just after Israel's invasion of southern Lebanon -- to 1985.
Michelle Walsh said those were some of the best years of their marriage, when Ed Walsh worked at home. Every day, she heard him in the next room, talking to sources from both sides of the Mideast conflict on the phone and typing out stories on a Telex machine.
"I always knew what he was doing and what he was up to," she said. "I always knew what the latest thing was. We were all scared before moving there, but it was fabulously interesting."
In a 2009 interview with Jeff Mapes, The Oregonian's senior political reporter, Walsh recalled how he and other foreign correspondents left their 1984 Thanksgiving dinner as soon as they got the word that Arafat was hold a meeting of the Palestinian National Council.
Of course, back then, Israel and Jordan didn't have formal diplomatic relations.
They took cabs to the Jordanian border, where they showed Israeli border guards the passport they used for travel into and out of Israel. Then they took a bus across the Jordan River, where they showed Jordanian authorities the second passport that they kept clean of any Israeli stamps. To get to Amman, they had to jump in another set of cabs. However, Walsh said, the arrangement only worked in one direction. So, they had to fly back through Athens or Cairo to get home.
When asked to recall his all-time favorite story, however, Walsh told Mapes it was when, as the Post's Chicago bureau chief, he wrote about a small-town high school basketball team from Batesville, Ind., which had a dream of trying to win it all at the state championship -- just like in the movie "Hoosiers."
Michelle Walsh said she wasn't surprised. Ed loved sports. He was a life-long White Sox fan. He followed the Green Bay Packers until the very end, expecting them to lose in their NFL playoff game against the San Francisco 49ers. "And they did," she said with a laugh.
After taking a buyout at the Post, Ed moved to Oregon with Michelle in 2004. He took a job as a political reporter at the The Oregonian, where he covered everything from the legal troubles of initiative activist Bill Sizemore to the unsolved mystery of D.B. Cooper until he retired in 2009.
Michelle Walsh was born in Portland and raised in Forest Grove. "Early in our marriage, Ed promised that we would return home, we would get me back to Oregon someday," she said. "It was a promise kept."
A funeral mass for Edward Walsh, former political reporter for The Washington Post and The Oregonian, has been scheduled for 10 a.m. Friday at Southwest Portland's St. Michael the Archangel Catholic Church.
-- Jeff Mapes of The Oregonian contributed to this report
-- Joseph Rose