Career
After leaving the Royal Marines in 1947, Wheeler joined the BBC, initially as a sub-editor at the Latin American division of the World Service. Wheeler's long career as a foreign correspondent began with a three-year posting to Berlin in 1950, partly thanks to his fluency in German. He subsequently returned to the UK, becoming a producer on the fledgling current affairs series Panorama in 1956. As part of Panorama's team, he travelled to Hungary to cover what would become known as the Hungarian Uprising. Taking Panorama's camera into the country, despite being told not to, he filmed the jubilant Hungarian reaction to the rebellion. Just hours after Wheeler returned to Britain, Russia re-entered Hungary and crushed the revolt. Having declined an offer to become the programme's editor, he was later assigned to New Delhi (where he reported extensively on the 1959 Tibetan uprising) and Washington, D.C., where he covered the American Civil Rights Movement and the Watergate scandal between 1965 and 1973. In the later years of his television career he was the American correspondent of Newsnight.
Wheeler was the first presenter of BBC World's Dateline London discussion programme. He remained active in his later years as a presenter of documentary series on Radio 4 and a contributor to the network's From Our Own Correspondent series. He had been working on a programme about the Dalai Lama until a few weeks before his death.
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