‘A total newshound’: Steven Edwards, National Post reporter who ran toward the towers on 9/11, dead at 67

Steven Edwards, who has died aged 67, was a newspaper correspondent whose youthful experience of the 1974 Birmingham IRA bombings inspired a close reckoning with the extremes of human politics, including major coverage of the Rwandan genocide and the detention of Omar Khadr at Guantanamo Bay.

Trained in England, he was an original National Post journalist on a staff that drew heavily from British newspaper talent, a tabloid man gone broadsheet.

It was at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in 2010, while covering the military commissions of the 9/11 attacks, that Edwards fell ill and a scan revealed kidney cancer. He died on Wednesday of complications from the disease in New York, where he was for many years the National Post’s United Nations correspondent.

A defining moment in a distinguished career came on 9/11 when he rushed downtown on foot, against terrified masses going the other way, only to be enveloped in the cloud of the first fallen building.

“A dust cloud powered up the street like an avalanche, devouring all in its path,” he wrote that same day.

“He was a total newshound. Great instincts, great drive, unrelenting,” said Kelly McParland, a former National Post foreign editor who handled many of Edwards’ reports, including on 9/11.

“He had to feel his way along the sidewalk by hand, one hand at a time as he edged along one building after another,” said McParland. “He came across a woman in tears, terrified and crying, slumped on the sidewalk not knowing what to do or where to go, and helped her find her way until she was safe, then headed back into the ash. He got as close as he could until the ash was so thick he couldn’t see anyone or anything any longer. Eventually he had to turn back and got home covered with ash himself, in his eyes, his hair, all over his clothes. He wrote a spectacular story about the horror of it and what he’d seen.”

Edwards’ career in the UN press gallery had him directly observing the main diplomatic players in all manner of geopolitics, from Iran to Libya, Darfur to Kosovo. He reported from Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, earning a National Newspaper Award nomination in breaking news. He chronicled the saga of Canada’s failed efforts to obtain a seat on the UN Security Council.

He was especially passionate about his reporting on the 1994 Rwandan genocide, and the central role of Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian leader of United Nations peacekeeping troops who warned his superiors in vain of the imminent violence. Edwards’ exclusive report in 1999 told Dallaire’s side publicly for the first time, and how he “lambasted the world organization in a secret report soon after his return from Africa, blaming it for the deaths of ‘hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings.’”

Edwards also had a correspondent’s eye for the human interest story, such as this corker of a story from the early days of the National Post: “Bill Barnes has been dead for three years, but yesterday his wife received a letter from him that was sent nearly 57 years ago while he was serving in the Second World War.”

Steven Michael Edwards was born in Portsmouth, England, on Jan. 20, 1957, the first of four children to Isabel and the late Reg Edwards, both in the Royal Navy. The family lived in Birmingham, where knowing about the news was a household way of life, said his sister Elizabeth Edwards.

His mother Isabel said Steven was a very “particular” child, and Elizabeth recalls his ability to win arguments with factual details, especially about history. A grandmother felt he would be prime minister one day, and Isabel said he would have been in politics had he not found journalism.

He had luckily stayed home to study the night in 1974 when Irish republican terrorists bombed pubs in central Birmingham, but some of his friends were there, including one who lost his legs. The impact on Edwards’ life ran deep, inspiring his professional efforts to learn and share the truth about even the worst things, his sister Elizabeth said.

The next year the family moved to Winnipeg, where Edwards worked on rural electricity lines before finding reporting work in Kamloops, B.C., and then Winnipeg. He would later write about trying to bring a British tabloid sensibility to his work, and to “emulate their vivacity.” One gambit saw him obtain Winnipeg’s first Cabbage Patch Kid doll when they were all the rage but understocked, which the Winnipeg Sun ran a contest to give away.

After only a year at the American celebrity scandal sheet Star Magazine in 1992, Edwards was on the team that chased down rumours of sexual indiscretions by the former Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, then a potential Democratic presidential candidate. Years later, as a freelancer, he wrote the story of that story. The cover of the May 1998 edition of Saturday Night magazine has a cartoon of a nude Bill Clinton covering his naughty bits and the display text: “I exposed Clinton. Before Monica, Paula, and all the rest, there were only rumours, and me, a humble tabloid reporter on the scent of a woman named Gennifer Flowers.”

Even with such success, he left journalism for a while, learned French in Paris and Spanish in Ecuador, and moved back to Canada to study economics and politics at Université Laval. On the strength of his Clinton piece, he joined the National Post for its 1998 launch, working solidly until 2011, producing thousands of stories.

The year following his cancer diagnosis, in May 2011, he was back on site at Ground Zero to see One World Trade Center reach its completed height of 1,776 feet, representing the founding year of the republic.

After journalism, Edwards taught English as a second language to mostly newcomer high school students in New York. He also worked as an advocate for kidney cancer organizations. By 2017, his disease had metastasized, and he tried several treatments based on many medical opinions.

His friend and colleague Ben Evansky, a senior international editor at Fox News Digital, said he fought his cancer “like the true investigative journalist that he was. Always trying to be one step ahead, reading the literature on the possibilities for a cure while also talking to doctors and medical experts about a path forward.”

Edwards leaves three daughters: Alejandra, 24; Inga, 21; Lisia, 18.

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