Mike Shuster, longtime NPR foreign correspondent, dies at 76

Mike Shuster’s long career took him all over the world, starting in the early 1970s in Africa. He joined NPR in 1980 and filed more than 3,000 stories over the next three decades.

NPR

Editor’s note: Daniel C. Sneider, a lecturer of East Asian studies at Stanford University, former foreign correspondent and friend of Mike Shuster’s, was the Moscow bureau chief for the Christian Science Monitor in the 1990s when Shuster was based there. He offers this appreciation:

Mike Shuster, an award-winning foreign and diplomatic correspondent for National Public Radio, died Monday. During more than three decades as a reporter and an editor, his work spanned the world and made him an eyewitness to some of the most momentous events in modern history.

Shuster died at home in Southern California of complications from Parkinson’s disease, his family said. He was 76.

Shuster had a long career, beginning in the early 1970s in Africa, where he spent five months covering the Angolan civil war and traveled throughout the region, working then for Liberation News Service.

He joined NPR in 1980 and filed more than 3,000 stories, with coverage spanning both Gulf wars, conflicts in Israel and Palestine, the Bosnian civil war and the war in Kosovo, and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

As a senior diplomatic correspondent, Shuster covered issues of nuclear nonproliferation and weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and the Pacific Rim. He notably traveled frequently to Iran — at least seven times after 2004 — where he was one of the few American correspondents to spend extended time.

Shuster began his career with NPR in New York. In a now famous case, his reporting on the trial of notorious mobster John Gotti led to a…