Don Schanche; Times Foreign Correspondent

Don Schanche, a retired Los Angeles Times foreign correspondent who was one of the most widely traveled and highly regarded journalists of his time, died Thursday of cancer at his home in Key Biscayne, Fla. He was 68.

Schanche came to The Times in 1976 from a distinguished career as a magazine editor and writer.

As a reporter for Life magazine and later as an editor and writer for the Saturday Evening Post and Holiday, and as a free-lance writer, Schanche crisscrossed the globe, diving for treasure in Bermuda, trekking with Laotian hill tribesmen, sailing on the first underwater crossing of the Atlantic aboard the U.S. nuclear submarine Skate.

While at Life, Schanche was ghost writer for the Mercury astronauts who charted America’s path into space. As a free-lance writer, he was Saul Kapel MD, author of a syndicated newspaper column on child psychology.

In the last 15 years of his professional life, Schanche served as Times bureau chief in Cairo, Rome and Miami, from which he covered, respectively, the Middle East, the Mediterranean and the Caribbean.

Schanche chronicled turmoil in Iran--the fall of the Shah and the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini--the civil war in Lebanon, war between factions of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

Schanche, whose first foreign post was as a 25-year-old Korean War correspondent for the International News Service, was an inveterate--and irreverent--student of human nature: “I never met a truly evil man who was not also a charming son of a bitch,” he observed recently.

From Rome, he covered the attempted 1981 assassination of Pope John Paul II, and reported from 66 countries on 29 trips with the Pope across 250,000 miles.

To colleagues, Schanche’s insouciance--he was unflappable in the face of destruction, death and deadline--was one of his most remarkable traits. He was legendary for his aplomb under fire. Breakfasting by the pool at Beirut’s Hotel Commodore after a mortar attack one morning, Schanche politely complained to the waiter that there was shrapnel in his eggs.

In 1991, Schanche, who had been an inveterate smoker, was diagnosed with lung cancer.

In November, 1993, he was found to have inoperable pancreatic cancer, a terminal illness he endured with grace. One recent day in Miami, while a particularly colorless specialist earnestly poked him, Schanche asked, “Tell me, doctor, will I keep my sense of humor until the end?” He did.

Donald Arthur Schanche was born in New Brunswick, N.J., of Norwegian stock on May 26, 1926. He grew up outside Atlanta where, as a seventh-grader, he met Marybelle Waddington. They were married on Jan. 7, 1952, in Tokyo.

Schanche attended Georgia Tech and the University of Miami, and graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in journalism in 1950. During World War II he served in the U.S. Navy as radioman with a P.T. boat squadron in the Philippines.

His six books include “Mister Pop: The Adventures of a Peaceful Man in a Small War,” about an Indiana farmer who went to Laos as an agricultural adviser and found himself drawn into conflict, and “The Panther Paradox: A Liberal’s Dilemma,” about Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers.

Schanche is survived by his wife; a son, Donald A. Jr., city editor of the Union-Recorder in Milledgeville, Ga; two daughters, Didrikke (Didi) Schanche-Shields, an Associated Press correspondent in Nicosia, Cyprus, and Anne Schanche Ferro, an associate administrator of the Motor Vehicle Administration of Maryland; a brother, Norman Dean Schanche, a retired Army colonel, of Severna Park, Md., and six grandchildren.