Deceased Date Unknown
View alumni profile (log in required)
Read obituary
In Memory
We lost Ed Harriman in April of this year from pneumonia following liver surgery.
After leaving Amherst—where he was in Psi U—Ed became an investigative journalist and filmmaker.
Ed grew up in Rochester and Binghamton, N.Y., where, according to his son Lucian, he “trapped muskrats, photographed snow crystals and detonated cherry bombs.” He came to us from St. Paul Academy in Minnesota. He moved to London on graduation from Amherst to avoid the draft and earn advanced degrees at the London School of Economics. He campaigned against the Vietnam War and worked as a laborer, digging a line for the London Underground.
Ed began his journalism career with an article in the Manchester Guardian on oil drilling in Aberdeen, Scotland, that set the tone for his life’s work focusing on family issues, poverty, conflict, science and pollution. Granada Television provided an arena for much of this activism and, in 1987, one of Ed’s films won the gold medal for TV drama at the New York Film and Television Festival. In l992, it was Ed who traveled to Serb-held territory in Bosnia to do the first television coverage of the genocide against Muslims. The legendary British author Graham Greene described Ed’s book Hack: Home Truths about Foreign News (1987) as “masterly.”
Ed married Barbara Jacobs in 1986. She survives him along with sons Oliver, Andre and Lucian and grandson Leon. Along with his family, and people around the world whose causes Ed took up, it is clearly not only we, Ed’s classmates, who regret his passing.
Paul Ehrmann ’65