Adept at gaining the confidence of every kind of source ranging from spymasters to sheikhs, Dickey has been praised for a career that took him through Central America, the Middle East and Europe.

Catherine Nicholson, European Affairs Editor at France 24, tweeted: “I’m shocked to learn of the sudden death of this lovely man- an excellent, thoughtful journalist who was a much-admired regular contributor on @France24.”

NBC News’ Bill Neely tweeted: “Lovely man, @NBCNews analyst, always full of fabulous insights. And not just about French life and politics.” Meanwhile NBC’s Richard Engel tweeted: “Chris was a legend, a true gentleman and an idol of mine.”

In a heartfelt obituary in the latest publication he worked for, journalist Barbie Latza Nadeau wrote in the Daily Beast: “He was truly the best reporter I ever met—friends to spymasters and sheikhs, cardinals and cops, insurgents and intellectuals—and all he ever wanted was for anyone he mentored to try to beat him to a source.”

Born in Nashville in 1951, he studied documentary filmmaking at Boston University after which he joined The Washington Post, where he went from being an editor in the books section, to a foreign correspondent in 1980.

Embedded with a U.S.-backed guerilla unit in Nicaragua in the early 1980s in a conflict he covered for The Post, he narrowly escaped death and his experiences formed the basis of his book in 1986, With the Contras: A Reporter in the Wilds of Nicaragua.

Between 1986 and 2013, he worked for Newsweek and his work also appeared in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and The New Republic.

He penned books that drew on both the broad canvas of global events and the minutiae of domestic life.

Expats was about westerners living in the Muslim world, Saving the City, about the New York City Police Department’s counter-terrorism unit, but he was equally lauded for his 1998 family memoir Summer of Deliverance, the title a nod to the novel by his poet father James Dickey, Deliverance, which was made into an Oscar-winning film.

The book drew praise for its unsparing depiction of a dysfunctional family, and the corrosive impact of fame and alcohol that claimed his father’s life a year before its publication. Although estranged for two decades, there was a reconciliation between father and son before James Dickey’s death in 1997.

As world news editor for The Daily Beast at the time of his death on Thursday in Paris where he had been based for three decades, he was praised by MSNBC anchor Brian Williams as “the real deal” and “a journalist in full, one of those great and curious storytellers who seem to know just about everything and everyone.”