Edward S. McFadden serves as the Senior Vice President of Communications for the American Financial Services Association (AFSA), where he is the senior communications leader for one of the oldest and largest financial services trade associations in the United States.
Prior to this, Mr. McFadden was named as Secretary for Communications by Cardinal Donald Wuerl, Archbishop of Washington, in 2016. Mr. McFadden led the Archdiocese’s Secretariat for Communications, which includes multiple specialty focus areas, including media and public relations, digital media, multimedia production, and Carroll Publishing, which publishes the Catholic Standard and El Pregonero newspapers. Mr. McFadden also directed the Archdiocese’s public policy office, including the District of Columbia Catholic Conference. Before that, Mr. McFadden served as Verizon Communications’ Vice President for Global Public Policy Communications, where his duties included media relations for public policy, U.S. federal and regulatory affairs, national security issues, and other legal matters. Prior to that position, he served as one of Verizon’s first communications executives focused on new media and digital strategy and how those tools can be used to influence corporate and public policy, while also serving as a speechwriter to the company’s senior leadership.
Mr. McFadden joined Verizon in early 2005 after four years as senior advisor and chief speechwriter to Attorney General John Ashcroft, as well as an occasional speechwriter for the Executive Office of the President of the United States. While at the Department of Justice, he also served as a member of the President’s Task Force on Intellectual Property, and was the author of the Department of Justice’s 2004 report on the task force’s efforts.
Prior to his stint in the Bush administration, Mr. McFadden had a successful career in journalism – first, as an editorial writer and Deputy Features Editor for The Wall Street Journal/Europe, where he covered the collapse of the Soviet Union, from the free elections in Poland and Czechoslovakia to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of Germany. In that time, he won awards from the Overseas Press Club, as well as regional journalism awards in Europe. He joined Reader’s Digest in 1992, where he served as a senior editor in New York and Washington, DC, while also overseeing the company’s movie and TV development projects.
Over the years he has also worked on a number of book projects as a ghostwriter and editor, including The History of Wine in America, and a history of the technology/business battle between Cisco and Nortel in the early days of the Internet.
He is a graduate of the University of San Francisco (BA, Government), as well as USF’s St. Ignatius Institute, a Great Books program, and Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. He serves on the Board of Directors of the American Veterans Center (a 501(c)(3) organization), the corporate Board of Radio America, Aquinas College, and the Board of the privately held web application startup Voter Gravity. He was a Young Leader in 2002, and he has served on the American-German Young Leader Conferences’ Steering Committee since 2003 and as its Chairman since 2009. Mr. McFadden, his wife, Beth, and their three children reside in Arlington, Virginia.