[1] McElhiney grew up in West Virginia, New York City and the Mount Washington neighborhood of Baltimore.
Joining the Foreign Service in 1946, he rose to be deputy chief of mission in the Sudan.
He served as U.S. ambassador to Ghana from 1968 to 1971, and then as Inspector-General of the Foreign Service until retirement in 1974.
He married the former Helen Lawrence Lippincott, of Baltimore, Maryland, on September 7, 1946.
McElhiney died January 17, 1998, aged 78, at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.