Watergate editor;

Watergate editor;

Born: August 26, 1921; Died: October 21, 2014.

Ben Bradlee, who has died aged 93, became internationally famous as the executive editor of the Washington Post who oversaw the publication of the stories exposing the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

All The President's Men, the account of the affair published by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the reporters on the story, offered a short description. "There was an alluring combination of aristocrat and commoner about Bradlee: Boston Brahmin, Harvard, the World War II Navy, press-attaché at the US Embassy in Paris, police-beat reporter, news-magazine political reporter and Washington bureau chief of Newsweek."

Even this assessment, playing up the glamour of the heyday of print journalism, when lunches were extravagant and scoops toppled governments, omitted two points of more than passing interest; Bradlee was a close personal friend of John F Kennedy, and a first rate newspaperman.

To compound the legend, in the film of Woodward and Bernstein's book, in which the pair were played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, the role of Bradlee was taken by Jason Robards (who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, to boot). Some argued that the real Bradlee was more handsome, and more like a movie star.

Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee was born into a prominent Boston family on August 26, 1921. His father, an investment banker, had previously been a star American football player. His mother's relatives included the Crowninshields, one of Boston's "Brahmin" dynasties, wealthy New York lawyers, and European noble and royal houses. There were journalistic connections, too; Bradlee's great-uncle Frank Crowninshield was founder-editor of the magazine Vanity Fair, published by his friend Condé Nast.

Though the family was well-to-do and Bradlee had a cultured, upper-middle class upbringing, their finances were badly hit by the stock market crash of 1929, and his father took several jobs to make ends meet during the Depression. But Bradlee attended Dexter and then St Mark's School and proceeded to Harvard. He had a bout of polio in his teens, but recovered well enough to play varsity baseball.

After graduating, in Greek and English, he immediately signed up for the US Navy (he had been a reservist as an undergraduate) in 1942, and married Jean Saltonstoll, with whom he had a son, Ben.

He served in Naval Intelligence as a communications and code officer on a number of destroyers, taking part in every landing in the Solomon Islands and Philippines campaigns. As he later replied to a reader who had questioned what he had done in the war (addressing him as "Dear Ass****"), he had acquired 10 battle ribbons by the cessation of hostilities.

After the war he bought and worked as a reporter for the New Hampshire Sunday News, which he sold in 1948 to join The Washington Post. In 1951, partly through his friendship with the paper's publisher Philip Graham, he became a press attaché in the US Embassy in Paris, where he worked in the propaganda department until 1953.

He stayed in France, however, working as the correspondent for Newsweek, though it is probable that he also continued to operate on the fringes of the intelligence community; one of his colleagues at the embassy was James Angleton, who soon afterwards became head of counter-intelligence for the CIA. His time in Paris also saw the collapse of his first marriage, and his second, to Antoinette Pinchot, with whom he had a son and a daughter.

Bradlee returned to America as Washington Bureau chief of Newsweek, and became friendly with the then Senator John F Kennedy, about whom he later published a book, Conversations with Kennedy (1975). He was also instrumental in brokering the magazine's sale to The Washington Post. He became its managing editor in 1965.

Though he was never less than a highly capable reporter, some - including Woodward and Bernstein - felt that Bradlee's closeness to the Kennedy clan compromised his coverage of the scandals, political misjudgments and corruption around the White House in the "Camelot" era. It was not a charge anyone could have made when it came to his readiness to examine failings in the administrations of Lyndon B Johnson or Nixon.

Not long after becoming executive editor of the Post in 1968, Bradlee pressed hard for the release of papers relating to American conduct during the Vietnam War. His irritation that the New York Times, which was also pressuring the government over the story, beat the Post to the punch when the Pentagon Papers were released in 1971, may have contributed to his determination and resilience in the Watergate investigation.

Woodward and Bernstein's book made it clear that, though he would shoot down speculative articles, he was increasingly convinced the Nixon administration had been involved in the Watergate break-in and engineered a cover-up. He defended and encouraged his reporters and was - besides them - the only person to have known the identity of their informant Deep Throat, revealed many years later to have been Mark Felt. He put up with late-night phone calls and visits to his house by the reporters even after initially rating their story that the President had secretly bugged the White House as "B plus".

When it ran, and was presented to the Senate committee, leading to Nixon's protestation that "I am not a crook", and his subsequent resignation, Bradlee reconsidered. "Okay," he said. "It's more than a B plus."

Bradlee - established by the story as a legendary figure in journalism - continued as editor at The Washington Post until his retirement in 1991, but remained Vice-President at Large until his death.

There were numerous other scoops under his watch, including, embarrassingly, a fabricated story about an eight-year-old heroin addict, but nothing approached the impact of the Watergate reporting. He published an autobiography, A Good Life, in 1995, lectured on journalism and served on the boards of several charitable bodies.

To the last, Bradlee - once described as looking like an international jewel thief - doggedly pursued stories that interested him, walked away from conversations that didn't, affected boldly striped shirts, swore like the sailor he had been, and incurred the devotion of his reporters. In 2013, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

His third marriage, in 1978, was to the Post reporter Sally Quinn, with whom he had a son.