Ben Bradlee, 93, legendary Washington Post editor

WASHINGTON - Benjamin Bradlee, 93, who presided over the Washington Post newsroom for 26 years and guided the Post's transformation into one of the world's leading newspapers, died Tuesday at his home in Washington. He had been in hospice care, suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

From the moment he took over the Post newsroom in 1965, Mr. Bradlee sought to create a newspaper that would go far beyond the traditional model of a metropolitan daily.

He achieved that goal by combining compelling news stories based on aggressive reporting with engaging feature pieces of a kind previously associated with the best magazines. His charm and gift for leadership helped him hire and inspire a talented staff and eventually made the Harvard graduate the most celebrated newspaper editor of his era.

The most compelling story of Mr. Bradlee's tenure, almost certainly the one of greatest consequence, was Watergate, a political scandal touched off by the Washington Post's reporting that ended in the only resignation of a president in U.S. history.

But Mr. Bradlee's most important decision, made with Katharine Graham, the Post's publisher, may have been to print stories based on the Pentagon Papers, a secret Pentagon history of the Vietnam War. The Nixon administration went to court to try to quash those stories, but the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision of the New York Times and the Post to publish them.

The Washington Post's circulation nearly doubled while Mr. Bradlee was in charge of the newsroom - first as managing editor and then as executive editor - as did the size of its newsroom staff. And he gave the paper ambition.

Mr. Bradlee stationed correspondents around the globe, opened bureaus across the Washington region and from coast to coast in the United States, and he created sections and features - most notably Style, one of his proudest inventions - that were widely copied by others.

During his tenure, a paper that had previously won just four Pulitzer Prizes, only one of which was for reporting, won 17 more, including the Public Service award for the Watergate coverage.

"Ben Bradlee was the best American newspaper editor of his time and had the greatest impact on his newspaper of any modern editor," said Donald Graham, who succeeded his mother as publisher of the Washington Post and Mr. Bradlee's boss.

In the early 1970s, Mr. Bradley fell in love with Sally Quinn, a vivacious, high-energy soul mate, 20 years his junior, whom he had hired as a party reporter for the Style section. Quinn, his third wife, survives him.

President Obama saluted Mr. Bradlee's role at the Post when giving him the country's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 2013: "He transformed that newspaper into one of the finest in the world."

Mr. Bradlee's patrician good looks, gravelly voice, profane vocabulary and zest for journalism and for life all contributed to the charismatic personality that dominated and shaped the Post.

Modern American newspaper editors rarely achieve much fame, but Mr. Bradlee became a celebrity and loved the status.

Jason Robards played him in the movie All The President's Men, based on Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's book about Watergate. Two books Mr. Bradlee wrote - Conversations With Kennedy and his memoir, A Good Life - were bestsellers. His craggy face became a familiar sight on television. In public and in private, he always played his part with theatrical enthusiasm.

"He was a presence, a force," Woodward recalled of Mr. Bradlee's role during the Watergate period, 1972 to 1974. "And he was a doubter, a skeptic -'Do we have it yet? Have we proved it?' "

Decades later, Woodward remembered the words that he most hated to hear from Mr. Bradlee then: "You don't have it yet, kid."