Editor at The New York Times, Boston Globe

Robert H. Phelps had a distinguished career at The Boston Globe, shaping the modern paper, overseeing the coverage in major series that won Pulitzer Prizes, and serving as the newspaper’s executive editor for 11 years.

But he may be remembered as much for one story that he missed. In 1972, as news editor in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, he inadvertently let the Watergate scandal slip through his fingers, allowing it to become The Washington Post’s enviable scoop.

Mr. Phelps died at 97 on Wednesday in Lincoln, Mass. Thomas Mulvoy Jr., his friend and former Globe colleague, said the cause was complications of colorectal cancer.

Under Mr. Phelps’ leadership, The Globe won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1975 for its coverage of Boston’s tumultuous school desegregation dispute. He headed the Spotlight Team that won a Pulitzer in 1980 for Local Investigative Reporting, for a series on abuses by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.

“He played a highly significant role in the formation of the contemporary Boston Globe,” said Matthew Storin, one of his successors as executive editor.

Mr. Phelps revealed his part in the Watergate episode in 2009, in a memoir, “God and the Editor: My Search for Meaning at The New York Times.”

He recalled in the book that on Aug. 16, 1972, a 31year-old Times reporter, Robert M. Smith, carrying a notebook and a Dictaphone, rushed into Mr. Phelps’ Washington bureau office to deliver an account of a startling conversation he had just had over lunch at San Souci with L. Patrick Gray III, the new acting director of the FBI.

Mr. Smith had asked Gray about the break-in, two months earlier, at the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington, and Gray, for the first time, implicated Donald Segretti, a covert Nixon campaign operative.

He also intimated that the wrongdoing went further. As Mr. Smith wrote in 2009 in The American Journalism Review:

“'The attorney general?’ I asked,” referring to John N. Mitchell, who had left the Justice Department to run the president’s re-election campaign. “He nodded.” “'The president?’ I asked.” “He looked me in the eye without denial — or any comment. In other words, confirmation.”

In his memoir, Mr. Phelps wrote, “There we were, with leads from the acting director of the FBI that a man named Mr. Segretti, former attorney general Mitchell, and the White House, perhaps Nixon himself, were involved in Watergate, long before the Post’s revelations.”

He added: “We never developed Gray’s tips into publishable stories. Why we failed is a mystery to me.”

Though the Times was slow to compete with the Post in its Watergate coverage, it did rally to break subsequent stories, a point Mr. Phelps nevertired of making.

Robert Howard Phelps was born on July 19, 1919, in Erie, Pa., the son of Harry Phelps, a union leader, and the former Ruth Fox.

Mr. Phelps began his journalism career at The Ambridge Daily Citizen in Pennsylvania in 1941 and later worked for United Press.