Editor oversaw Pulitzerwinning Watergate coverage

Harry Rosenfeld, who injected his brash brand of journalism into the Washington Post, where he oversaw the two reporters who transformed a local crime story into the national Watergate corruption scandal that toppled the Nixon administration, died July 16 at his home in upstate Slingerlands, N.Y. He was 91.

The cause was complications of COVID19, his daughter Amy Rosenfeld Kaufman said.

As the Post’s assistant managing editor for metropolitan news, Rosenfeld directly supervised Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they mined secretive sources in their followthemoney unraveling of the Watergate breakin, which President Richard Nixon’s press secretary had described as a “thirdrate burglary attempt” and which led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974.

At one point, Rosenfeld shielded the two reporters from attempts to remove them from the story. The Post’s editor,

Benjamin Bradlee, had sought to replace “Woodstein,” as the duo were nicknamed, with Post veterans steeped in politics. As quoted in Woodward and Bernstein’s book “All the President’s Men” — a line delivered by Jack Warden playing Rosenfeld in the 1976 movie version — Rosenfeld defended the reporters by asking Bradlee a rhetorical question.

“They’re hungry,” he said. “You remember when you were hungry?”

While the Post’s publisher, Katharine Graham, called him “a real hero of Watergate for us,” he left the paper in 1978 after he was reassigned to edit the Outlook and Book World sections, which he considered a downgrade.

Rosenfeld’s jobs at the Post were sandwiched between 18 years at the Herald Tribune in New York and, beginning in 1988, a long tenure as editor of the Hearst Corp.’s two newspapers in Albany, the Times Union and the afternoon Knickerbocker News. Hearst now owns The Chronicle.

Hirsch (Harry) Moritz Rosenfeld was born Aug. 12, 1929, in Berlin to Jewish parents from Poland. His father was a furrier. Although the family applied to emigrate to the United States as early as 1934, its application was not approved until March 1939, after the Nazis had ransacked Jewishowned businesses and torched the family’s synagogue.

In a career that he said had been influenced by his childhood under the Nazis, he “discerned a theme underpinning much of my journalistic labors: holding to account the accountable, the more powerful the better.”

Associated Press 1976 Harry Rosenfeld (right) attends the 1976 premiere of “All the President’s Men” in Washington, D.C., with Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee (left) and actor Dustin Hoffman.