Instrumental newspaper editor of Watergate coverage

Harry Rosenfeld, who barely escaped the Holocaust as a child in Nazi

Germany and who became a key Washington Post editor during its Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Watergate break-in and resulting scandal, died July 16 at his home in Slingerlands,

New York.

He was 91.

The cause was complications from COVID-19, said his daughter Amy Rosenfeld Kaufman.

A burly, brusque and demanding editor, Rosenfeld became fascinated by world affairs and journalism as a schoolboy in New York. He saw in journalism a way to keep oppressive forces at bay, “holding to account the accountable, the more powerful the better,” he wrote in his 2013 memoir, “From Kristallnacht to Watergate.”

Rosenfeld worked in the newspaper industry for 50 years, beginning at the now-defunct New York Herald Tribune, then at

The Post and finally as the top editor of two newspapers in Albany, New York.

His most enduring legacy stemmed from his years as The Post’s assistant managing editor for metropolitan news. In that role, he was the direct supervisor of two young reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, as they doggedly reported on the unfolding Watergate saga that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation in August 1974.

Rosenfeld was a colorful and energetic figure at The Post. “He was like a football coach,” Woodward and Bernstein wrote in their 1974 book about Watergate, “All the President’s Men.” “He prods his players, pleading, yelling, cajoling.”

Reflecting on his own demeanor, Rosenfeld acknowledged in his memoir that he could be “a pain in the ass” to work with. He clashed with executive editor Benjamin Bradlee over Bradlee’s “compulsion to see the world in personal terms,” Rosenfeld wrote, and over what he saw as Bradlee’s privileged upbringing and aura of elitism.

In the early days of the scandal, Rosenfeld passionately defended Woodward and Bernstein when Bradlee wanted to replace them on the Watergate story with more seasoned staff writers.

“They’re hungry,” he is said to have told Bradlee. “You remember when you were hungry?”

The line, snarled by Jack Warden as Rosenfeld, became one of the most memorable in the acclaimed 1976 film version of “All the President’s Men,” which featured

Jason Robards as Bradlee, Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein.

In 1973, The Post won a Pulitzer for public service for its Watergate coverage. Rosenfeld was rewarded with a promotion to assistant managing editor in charge of The Post’s starstudded national staff. He lasted only a few months in that job.

Besides his wife, Anne, survivors include three daughters, Susan Rosenfeld Wachter of Acton, Massachusetts, Amy Rosenfeld Kaufman of Highland Park, Illinois, and Stefanie Rosenfeld of New York City; and seven grandchildren.