In a charmed life of newspapering, Ben Bradlee seemed always to be in just the right place.

The raspy-voiced, hard-charging editor who invigorated The Washington Post got an early break as a journalist thanks to his friendship with one president, John F Kennedy, and became famous for his role in toppling another, Richard Nixon, in the Watergate scandal.

Bradlee died at home on Tuesday of natural causes, the Post reported. He was 93.

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Ever the newsman and ever one to challenge conventional wisdom, Bradlee imagined his own obituary years earlier and found something within it to quibble over.

“Bet me that when I die,” he wrote in his 1995 memoir, “there will be something in my obit about how The Washington Post ‘won’ 18 Pulitzer prizes while Bradlee was editor.”

That, he said, would be bunk. The prizes are overrated and suspect, he wrote, and it’s largely reporters, not newspapers or their editors, who deserve the credit.

Yet the Post‘s Pulitzer-winning coverage of the Watergate scandal is an inextricable part of Bradlee’s legacy, and one measure of his success in transforming the Post from a sleepy hometown paper into a great national one.

As managing editor first and later as executive editor, Bradlee engineered the Post’s reinvention, bringing in a cast of talented journalists and setting editorial standards that brought the paper new respect.

President Obama on Ben Bradlee: “A true newspaperman” http://t.co/DyXuoDQDPs pic.twitter.com/yjNCp7QcSY

— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 22, 2014

When Bradlee retired from the Post newsroom in 1991, then-publisher Donald Graham said: “Thank God the person making decisions in the last 26 years showed us how to do it with verve and with guts and with zest for the big story and for the little story.”

With Watergate, Bradlee himself became a big part of a story that epitomised the glory days of newspapers – back before websites, cable chatter and bloggers drove the talk of the day.

Actor Jason Robards turned Bradlee into a box-office hit with his Oscar-winning portrayal of the editor in the 1976 movie All the President’s Men, which recounted the unravelling of Watergate under the reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Bradlee’s marriage in 1978 to Post star reporter Sally Quinn (his third) added more glamour to his image.

He was one of the few to know the identity early on of the celebrated Watergate source dubbed Deep Throat, revealed publicly in 2005 to be FBI official W Mark Felt.

“I think he did a great service to society,” Bradlee said after Felt’s role finally came out. In enduring partnership with publisher Katharine Graham, Bradlee took a stand for press freedom in 1971 by going forward with publication of the Pentagon Papers, a secret study of the Vietnam War broken by The New York Times, against the advice of lawyers and the entreaties of top government officials.

The ensuing legal battle went all the way to the Supreme Court, which upheld the right of newspapers to publish the leaked papers.

The Post‘s decision to publish helped pave the way for all of the smaller, difficult ones that collectively produced the newspaper’s groundbreaking coverage of Watergate.

I’ll take Remnick on Ben Bradlee, who died today at 93. http://t.co/qZZbFIw3If

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) October 22, 2014

Bradlee “set the ground rules – pushing, pushing, pushing, not so subtly asking everyone to take one more step, relentlessly pursuing the story in the face of persistent accusations against us and a concerted campaign of intimidation,” Katharine Graham recalled in her memoir.

In November 2013, at age 92, Bradlee stood in the White House East Room and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, who saluted Bradlee for bringing an intensity and dedication to journalism that served as a reminder that “our freedom as a nation rests on our freedom of the press”.

Quinn disclosed in September 2014 that her husband had suffered from Alzheimer’s disease for several years. She described him as happy to be fussed over and content even in decline.

“Ben has never been depressed a day in his life,” Quinn said in a C-SPAN interview.

Impatient, gruff, profane, Bradlee was all that. But also exuberant, innovative, charismatic.