Robert LeRoy Knudsen; Major White House Photographer

Robert LeRoy Knudsen, 61, whose photographs chronicled nearly three decades of major White House events. Knudsen joined the White House photographers’ staff in 1946, being detailed there from the Navy secretary’s office after his graduation from the Naval Photographic School in Pensacola, Fla. Knudsen’s photographs include the 1948 and 1952 elections of Presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, the historic 1959 meeting between Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev, the autopsy of slain President John F. Kennedy in 1963, President Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 trips to China and the Soviet Union, Nixon’s 1974 farewell in the wake of the Watergate-scandal and the White House weddings of three first daughters, Lynda and Luci Johnson and Tricia Nixon. His pictures had appeared in several prominent magazines, including Life, Look and National Geographic. Several of his Washington scenes were imprinted on the U.S. Postal Service’s 1969 beautification stamps. In Washington on Jan. 27 of a heart attack.