Howard Simons Dies; Washington Post Managing Editor in Watergate Period

Howard Simons, managing editor of the Washington Post when the newspaper won the Pulitzer Prize for unraveling the Watergate scandal, died Tuesday of pancreatic cancer, Harvard University officials said. He was 60.

Simons, curator of the Nieman Foundation for journalists at Harvard for the last five years, died at a hospice in Jacksonville Beach, Fla., where he had gone last month after taking medical leave from Harvard.

Simons was a key player in the Post’s series of articles following the 1972 break-in at Democratic national headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, which led to President Richard M. Nixon’s Aug. 9, 1974, resignation in disgrace.

Articles Won Prize

The articles, by reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, won the newspaper the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished public service.

Ben Bradlee, executive editor of the Washington Post who oversaw the paper’s Watergate coverage, said after learning of Simons’ death:

“Howard Simons played a terribly important part in this newspaper for 15 years. He was a close personal friend, to a point where we could finish each other’s sentences.”

Shelby Coffey III, editor of the Los Angeles Times and a former colleague of Simons at the Post, said: “Howard Simons had an unmatched talent for spotting and encouraging spirited young journalists. He was a superb news editor but he never let his responsibilities dampen his ebullient wit or his capacity for wise friendship.

“Both at the Post and at the Nieman, he was a leader who helped people do better than they ever imagined they could.”

Simons was a science writer and editor before joining the Post in 1961, and served as managing editor from 1971 to 1984.

Since 1984, he had been curator of the Nieman Foundation, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last month by bringing back about 350 former Nieman fellows, each of whom had studied for a year at Harvard.

Simons, who himself was a Nieman fellow in 1958, appeared at the celebration in obviously frail condition, but managed to joke about his illness.

When he told of his plans to move to Florida, to be near his wife’s family, he said he was going there to lie in the sun “with no worries at all about skin cancer.”

“I have no regrets, no apologies. I am completely at ease with myself,” he added.

Simons, born in Albany, N.Y., the son of a poor Polish cobbler, graduated from Union College in Schnectady, N.Y., and earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1952.

From 1954 to 1959, he was a writer and editor with the Science Service in Washington and later was the American correspondent for the New Scientist, a London-based publication. He received science writing awards from Westinghouse in 1962 and 1964.

Wrote Several Books

Simons was author of several books, including two co-authored by former Cabinet secretary Joseph Califano, “The Media and the Law” (1976) and “Business and Media” (1979). He also wrote, with Haynes Johnson, a political commentator for the Post, “The Landing,” a novel about Nazi commandoes on a secret mission in Washington during World War II.

Simons’ body will be cremated and no services are planned, said Harvard spokesman Peter Costa.