Meg Greenfield; Pulitzer Prize-Winning Editor

Meg Greenfield, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editor and writer who ran the editorial page at the Washington Post for 20 years, died Thursday of lung cancer. She was 68.

Greenfield had also been a columnist for Newsweek magazine since 1974.

White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said President Clinton was saddened to learn of her death. “She was one of the most eloquent, clear and powerful voices in this town for a long time,” Lockhart said.

Greenfield voiced opinions on the great turmoils and scandals of her time, up through Clinton’s impeachment. She said she tried not to lose sight of the humanity of the fallen.

“I am, to this day, even given the uncountable number of scuzzy public betrayals and lies, much more comfortable when a scoundrel eludes us or we miss the scent, than when we are pursuing someone who shouldn’t be charged,” she wrote in a Newsweek column in November.

Indeed, the Post, for all its groundbreaking coverage of Watergate, editorialized in favor of President Richard M. Nixon’s pardon--”to the disgust of most of our friends,” she said. At that time, Greenfield was deputy editor of the editorial page, a position she held from 1970 to 1979. She became editor of the page in 1979.

Born in Seattle, Greenfield joined the Post in 1968 as an editorial writer after 11 years with Reporter magazine.

She won a 1978 Pulitzer for writing editorials, including some in defense of outgoing President Gerald R. Ford, who had been criticized in earlier Post commentary.

“How odd that so few of us have been willing to acknowledge that decency in the White House can be regarded as a luxury or a bonus or a fringe benefit only at our peril,” she wrote in one of them.

“It is central. And its absence was central to the sorrows this country endured in the years preceding Mr. Ford’s presidency.”