Formar post editor of Washington  Ben Bradlee has died at the age 93.

He was the hard-driving editor that reigned over the Washington Post newsroom with the style of a well-dressed swashbuckler and the profane vocabulary of dockworker as the newspaper helped topple President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal.

Bradlee's death at his Washington home of natural causes was announced by the Post, which reported late last month that its former editor had begun hospice care after suffering from Alzheimer's disease for the past several years.

As executive editor from 1968 until 1991, Bradlee became one of the most important figures in Washington, as well as part of journalism history, while transforming the Post from a staid morning daily into one of the most dynamic and respected publications in the United States.

Bradlee's work guiding young reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they traced a 1972 burglary at Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate office and apartment complex back to the Nixon White House has been celebrated from journalism schools to Hollywood.

The Post won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the scandal, which forced Nixon to quit under threat of impeachment in August 1974.

The Post's coverage - along with the book and movie about it, "All the President's Men" - inspired a generation of investigative reporters.

"I think the great lesson of Watergate was probably the stick-tuitiveness of the Post," Bradlee once told the American Journalism Review. "The fact that we hunkered down and backed the right horse. I think that was a wonderful lesson for publishers, too." 

Upsetting presidents was a Bradlee stock-in-trade. In 1972 the Post joined the New York Times in publishing stories based on the Pentagon Papers, a secret government account of Vietnam War decisions, despite heavy legal pressure. The Post also uncovered details of the Iran-Contra scandal that rocked Ronald Reagan's White House.

He also was known for his blunt way of expressing himself.

"One of the first things you notice about Ben, both the written and in-person Ben, is his vocabulary, his vernacular, his penchant for one-liners and salty phrases," Jeff Himmelman wrote in his biography, "Yours in Truth." "Swearing with Ben makes you feel like you're part of his club, the club that doesn't take anything too seriously."

Bradlee also was a fixture on the Washington social circuit with his third wife, former Post reporter Sally Quinn, who was 20 years younger.

Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee was born in Boston on Aug. 26, 1921, to an aristocratic family. He attended Harvard and served on a Navy destroyer in the Pacific during World War Two before starting a New Hampshire newspaper in 1946.

His career at the Washington Post began in 1948 as a police reporter. He quit to become a press attache at the US Embassy in Paris, then Newsweek magazine's Paris correspondent and its Washington bureau chief.

He returned to the Post, was named managing editor in 1965 and became executive editor in 1968, holding the job until his 1991 retirement.

Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee were the only people at the Post to know the identity of Deep Throat, the source who revealed key secrets of the Nixon Watergate cover-up to the Post in clandestine meetings.

President Barack Obama gave Bradlee the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honour.

"A true newspaperman, he transformed the Washington Post into one of the country's finest newspapers, and with him at the helm, a growing army of reporters published the Pentagon Papers, exposed Watergate, and told stories that needed to be told - stories that helped us understand our world and one another a little bit better," Obama said in a statement.