WASHINGTON — Benjamin Bradlee, who presided over The Washington Post newsroom for 26 years and guided The Post’s transformation into one of the world’s leading newspapers, died Tuesday at his home in Washington of natural causes. He was 93.

From the moment he took over The Washington Post newsroom in 1965, Bradlee sought to create an important newspaper that would go far beyond the traditional model of a metropolitan daily. He achieved that goal by combining compelling news stories based on aggressive reporting with engaging feature pieces of a kind previously associated with the best magazines. His charm and gift for leadership helped him hire and inspire a talented staff and eventually made him the most celebrated newspaper editor of his era.

The most compelling story of Bradlee’s tenure, almost certainly the one of greatest consequence, was Watergate, a political scandal touched off by The Washington Post’s reporting that ended in the only resignation of a president in U.S. history.

But Bradlee’s most important decision, made with Katharine Graham, The Washington Post’s publisher, may have been to print stories based on the Pentagon Papers, a secret Pentagon history of the Vietnam War. The Nixon administration went to court to try to quash those stories, but the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision of The New York Times and The Washington Post to publish them.

The Washington Post’s circulation nearly doubled while Bradlee was in charge of the newsroom – first as managing editor and then as executive editor – as did the size of its newsroom staff. And he gave the paper ambition.

Bradlee stationed correspondents around the globe, opened bureaus across the Washington region and from coast to coast in the United States, and he created sections and features – most notably Style, one of his proudest inventions – that were widely copied by others.

During his tenure, a paper that had previously won just four Pulitzer Prizes, only one of which was for reporting, won 17 more, including the Public Service award for the Watergate coverage.

“Ben Bradlee was the best American newspaper editor of his time and had the greatest impact on his newspaper of any modern editor,” said Donald Graham, who succeeded his mother as publisher of The Washington Post and Bradlee’s boss.

“So much of The Post is Ben,” Katharine Graham said in 1994, three years after Bradlee retired as editor. “He created it as we know it today.”

Leonard Downie Jr., who succeeded Bradlee as The Washington Post’s executive editor in 1991, said, “Ben’s influence remained very much alive at The Washington Post long after he retired, distinguishing the newspaper and our newsroom as unique in journalism.” President Barack Obama saluted Bradlee’s role at The Washington Post when giving him the country’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 2013: “He transformed that newspaper into one of the finest in the world.”

Bradlee’s patrician good looks, gravelly voice, profane vocabulary and zest for journalism and for life all contributed to the charismatic personality that dominated and shaped The Washington Post. Modern American newspaper editors rarely achieve much fame, but Bradlee became a celebrity and loved the status. Jason Robards played him in the movie “All The President’s Men,” based on Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book about Watergate. Two books Bradlee wrote – “Conversations With Kennedy” and his memoir, “A Good Life” – were bestsellers. His craggy face became a familiar sight on television. In public and in private, he always played his part with theatrical enthusiasm.

“He was a presence, a force,” Woodward recalled of Bradlee’s role during the Watergate period, 1972 to 1974. “And he was a doubter, a skeptic – ‘Do we have it yet?’ ‘Have we proved it?’ ” Decades later, Woodward remembered the words that he most hated to hear from Bradlee then: “You don’t have it yet, kid.”

Bradlee loved the Watergate story, not least because it gave the newspaper “impact,” his favorite word in his first years as editor. He wanted the paper to be noticed. In his personal vernacular – a vivid, blasphemous argot that combined the swear words he mastered in the Navy during World War II with the impeccable enunciation of a blue-blooded Bostonian – a great story was “a real tube-ripper.”

This meant a story was so hot that Washington Post readers would rip the paper out of the tubes into which the paperboy delivered it. A bad story was “mego” – the acronym for “my eyes glaze over” – applied to anything that bored him. Maximizing the number of tube-rippers and minimizing mego was the Bradlee strategy.

Bradlee’s tactics were also simple: “Hire people smarter than you are” and encourage them to bloom. His energy and his mystique were infectious.

“It was hard to explain the full force of his personality to people who never met him,” said Ward Just, the reporter-turned-novelist whom Bradlee sent to cover the Vietnam War for The Washington Post in 1966-1967. “He really was one of those guys you’d take a machine-gun bullet for. You only meet three or four of them in an entire lifetime.”

But his strengths sometimes became weaknesses. The editor who could inspire his troops to do some of the best journalism ever published in America also fell for an artful hoax by a young reporter, Janet Cooke. Cooke invented an 8-year-old heroin addict named Jimmy and wrote a moving story about him. After the story won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981, Cooke was exposed as an impostor who invented not only Jimmy but also her own life story.

When they realized that Cooke had concocted an imaginary resume, Bradlee and his editors interrogated her and extracted a confession. Bradlee quickly returned the Pulitzer, then encouraged The Washington Post’s ombudsman, Bill Green, to investigate and report how the incident could have happened. This was the biggest assignment ever given to the in-house reader’s representative. Bradlee had created the position in 1970, making The Washington Post the first major paper to employ an independent, in-house critic.

He made friends easily with important people – his most famous friend was John F. Kennedy – but he also had pals among printers at The Washington Post and farmers in Southern Maryland, where he spent weekends at his country estate for many years.

He and his third wife, the writer Sally Quinn, loved to give parties at their big house in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood. In his 80s, Bradlee still caroused energetically with people 30 and 40 years younger, amazing his old friends. “He gave a whole new meaning to ‘over 80,’ ” Don Graham said.

Bradlee’s wartime experience left him an unabashed patriot who bristled whenever critics of the newspaper accused it of helping America’s enemies. He sometimes agreed to keep stories out of the paper when government officials convinced him that they might cause serious harm. But he also reacted angrily to what he considered phony attempts to invoke “national security” by officials who were really just trying to avoid embarrassment.

Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee was born into the old aristocracy of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Boston on Aug. 26, 1921. His father, Frederick Josiah Bradlee Jr., known as “B,” could trace his American ancestry back through 10 generations of Bradlees. B was an all-American football star at Harvard who became an investment banker in the booming 1920s. He married Josephine deGersdorff, daughter of a prominent New York lawyer and a New England aristocrat named Helen Crowninshield.

Bradlee got his first whiff of the newspaper business at age 15, when his father arranged a job for him as a copy boy on the Beverly (Massachusetts) Evening Times. He could augment his $5-a-week salary by reporting events in the lives of local citizens, which he loved to do. “I learned a vital lesson: People will talk if they feel comfortable,” Bradlee wrote in “A Good Life.”

He was the 52nd male Bradlee to enter Harvard University since 1795 – “no alternatives were suggested, or contemplated,” he wrote. He arrived at Harvard Yard just as war in Europe was beginning and decided to join the Naval ROTC to improve his initial posting in the war he and his contemporaries knew they would soon be fighting. With that threat hovering over him, Bradlee found it hard to be serious about college. Only in his third year, with the war ever more ominous, did he buckle down.

After the war, Bradlee got his first real job in journalism, working with a St. Mark’s friend, Blair Clark, to create the New Hampshire Sunday News. Bradlee was one of seven staff members who filled the 64-page paper every week. The editor, Ralph Blagden, “had an almost contagious sense of how to find a story and where it might go,” Bradlee wrote in his memoirs. “For every answer we gave him, he had 50 more questions, and I learned everything from him in two years.”

But the Sunday News couldn’t make money, and it failed. Family friends offered to help Bradlee find a new job. Edward Weeks, the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, wrote a friend at the Baltimore Sun about Bradlee; Christian Herter, the congressman and former governor of Massachusetts, wrote to The Washington Post. In November 1948, Bradlee set out on a train trip, bound from Boston to Baltimore to Washington to Salt Lake City to Santa Barbara, California. When his overnight train reached Baltimore, a heavy rainstorm discouraged him from getting off, so he decided to go first to Washington. The day before he arrived for an interview, a Post reporter had quit unexpectedly, creating a vacancy. Bradlee charmed The Washington Post’s editors, who offered him a job for $80 a week, starting on Christmas Eve.

In his first days at the paper, he impressed The Post’s managing editor, J. Russell Wiggins, by producing a list of the city’s 10 leading bookies. He didn’t tell Wiggins that he got the names from Morris Siegel, his new pal, who was a Washington Post sportswriter. Bradlee covered the municipal court, the attempted assassination of President Harry S. Truman by Puerto Rican nationalists, the gambling industry in Washington and life in the city’s alleys, still home to tens of thousands of poor African Americans.

He liked The Washington Post, but he wanted to cover big national stories, and it was clear to him that he wouldn’t get a chance to do that for years. The Washington Post, which Katharine Graham’s father, Eugene Meyer, had bought at a bankruptcy auction in 1933, was still losing money, $1 million a year in 1951. Bradlee concluded that the paper would not be growing anytime soon. So when an old friend said he could help him become the press attache at the American Embassy in Paris, he jumped.

Bradlee loved life in Paris, but he was not a natural diplomat or bureaucrat. After 2 1/2 years, he found a way to return to journalism. Newsweek, then a struggling imitation of Time and owned by Vincent Astor, needed a European correspondent. The magazine’s foreign editor was delighted to discover that Bradlee’s mother had been a friend of Brooke Astor, the boss’ wife. He got the job.

“The sheer joy and romance of being a foreign correspondent is hard to explain, even harder to exaggerate,” Bradlee wrote in his memoirs. In four years, he covered wars in Algeria and the Middle East, peace conferences in Geneva, the wedding of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier in Monte Carlo.

One summer, he and his wife, Jean, joined several couples in renting a huge, old French chateau, where they gave house parties every weekend. One of the guests was an old friend from Washington, Antoinette “Tony” Pinchot Pittman, wife of a Washington lawyer and mother of four young children. She and Bradlee fell in love on the spot, he recounted, an unexpected turn of events that led to their divorces and their eventual marriage.

In 1957, Bradlee and his new wife returned to Washington. As a 36-year-old junior reporter in the capital, Bradlee began conspiratorial conversations with Osborne Elliott, another well-born WASP, also in his 30s, who was Newsweek’s managing editor. They knew that the magazine was likely to be sold.

“One night, after a bad day of brooding and a few shooters, I called Elliott in New York and told him I was damn well going to pick up the phone – it was almost 11 p.m. – and call Phil Graham right then,” Bradlee wrote in his memoirs. And he did.

Philip Graham, publisher and owner of The Post and husband of Katharine Graham, invited Bradlee over to his home immediately. They stayed up until 5 a.m. talking about Newsweek. Within days, The Washington Post Co. had bought the magazine for $15 million.

This business transaction changed Bradlee’s life. Ultimately, it made him wealthy: Phil Graham bestowed a considerable block of Washington Post stock on him as a “finder’s fee” for putting him on to the Newsweek deal. The shares Graham gave Bradlee were eventually worth millions.

Phil Graham decided that once he owned Newsweek, Bradlee should be its Washington bureau chief. This promotion brought him into the inner sanctum of The Post Co. Bradlee befriended the Grahams, as well as their attorney and key financial adviser, Frederick “Fritz” Beebe, who soon left his New York law firm to become chairman of The Post Co.

The Post Co. bought Newsweek in March 1961, barely six weeks after the inauguration of Bradlee’s friend, John F. Kennedy, as president. The two young men (Bradlee was 39 in early 1961; Kennedy, 43) had been neighbors in the 3300 block of N Street NW, where both bought houses in 1957. They met walking baby carriages through Georgetown with their wives. Soon the couples were having dinner together on a regular basis, and Bradlee was developing what turned out to be the best source of his career.

Bradlee’s friendship with Kennedy produced complex feelings that lasted for decades after the president’s 1963 assassination. Bradlee knew reporters shouldn’t become close friends with politicians. At the same time, Bradlee loved bright, lively, charming people, and he had great confidence in his own ability to stay straight journalistically in all circumstances. “If I was had, so be it,” Bradlee wrote in his 1974 bestseller, “Conversations With Kennedy.”

Several months after lunch with Bradlee, Mrs. Graham told her editor, J. Russell Wiggins, and Friendly of her interest in Bradlee. They reacted negatively. Nevertheless, she proposed that Bradlee join The Post as a deputy managing editor responsible for national and foreign news with the understanding that he would succeed Friendly “sometime.” She told Bradlee that it would be in a year; Friendly proposed three years. Bradlee’s appointment was announced July 7, 1965.

That fall, Lippmann and Friendly had lunch together, a meeting Graham had suggested so Friendly could hear Lippmann’s criticisms of The Post. But Lippmann used the occasion to tell Friendly that administrative jobs in newsrooms burned people out and that he should consider returning to reporting.

Friendly, shaken, went right from the lunch to Graham’s office, asking whether she wanted him to step down. She was stunned by the speed of events but said yes. On Nov. 15, The Post announced that Bradlee would be the paper’s new managing editor, a title he would hold until 1968, when he was named to the newly created position of executive editor.

Watergate made Bradlee’s Post famous, but the story that probably made the Watergate coverage possible was the Pentagon Papers, initially a New York Times scoop. Daniel Ellsberg, a disaffected former government official, gave the Times a set of the papers, a compilation of historical documents about U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Times journalists worked for months on stories about them, which began to appear June 13, 1971. The stories created a sensation, even though they contained very little dramatic revelation. After three days of stories, the Nixon administration successfully sought a federal court injunction blocking further publication, the first such “prior restraint” in the nation’s history.

Ellsberg then offered the documents to The Washington Post. Two days after the court order, Post editors and reporters were plowing through the Pentagon Papers and planning to write about them.

The Post’s attorneys were extremely nervous that the paper might publish stories based on material already deemed sensitive national security information by a federal judge in New York. The Post was about to sell shares to the public for the first time, hoping to raise $35 million. And the government licenses of The Post’s television stations would be vulnerable if the paper was convicted of a crime.

The reporters and editors all believed that The Post had to report on the papers. Bradlee called one of the two friends he kept throughout his adult life, Edward Bennett Williams, the famous lawyer. (The other long-term pal was Art Buchwald, the humorist. The three regularly ate lunch together, boisterously. Williams died in 1988; Buchwald in 2007.)

After hearing Bradlee’s description of the situation, Williams thought for a moment and said: “Well, Benjy, you got to go with it. You got no choice. That’s your business.”

Armed with Williams’ judgment, Bradlee called Graham, who was hosting a retirement party for a Post business manager. Beebe was on an extension phone. When Graham asked his advice, he tepidly said he didn’t think he would publish. She disagreed. “I say let’s go,” she told Bradlee. “Let’s publish.”

That moment, Bradlee wrote in his memoir, “crystallized for editors and reporters everywhere how independent and determined and confident of its purpose the new Washington Post had become.” Defying the government in printing those stories proved that The Post was “a paper that holds its head high, committed unshakably to principle.”

The Post did publish, and did end up in court, with the Times. The Nixon administration argued that publication of stories based on the Pentagon Papers could undermine national security, an argument that infuriated Bradlee. But the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that the government could not restrain the newspapers.

Eighteen years later, the man who had argued the government’s case before the Supreme Court, former solicitor general Erwin Griswold, admitted in a Washington Post op-ed essay that the national security argument was phony.

“I have never seen any trace of a threat to the national security from the publication” of the Pentagon Papers, Griswold wrote in 1989. Bradlee loved that article, and he carried a copy in his jacket pocket for weeks afterward.

The sense of independence earned in 1971 was critical to The Washington Post’s pursuit of Watergate, which began the next June. At every stage, it was a compelling yarn, from the days when Woodward and Bernstein established connections between the burglars and President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign to the amazing weeks, more than two years later, when it became clear that the president would not survive in office.

“Newspapering deals with small daily bites from a fruit of indeterminate size,” Bradlee wrote later. “It may take dozens of bites before you are sure it’s an apple. Dozens and dozens more bites before you have any real idea how big the apple might be. It was that way with Watergate.”

Bradlee called it “the story that put us all on the map.” Neither he nor The Post was ever the same again. The recognition grew after the movie made from “All The President’s Men” appeared. Bradlee was relieved that director Alan Pakula made a good and essentially accurate movie that seemed to capture the real spirit of The Post and the story.

In 1991, on the eve of his 70th birthday, Bradlee retired. He still looked and acted like a man much younger.

The staff drenched him in an outpouring of emotion on his last day in the newsroom, July 31, 1991. Most of the men and women on the staff had bought, borrowed or faked a striped shirt with a white collar and cuffs, mimicking those made by Turnbull & Asser in London that Bradlee had been wearing for years. For tribute after tribute, Bradlee kept his eyes dry. But then he heard the telegram from Nora Boustany, who had covered the war in Lebanon for The Post and was back in Beirut for a visit at the time of the retirement party. Her comments were read aloud:

“Whenever I found myself alone on the streets of Beirut, I would just shrug off the shelling, the gunmen, and the dark corners, telling myself there is this distinguished eminence up there who really appreciates and understands the true meaning of courage in journalism. . . . For me you will always be the grand, brave man of the news who watched over me and made me want to give just a little bit more. Thank you for giving us all something so special to believe in.”

Don Graham made Bradlee a director of The Washington Post Co. and a vice president of the newspaper. Graham spent some time coming up with an appropriate title. He chose “vice president at large,” a generous signal that Bradlee remained a big figure but had no particular responsibilities.

In retirement, Bradlee wrote his highly successful memoir. He and Quinn raised millions of dollars for Children’s National Medical Center, which had done so much for their son, Quinn, who was born with serious disabilities in 1982. He also gave money away, endowing the Bradlee Professorship of Government and the Press at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

He joined the International Advisory Board of Independent News & Media, a global media company that owns newspapers and other properties in Ireland, England and South Africa. Into his 80s, he enjoyed traveling to board meetings in those countries. Bradlee also served as chairman of the Historic St. Mary’s City Commission, the nonprofit organization that maintains the historical relics of St. Mary’s, the oldest European settlement in Maryland. In 2007, the French government awarded him its Legion d’Honneur, France’s highest decoration.

Bradlee and Quinn maintained residences in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, in East Hampton, New York, and in Georgetown. Besides his wife, survivors include a son from his first marriage, Benjamin Bradlee Jr. of Boston; two children from his second marriage, Dominic Bradlee of Hydra, Greece, and Marina Murdock of Purcellville, Virginia; a son from his third marriage, Quinn Bradlee of Washington; 10 grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.

The late David Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer Prize for the New York Times and devoted much of his book “The Powers That Be” to Bradlee’s Washington Post, offered this valedictory in an interview:

“He took The Post, then affluent and filled with underutilized potential, and made it a formidable national newspaper worthy of a head-to-head competition with the 1/8New York3/8 Times. He did it in a way that made the paper itself a joyous place to work. The paper reflected his personality. He was exuberant, competitive and combative if challenged. He made The Post a magnet for young reporters looking for a chance to play in a very high-stakes game.”

Robert G. Kaiser is a former managing editor of The Washington Post.