Apple, legendary reporter, dies

NEW YORK – R.W. Apple Jr., the colorful New York Times correspondent who charted the fall of Richard Nixon and covered wars from Vietnam to the Persian Gulf while having a parallel career as a food and travel writer, died Wednesday. He was 71.

Apple died in Washington after a long bout with thoracic cancer, the newspaper said.

His last words to Times readers came in a piece in last Sunday’s paper about food and travel destinations in Singapore.

“He was himself to the last,” New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller said in a statement to the staff.

“From his sickbed he hammered out his last words to readers … negotiated details of the menu and music for his memorial service, followed the baseball playoffs and the latest congressional scandal with relish,” Keller said.

Apple joined the Times in 1963 after working for The Wall Street Journal and NBC News. Author David Halberstam, in his 1979 book on the media, “The Powers That Be,” described him in his early Times years as “a talented young reporter whose star was still ascending, hustling, brash, full of himself, very quick and very energetic.”

He covered the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars, the Iranian revolution and the collapse of Eastern Bloc governments.

Apple’s epicurean side was evident in his many lighter pieces on travel and food. Known as “Johnny,” for Johnny Appleseed, he wrote about foods as varied as hot dogs in Chicago and bacon in Wisconsin.

“Vidalias are to run-of-the-mill onions as foie gras is to chopped liver,” he wrote in 1998.

Checking out hot dogs in Chicago, he wrote in 2004: “No place else this side of Frankfurt has a frankfurter stand every three or four blocks, as Chicago does. And no other place anywhere has a catechism of condiments as rigorously defined as Chicago’s. … And no ketchup, please. Ever.”