Ben Bradlee, the editor who reigned over The Washington Post with the style of a well-dressed swashbuckler and the profane vocabulary of a dockworker as the newspaper helped topple president Richard Nixon, died on Tuesday aged 93.

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

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