Charles Tasnadi, 82; Photographed Presidents for AP

Charles Tasnadi, 82, who escaped communist oppression in Europe by crawling to freedom and who ended his career as an Associated Press photographer covering the White House, died Jan. 10 at Community Hospices at the Washington Home. He had colon cancer and died from a stroke.

Mr. Tasnadi arrived in the AP's Washington bureau in 1964 after working as a photographer in Caracas for Time-Life and a Venezuelan newspaper. A year later, while covering President Lyndon B. Johnson, he snapped one of his most memorable images.

Over Labor Day weekend in 1965, Johnson underwent gallbladder surgery at National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda. While recuperating, Johnson met with a few reporters and photographers on the hospital's helipad and pointed to the scar across his abdomen.

"All of a sudden, LBJ just held up his [shirt], with his scar," Dennis Brack, president of the White House News Photographers Association, who was standing next to Mr. Tasnadi, recalled yesterday. "You never knew what LBJ was going to do. Charlie made the first frame, and probably the best."

Mr. Tasnadi (pronounced tass-NADD-ee) went on to have a 32-year career in Washington, during which he covered seven presidents and countless historic events around the world before his retirement in 1996. He photographed a 1980 meeting between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and, in 1974, captured President Richard M. Nixon shaking hands with bystanders while checking his watch.

Aside from his photographs, Mr. Tasnadi was remembered for his gentlemanly manner and his kindness toward colleagues.

"I don't think you can find a photographer in Washington who did not love Charlie," said Pulitzer Prize-winning AP photographer Ron Edmonds. "I've been in this town 30 years, and I don't know another person like him. He was the greatest human being I've ever worked with."

Mr. Tasnadi, a skiing champion in his youth, was known to ski from his Northwest Washington home to his office during blizzards. He once joined President Gerald R. Ford on the slopes in Colorado -- and got a shot of the laughing president after he had taken a tumble.

Mr. Tasnadi was among the first U.S. journalists to visit Cuba and made more than 40 trips there. His fluent Spanish -- and his generosity in sharing film and photographic equipment -- put him on good terms with President Fidel Castro and others in his regime.

In Cuba and elsewhere, Mr. Tasnadi never divulged his political views, which were strongly colored by his experiences in Hungary, as his country fell under the control of the Axis powers and, later, the Soviet Union.

At the end of World War II, he and other young Hungarians were lined up and marched down a Budapest street by Soviet soldiers. Fearing that he would be sent to a labor camp, Mr. Tasnadi dived into an open door and ran through a courtyard. A Hungarian nurse wrapped a bandage around his arm and poured red ink over it, saving Mr. Tasnadi from an unknown fate.

Mr. Tasnadi was born in Ajka, Hungary, and moved to Budapest with his mother after his father died. He was a Boy Scout and began taking pictures as a hobby.