Frances Lewine; Pioneering Journalist With Associated Press

A similar campaign was founded around the Gridiron Club, the exclusive group of journalists and politicians that excluded women from its annual event. Ms. Lewine founded the "Counter-Gridiron," a blue-jeaned, hot-dog-and-beer party held in a gym. After three such parties, the Gridiron relented, accepting women as guests and then admitting Thomas as its first female member and Lewine as its second.

Ms. Lewine left the AP in 1977 to join the Carter administration as deputy director of public affairs in the Department of Transportation, until Carter left office in 1981.

"When President Reagan was shot, I walked over to CNN that day and asked to help," Ms. Lewine said in a 2005 article in a newsletter for Time Warner, CNN's parent company. "My claim to fame was, I found out what type of gun was used. They paid me $80 for my work."

She was born Jan. 20, 1921, in New York City and grew up in the Far Rockaway section in an extended family household that included her first cousin, Richard Feynman, who later won the Nobel Prize in physics.

Ms. Lewine graduated from Hunter College in New York and worked for the Plainfield (N.J.) Courier-News and then the Newark bureau of the AP.

From Washington, she traveled with the presidential and vice presidential press corps on overseas trips and quickly displayed the derring-do of journalistic legend.

When Jacqueline Kennedy's staff tried to keep reporters away during a trip to Athens, Ms. Lewine rented a 54-foot yacht with several other reporters and followed her from island to island, keeping track of her activities by listening in on ship-to-shore radio.

Thomas said she was "fearless" and "had great integrity. She had tremendous institutional knowledge about the White House, and her questions were always great."

At a televised news conference in the 1970s, Ms. Lewine asked President Gerald Ford if he agreed with his administration's advice urging federal officials not to patronize segregated facilities. He said he did. Then she asked why he played golf every week at Burning Tree Country Club, which refused to admit women.

She was a member of Executive Women in Government, the Society of Professional Journalists and the Journalism and Women Symposium. She was elected to the Washington Society of Professional Journalists Hall of Fame and to the Hunter College Hall of Fame.

Ms. Lewine had a memorable work ethic.

"I don't understand people who quit," she said in the Time Warner newsletter article. "We have the best jobs in the world. I have a front-row seat to history. What are you going to do that's possibly better than this?"

In October, she was awarded the Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism from the University of Missouri's School of Journalism.

"In times like these, when the credibility of our nation and our president often comes into question, it is the reporter on the scene that can raise issues and put the spotlight on problems so the nation can address them," she said in her acceptance speech.

"Reporters should understand that they have an obligation to search for the truth and to stand in the front line in holding governments and officials accountable for their actions."

She had no immediate survivors.