Admired Political Reporter for Wall Street Journal

Alan L. Otten, 88, a former Washington bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal who was widely regarded as one of the outstanding political reporters of his era, died Aug. 10 at the Sunrise assisted living center in the District. He had a vascular disease.

During his 44 years with the Journal, Mr. Otten covered seven presidential campaigns, starting with Dwight D. Eisenhower's first run in 1952. In addition to reporting on congressional, state and local elections, he headed the Journal's Washington bureau from 1968 to 1973.

After his time as Washington bureau chief, he spent several years as a senior national correspondent and then headed the Journal's European bureau in London from 1978 to 1983.

On his return to this country in 1983, he shifted his focus from politics to break new ground in his newspaper's coverage of long-term demographic trends and bioethical issues. He retired in 1990, but contributed a bioethics column until 1995 and was a Washington bureau consultant on a regular basis until 1999.

As a reporter assigned to politics, before the beat became a major industry, Mr. Otten was known for blazing the trail, developing useful techniques and identifying hazards.

David Broder, a political reporter and columnist of The Washington Post, said he considered Mr. Otten his mentor. Broder told Washingtonian that Mr. Otten had provided crucial early advice: Reporters should avoid becoming the buddies of those they covered.

As quoted in the article, Mr. Otten said it was important to "deliberately lean a bit against the candidate you're traveling with. Hope that your counterpart traveling with the other candidate does likewise. That way the coverage stays balanced."

In addition to covering the news, Mr. Otten spent time pondering the role of the press. In a column in The Post 35 years ago, he proposed that newspaper journalism be "tied less and less to news 'events' and more and more to exploration and analysis." Recognizing that readers have already seen coverage of "spot news" on television, he suggested that it could be cut in favor of more in-depth reporting.

Alan Leonard Otten, the son of a hospital administrator and a schoolteacher, was born Aug. 22, 1920, in New York City. He was a graduate of the City College of New York, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and he received a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1942.

During World War II, he served in the Army as a censor in London and as a press officer with a photo reconnaissance group in France and Germany.

Shortly after joining the Journal in 1946, he was sent to Washington, and in time, he headed the paper's coverage of Congress, specializing in taxation and government spending as well as national political trends. Among the major stories he covered as a White House reporter from 1958 to 1967 were the Kitchen Debate in Moscow between Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and Vice President Richard M. Nixon, a summit in Vienna between President John F. Kennedy and Khrushchev, and the Kennedy assassination.

Beginning in 1966, he wrote "Politics and People," a weekly column that appeared on the Journal's editorial page. Its viewpoint was regarded as somewhat more liberal than that of the rest of the page. The column ended its run in 1978, the year he took up his overseas post.

It appears that among Mr. Otten's credits was the first use of a word now embedded in the nation's political vocabulary as part of the abortion debate: "pro-choice."

Word maven William Safire said in the New York Times that the term's first use was in a Journal article by Mr. Otten on March 20, 1975.

Mr. Otten's wife of 61 years, the former Jane Mantell, a longtime Washington-based freelance writer, died in 2007. Survivors include four children, Carla Hosford of Bethesda, Laura Otten of Ardmore, Pa., and Victoria Otten and Anthony Otten, both of Washington; seven grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.