Hays Gorey, 89, a longtime Washington correspondent for Time magazine who covered presidential races and the Watergate affair, died April 5 at a health-care facility in Salt Lake City. He had complications from dementia.
Mr. Gorey worked for Time from 1965 to 1991, and he contributed to presidential coverage in 1968, 1972 and 1984. He was present at Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel when presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1968.
In the ensuing years, he reported on Capitol Hill and the Justice, Labor and Treasury departments, and was one of the magazine’s reporters covering the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974.
He later spent brief periods as bureau chief in Boston and Jerusalem and was a senior correspondent in Washington when he retired.
His books included “Ralph Nader and the Power of Everyman” (1975), a biography of the consumer activist; “Mo: A Woman’s View of Watergate” (1975), co-written with Maureen Dean, the wife of John W. Dean III, a White House counsel to Nixon; and “Pepper, Eyewitness to a Century” (1987), co-written with former congressman Claude D. Pepper (D-Fla.).
He and photojournalist Bill Eppridge collaborated on“Robert Kennedy: The Last Campaign” (1993).
Mr. Gorey had been one of the closest followers of Kennedy as a senator and candidate, and he grew to admire him.
“No one who has seen Kennedy on the Indian reservations of Arizona or Idaho, no one who has seen him in the stinking hovels of Appalachia, no one who has seen him take the hand of a starving Negro child in the Mississippi Delta, accuses him of acting,” Mr. Gorey told Time in 1968. “Neither he nor any other politician could be that good an actor.”
Andrew Hays Gorey was a Salt Lake City native and a 1942 graduate of the University of Utah. In 1949, he was awarded a Nieman Fellowship to study at Harvard University. He served briefly in the Marine Corps during World War II before being medically discharged.
He worked for the Salt Lake Tribune during much of his early career, serving as the top news editor before moving to Time. He moved back to Salt Lake City from Bethesda in 1995.
Survivors include his wife of 67 years, Nonie Hammond Gorey of Salt Lake City; four children, Hays Gorey Jr. of Vienna, Thomas H. Gorey of Germantown and DeAnn Barrigar and Susan Gorey, both of Salt Lake City; nine grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren.