RIP, Niles Lathem

Former New York Post reporter Niles Lathem has passed away, the third great Post reporter to die in the past several months.

Niles Lathem, a long-time Washington correspondent for the New York Post, died yesterday after a battle with lung cancer. He was 51.

Lathem covered some of the biggest stories of the last 30 years, including on-the-scene reporting of the 1999 Kosovo war and of President Ronald Reagan's 1987 "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" speech in Berlin.

He later became The Post's security-affairs expert and tracked the rise of Osama bin Laden and international terrorism long before Sept. 11, 2001.

"He was a fine journalist and a treasured member of the staff. He'll be sorely missed," said Col Allan, The Post's editor-in-chief.

Lathem was raised in Brooklyn and lived for a time in England while his father served as a doctor at the U.S. Embassy. After Colorado College, he broke into journalism at the Paterson News..

"He cut his teeth in New Jersey, covering school boards and stuff," his wife, Ellen, recalled.

In 1980 he was hired by The Post. After three months in New York, he was promoted to Washington bureau chief.

After Reagan was elected that fall, Lathem became a frequent flier on the president's trips to the Soviet Union, China and to Alaska, when Reagan met Pope John Paul II.

A Post editorial marks his passing.

The Post's Washington correspondent Niles Lathem was a genuinely nice guy in a profession noted for its hard-bitten cynics. As a reporter, though, he was a genuine workhorse.

Lathem died yesterday at 51, after a brief battle with cancer.

Sadly, he's the third Post veteran who's left us in the past few months, following the untimely passing of Middle East correspondent Uri Dan and Washington Bureau Chief Deborah Orin-Eilbeck.

Niles joined The Post in 1980 as a general-assignment reporter and was named Washington Bureau chief after Ronald Reagan's election. He served in that position throughout Reagan's terms in office, chronicling one of the most significant presidencies in American history.

He filed story after story, many of them exclusives. Early on, he was the subject of a front-page Style story in The Washington Post that made him a celebrity.