WASHINGTON - Richard Ben Cramer, a fearless and dedicated author and reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his journalism and wrote the classic presidential campaign book "What It Takes," has died. He was 62.
Cramer died Monday at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore from complications of lung cancer, his agent, Philippa Brophy, said. Cramer lived with his wife, Joan, in Maryland.
Cramer won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting from the Middle East while with the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he worked for seven years. He was known for an in-depth reporting style that involved spending significant time with the subjects he profiled and re-creating scenes with vivid color and dialogue.
His 1986 profile of Ted Williams in Esquire magazine traced the hitter's career - including his personal relationships and feelings on fame - from early days to post-baseball life in the Florida Keys, where, Cramer wrote, locals might run into him at the tennis club, coffee bar or tackle shop.
"It was forty-five years ago, when achievements with a bat first brought him to the nation's notice, that Ted Williams began work on his defense. He wanted fame, and wanted it with a pure, hot eagerness that would have been embarrassing in a smaller man. But he could not stand celebrity. This is a bitch of a line to draw in America's dust," Cramer wrote.
Many readers knew him best for 1992's "What It Takes: The Way to the White House," a 1,000-page narrative of the 1988 presidential race that was equally heartfelt and irreverent.
Cramer delved into the lives and careers of the candidates, explaining how eventual winner George H.W. Bush had early in his political career resisted the urging by advisers to speak openly about his war record or the death of his young daughter from leukemia - personal topics he later discussed movingly during his presidential campaign.
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