April 1, 1918—July 2, 2009

Herbert G. Klein, a San Diego newspaperman who was a longtime aide to Richard

M. Nixon and was White House communications director during much of the Watergate era, died Thursday at his home in La Jolla, Calif., after a heart attack. He was 91.

Mr. Klein, who later was the top editor at the San Diego-based Copley newspaper chain, began working for Nixon in 1948, when the future president was running for Congress in California. He was Nixon’s press aide during the 1952 presidential campaign when Nixon was the vice presidential candidate on the Republican ticket with Dwight D. Eisenhower.

After joining the vice president’s office in 1956, Mr. Klein helped arrange the televised debates between Nixon and John F. Kennedy during the 1960 presidential campaign. The debates were viewed as a watershed moment in national politics, emphasizing the importance of the candidates’ appearance on television. Nixon’s five o’clock shadow and brooding countenance did him no favors when compared with Kennedy’s tanned and youthful good looks.

Mr. Klein, whose career alternated between newspaper work and politics, came to Washington after Nixon was elected president in 1968.

He was the first director of communications at the White House, a job he created and held until 1973. The position emphasized public relations and other communications strategies, in contrast to the White House press secretary’s daily give-and- take with reporters.

Known as “a decent, reasonable chap whose sole aberration was his fondness for Richard Nixon,” as the Boston Globe’s Washington Bureau chief, Martin F. Nolan, wrote in the Washington Post in 1980, Mr. Klein was intensely loyal to his fellow Californian. He later criticized Nixon’s administration for its obsession with public relations, but he never turned his back on the president.

Nixon became suspicious of Mr. Klein’s loyalties after he balked at employing tougher tactics with the news media during Watergate. “He doesn’t have his head screwed on right,” Nixon told his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman. “He’s not our guy at all, is he?”

Haldeman then hired Jeb Stuart Magruder to go on a public relations offensive against the media, which included an enemies list.

Mr. Klein left the White House in 1973, a year after the Watergate burglary and a year before Nixon resigned. In his 1980 book, “Making It Perfectly Clear,” Mr. Klein wrote: “The White House did not accept the concept of openness and gradually we drifted from an atmosphere of mutual working arrangements to an unproductive bully attitude toward the news media. The problem stemmed not from a lack of attention to the media but more from an obsession with it.”

Born in Los Angeles, Mr. Klein graduated from the University of Southern California in 1940 and served in the Navy during World War II as a press officer in San Diego. After the war, he became a reporter and editor at California newspapers.

When he left the White House, he became a vice president for the Metromedia broadcasting group. In 1980, he was made vice president and editor in chief of Copley Newspapers, a job he held until he retired in 2003.

His wife of 66 years, Marjorie Galbraith Klein, died last year. Survivors include a daughter.