In October 1989 Ian Brodie, then Washington correspondent of The Daily Telegraph, was accompanying Vice-President Dan Quayle on a trip to southern California when an earthquake struck San Francisco. As Quayle’s aides dithered, Brodie intervened. “I know what Margaret Thatcher would do. She would fly straight up there,” he said. Quayle took his advice, Brodie went with him, and he scooped the world with a helicopter tour of the devastated area.

Brodie was a reporter in the finest Fleet Street tradition. He never aspired to be a great writer or commentator, but was one of the best newsmen of his generation who loved being at the centre of events — and usually was.

In a long career with the Daily Express, The Daily Telegraph and The Times, Brodie served as a Vietnam war correspondent, reported from Moscow during the Cold War and covered many of the biggest stories in America, from Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968 right through to the Florida recount in the disputed presidential election of 2000.

Courteous, smartly dressed and amusing, he was a consummate professional and formidable operator who delighted in scooping his rivals and frequently did. He would also help them, however, if they were new or inexperienced.

Brodie was born in Bath, brought up in Luton and left school at 16 to join the Luton News as a general dogsbody. After National Service he moved to a local news agency. An exclusive story — sensational in those days — about a bus driver and his pregnant wife, a bus conductor, who were selling their baby to a US couple helped to propel him to Fleet Street and the Daily Sketch.

In 1961 he was headhunted by the Daily Express where his enterprise soon became evident. A group of British Nazis were holding a secret summer camp in Gloucestershire. Brodie persuaded a Battle of Britain pilot to scour the area to find it. They found not only the camp, but also Lincoln Rockwell, the American Nazi Party leader, who had been banned from Britain but slipped in through Ireland.

Brodie was sent to Moscow, where he covered the fall of Nikita Khrushchev in 1964 and met his first wife, Judy, a British diplomat’s nanny.

He was posted to New York during the civil rights era, and managed to attend a secret Ku Klux Klan meeting in North Carolina with Robert Shelton, the white supremacist organisation’s Grand Wizard, during the 1960s. “Do yourself a favour,” Shelton warned him. “When I leave it’s advisable you do too.”

Using his extensive connections, Brodie also managed to secure a place on the train carrying Robert Kennedy’s coffin from New York to Washington after his assassination.

As the Far East correspondent of the Daily Express Brodie covered the Vietnam war, and famously kept fatigues and body armour in the Caravelle Hotel in Saigon so that he could hit the ground running. He had a couple of narrow escapes: on one occasion his Vietnamese photographer sensed danger when he was to accompany a convoy and persuaded Brodie to turn back. He did so, and the convoy was never seen again.

Brodie also covered President Nixon’s ping-pong diplomacy in China in 1971, and stole a march on his rivals by sneaking into China on a tourist visa.

Brodie returned to Britain in 1972 to become foreign editor. The following year he was appointed editor of the old Scottish Daily Express. His stint as an executive was not entirely happy. He spent most of his time locked in bitter disputes with the unions before the paper closed down in 1974. The following year he moved to Los Angeles for The Daily Telegraph and remained there for a decade, covering the trial of Patty Hearst, Roman Polanski’s flight to France after being convicted of rape, the space programme and the rise of Ronald Reagan. A particular scoop was an interview he secured with Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana.

In 1978 he married his second wife, Bridget, and later fulfilled an ambition by investing $10,000 in a fledgling local paper near Malibu, the Topanga Messenger, and becoming its publisher — a position he held until his death.

In 1986 Brodie was appointed Washington bureau chief for The Daily Telegraph. He switched to the Washington bureau of The Times in 1993, still brimming with enthusiasm and as competitive as ever. Colleagues recall a day in December 1998 when President Clinton was facing impeachment and America was bombing Iraq. “It doesn’t get better than this,” he exclaimed as he hammered at his keyboard.

Between assignments Brodie wrote a beginners’ guide to sailing, published in conjunction with the Annapolis Sailing School. He also kept fit with a daily run, which is why friends were so shocked when he suffered a stroke in January 2001, having spent several weeks covering the Florida recount.

Brodie never fully recovered the use of his left side. He made a brave but unsuccessful attempt to return to work. He remained mentally sharp, however, and continued to draw on his prodigious experience to offer ideas and advice. He suffered a second and ultimately fatal stroke last month.

Brodie was appointed OBE for services to journalism in 1994. He is survived by his wife and two children.

Ian Brodie, OBE, journalist, was born on March 23, 1936. He died on May 8, 2008, aged 72