Mike Feinsilber fought the epic AP-UPI rivalry from both camps with wit and grace

WASHINGTON (AP) — Mike Feinsilber, whose masterful way with words and mischievous wit enlivened American journalism for five decades, the bulk of them at The Associated Press, died Monday. He was a month shy of 90.

Feinsilber died at home, said his wife of 55 years, Doris Feinsilber, a pioneering computer programmer at the CIA. “He was doing poorly, but was not in pain,” she said.

Feinsilber’s career was rooted in the wire services and their epic rivalry — working first for United Press International, then for the AP. But he never embodied the just-the-facts stereotype of that trade, though he was as fast as any in the competition to be first.

He wrote with elegance, style, authority, brevity and a gentle playfulness, all in service of finding the humanity in things.

Feinsilber covered a Pennsylvania mine collapse where three trapped miners were rescued. He covered Saigon in the Vietnam War, the impeachment hearings against President Richard Nixon and 18 political conventions, where he was always on the lookout for “outlandish aspects.”

In 1987, as Oliver North submitted to a grilling from a blockbuster congressional hearing on the Iran-contra scandal, Feinsilber summoned the ghosts of scandals past as he related the figures of history who had faced a reckoning in the same room:

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