Veteran political reporter Pat Heffernan dies

SARASOTA, Florida (Reuters) - Veteran journalist John W. "Pat" Heffernan, the only foreigner to have been president of the prestigious National Press Club in Washington, died on Tuesday after a brief illness, friends said. He was 96.

Heffernan, a soft-spoken Englishman, joined Reuters in the United States in 1946, and worked for 11 years at the United Nations and then for 20 years as the chief correspondent in the news agency's Washington bureau.

He was admitted Friday to the Tidewell hospice in Sarasota, Florida, where he lived the final years of his life.

Heffernan, who entered journalism at the Central News agency on London's Fleet Street in the 1930s, covered five American presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to Gerald Ford.

His election as president of the National Press Club in December, 1968, required an Act of Congress to allow a non-U.S. citizen to head a corporation holding a liquor license.

President Lyndon Johnson personally congratulated Heffernan, as did president-elect Richard Nixon and British Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

"Sevenscore and fourteen years ago, your fathers brought forth on this continent a conflagration. In short, they burned down the house I am now living in," Johnson wrote in his message, addressed "Dear Pat".

"I think there is no more heartening evidence of our accepting bygones as bygones than your election as President of the National Press Club," Johnson wrote.

Heffernan, who was of Irish ancestry, finally became a U.S. citizen in 1996.

In England, Queen Elizabeth made him an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1965 and a Commander (CBE) in 1970. He fought for the British Army during World War Two in East Africa and Burma, rising from private to major.

Heffernan is survived by his third wife, Ewa Jankowski, and by a stepson, Anthony, from his first marriage of 42 years to the late Edith Curry.