William Tuohy, a Los Angeles Times foreign correspondent who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Vietnam War, has died at 83.

Tuohy died Thursday after open heart surgery at St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica, the Los Angeles Times reported.

He worked for 29 years as bureau chief in Saigon, Beirut, Rome, Bonn and London. Before that, he was a correspondent for Newsweek.

He was Saigon bureau chief for Newsweek in 1966, when the Times hired him. He already had a reputation as a reporter who spent a lot of time in the field, and had an understanding of life among the troops as well as conduct of the war.

"Few correspondents have seen and written more about the war in Vietnam than William Tuohy," Pulitzer judges said in 1969 when they awarded him the prize for international reporting.

Colleagues at the Times remembered him for his professionalism and ability to get the story.

"He could arrive in some hellhole by plane in the early afternoon, assess the situation, talk to the right people and file a spot-on assessment within hours," said Jon Thurber, a Times managing editor who worked with him. "He just knew intuitively how to work under extremely high pressure."

During the 1979 Iranian revolution, he was able to get into Iran and help fly out the body of fellow correspondent Joe Alex Morris Jr., who was killed in Tehran.

Tuohy was born in Chicago on Oct. 1, 1926, and served in the U.S. navy in the Pacific from 1945 to '46.

After graduating from Northwestern University in 1951, he began his career in journalism at the San Francisco Chronicle, where he worked from 1952 to 1959.

He then joined Newsweek in New York as a writer, editor and national political correspondent, covering the 1964 presidential campaign that led to the election of Lyndon B. Johnson.

He retired from the L.A. Times in 1995.

Tuohy wrote three books:

• Dangerous Company (1987), a memoir of his days as a war correspondent.
• The Bravest Man: The Story of Richard O'Kane and U.S. Submariners in the Pacific War (2001).
• America's Fighting Admirals: Winning the War at Sea in World War II (2007).

He is survived by his wife, Rose Marie, a son, a stepson and three grandchildren.