When Ben Bradlee died a week ago at age 93, he was celebrated as a brass-balled crusader of the sort we’re unlikely ever to see again. After 23 years as the Washington Post’s executive editor, he stepped down in 1991, but remained until his death the most famous, admired newsman of our times—the man who inspired and empowered his young reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and, together, brought down a president.

A Nexis search produced 736 English-language Bradlee stories since his death, almost all celebratory.

As I waded through the deluge of obits and tributes, too many reading like school-boy and -girl crushes, I wondered, “Where’s Bradlee’s managing editor, Howard Simons, in all this hoopla and hyperbole?”

Here’s what a second Nexis search turned up: five mentions of Simons in pieces about Bradlee’s death, many of the references in captions accompanying photographs. (See Robert Kaiser’s colorful obit in the Washington Post, which doesn’t mention Simons, but shows him in a Watergate-era photograph with Bradlee, Woodward, Bernstein and then-Post Publisher Katharine Graham.) Simons does appear briefly in one sports writer’s reminiscence of Bradlee and his deputy’s role in “launching” Jimmy the Greek’s syndicated column. Marilyn Berger’s New York Times obit never mentions Simons, but its language is typical: “…two young reporters, boldly taking on the White House in pursuit of the truth, their spines steeled by a courageous editor.”

If Bradlee was the great man of Watergate, Simons, who died in 1989 at age 60, was the forgotten man, without whom Bradlee might never have been seen as so great. Bradlee certainly recognized Simons’ talents, naming him his assistant managing editor, and, in 1971—a year before Watergate broke and after first skipping over him—his managing editor. Simons was sharply intelligent and witty, his interests ranging far afield of politics to religion, education, history, medicine and much more. He had started at the Post in 1961 as a science writer, one of the subjects that particularly bored Bradlee, who focused on stories that made the reader exclaim, “Holy shit” and dismissed articles he called “four bowlers,” which meant stories so dull that readers dozed and their heads fell into their oatmeal.

It was Simons who took the call in June 1972 from Joseph Califano Jr., then general counsel of the Democratic National Committee, informing the Post that a break-in had occurred the night before at DNC headquarters at the Watergate complex and that five masked burglars wearing surgical gloves and carrying wiretap equipment had been arrested. It was Simons who decided that the story had legs, took charge and pursued it aggressively, with help from fellow editors Barry Sussman and Harry Rosenfeld. It was Simons who guided Woodward and Bernstein in the early going and who argued for keeping the young, green Metro reporters on what was obviously a national story.

In fact, it was months before Bradlee saw the makings of a “holy shit” story and started to take an interest. Woodward was quoted in Simons’ obit in the Washington Post as describing Simons as “the day-to-day agitator, the one who ran around the newsroom inspiring, shouting, directing, insisting that we not abandon our inquiry, whatever the level of denials or denunciations.”

In 1974, the year Nixon resigned, Woodward and Bernstein’s book, All the President’s Men, was published, with Simons as a relatively important figure. It was followed, in 1976, by the movie adaptation, starring Jason Robards Jr. as the hero of the story—Ben Bradlee; Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein. (Robards won an Oscar for his performance.) The movie was an even bigger sensation than the best-selling book. And it deeply hurt Simons. He was written as a minor character, played by Martin Balsam, who portrayed a timid man who pushed for taking Woodward and Bernstein off the story but was stopped by the steel-spined Bradlee. In the Hollywood version, Bradlee closely followed every aspect of the story. Simons, who in real life was the aggressive editor who dubbed Woodward and Bernstein’s famous source “Deep Throat,” worried that in the public’s mind the movie would become the reality.