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.

In 1984, having served as Bradlee’s managing editor for 13 years, Simons realized he wasn’t ever going to get the top job and left the Post, with some bitterness, to become the curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. When he died five years later, there was no wall-to-wall coverage of his life and career, although the major papers carried obituaries, the Washington Post ran an editorial, and the paper’s cartoonist Herb Block wrote an appreciation.

Simons lacked Bradlee’s aristocratic lineage, too. The son of a poor Polish immigrant, he was born and reared in Albany, earned his bachelor’s from Union College in Schenectady and his master’s in journalism from Columbia. He never got over the suspicion, a former confidant told me, that being Jewish and looking Jewish kept him stuck in the Post’s number two job. In the blazing story of Watergate—the paper won the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage in 1973—there are other forgotten men, as I learned in the the late ’80s and early ’90s, when I wrote an unauthorized biography of Katharine Graham, Power, Privilege and the Post. Among them was Sussman, a city editor who became the special Watergate editor in mid-1972, when the story was gaining traction. He worked closely with Woodward and Bernstein in writing and organizing the story—but wasn’t even a character in the movie. Another who worked directly with Woodward and Bernstein, guided them and closely edited them was metro editor Harry Rosenfeld. As did Len Downie, who as deputy metro editor helped to supervise the paper’s Watergate coverage; Downie succeeded Simons as managing editor in 1984 and in 1991, got the top job that Simons had so wanted—Bradlee’s position as executive editor.

After Simons’ death, Bradlee paid tribute to his chief lieutenant in Alex Jones’ New York Times obit of Simons, crediting him with playing “a vital role in everything that the paper did,” calling him a “powerhouse,” and noting that Simons “led the charge” on Watergate, and that he got “short-changed by the movie.” In his memoir, A Good Life, published in 1995, Bradlee wrote that after the movie, his and Simons’ relationship was “never the same.”

When I interviewed him for the Graham biography, Sussman told me that at Simons’ memorial service, Kay Graham delivered a eulogy that surprised him. “She paid Howard a real tribute. At one point she went back to old memos he had written urging her to do certain things with the paper. All of her remarks had to do with Howard’s having more foresight than most anybody around. Howard felt that Kay didn’t care for him at all. She had to have [had] some real feeling for him—maybe she didn’t want him to be the boss, but [her talk] was moving and heartfelt.”

On Wednesday, Bradlee’s life will be celebrated in an A-list affair in Washington’s National Cathedral. It does no dishonor to his memory to remember the long and hard work of another editor who helped to make him a legend.