NEW YORK – Reid G. Miller, who traveled the planet as an intrepid international correspondent for The Associated Press and developed a reputation as a supportive editor and unswervingly loyal boss during the toughest of breaking-news moments, has died. He was 90.

Miller died early Thursday in his sleep at his home in Sarasota, Florida, where he had been fighting congestive heart failure, said his son, G. Clay Miller of Brooklyn, New York.

In his 43-year AP career, he bore witness to and reported on some of the late 20th century’s most momentous — and sometimes most violent — events from Washington to Central America, East Africa to South Korea. Along the way, he survived a lethal explosion in Nicaragua, covered the genocide in Rwanda and spearheaded the release of a kidnapped colleague in war-ravaged Somalia.

“He loved the sense of adventure — living abroad, covering moments in history,” Clay Miller said. “Some of the most intense zones were some of the ones he talked about most while I was growing up.”

Miller, a native of Medford, Massachusetts, started at AP in his early 20s with a part-time job in Phoenix in 1956. He held reporting and leadership roles in Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh and Miami — and ultimately Washington, where he became assistant bureau chief, was a mainstay of the bureau softball team and helped raise a generation of reporters.

“Reid embraced me, as he did all newly arrived D.C. AP add-ons,” said Merrill Hartson, a longtime friend and colleague. “I found a man whose sense of humor was Johnny Carson’s, whose stolid and somewhat stern commitment to performance could sometimes evoke thoughts of Gen. George Patton, and whose suave, sartorially correct and Alpha-man comportment was far more often reassuring and comforting than gruff and intimidating.”

After Washington, Miller went to Central America to be roving correspondent during much of the 1980s — a time when regional flareups and U.S. interventions made the area a perilous place to report from.

On May 30, 1984, Miller and a group of reporters were in southern Nicaragua interviewing the counterrevolutionary Eden Pastora, known as “Commander Zero,” when a bomb went off in their midst. Miller was badly wounded and four of Pastora’s men and three journalists were killed, including Linda Frazier, wife of Miller’s AP colleague Joseph B. Frazier. No culprit was ever found.

A day later, from a hospital in nearby Costa Rica, Miller filed a first-person dispatch about the bombing.

“I was … trying to get my tape recorder to work. It had got wet during the boat ride. I had just given up on the tape recorder and was starting to step into the tight circle to take notes when there was a blinding explosion that knocked me back about 10 feet into a wall. … I crawled into an adjoining room and found myself at the open front of the building. I slid down a 2-by-4 brace to the ground, then rolled into a shallow slit trench that had been dug nearby.”

Miller recovered and returned to the field. Three years later, he was invited to participate in military exercises with the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan rebels known as the Contras. This was his sardonic assessment: “Having spent a few days recently covering a real war and a few more covering a make-believe war, I can tell you this: I preferred the mock war. It was more exciting. And the food was better.”

After Central America, Miller was named AP bureau chief for East Africa, based in Nairobi. From there, he would cover one of the most harrowing events of his career — the 1994 Rwandan genocide. He also covered the increasing societal breakdown after famine and clan warfare in Somalia, where his colleague Tina Susman was kidnapped in 1994. Miller spearheaded the negotiations to secure her release, and she was freed after 20 harrowing days.

“Unlike a lot of the older and far more experienced correspondents, Reid never made me feel like an outsider or like someone who hadn’t earned the right to be covering the world’s biggest stories,” Susman said Thursday. “I was one of the few female reporters on the scene at the time. But to Reid, I was a colleague who deserved as much respect and collegiality as anyone.”

Miller finished his career as the news cooperative’s South Korea bureau chief, based in Seoul. When he retired in 1999, he left behind dozens of journalists scattered across AP who remembered him as someone who, while bringing back the news for the world, nurtured careers on three continents.

“Reid Miller was the boss everybody loved — and the boss that many AP staffers wished they had,” said Edith M. Lederer, now the agency’s chief U.N. correspondent. “He had that amazing gift to listen to everyone carefully, get across what he wanted done never raising his voice, be very encouraging in difficult situations and send kudos for great stories.”

“He somehow established an esprit de corps among us that persists to this day,” friend and former colleague Marty Merzer wrote after a 2020 reunion of AP Florida staff.

In addition to his son Clay, Reid Miller is survived by his wife, former AP Pentagon reporter Pauline Jelinek; a daughter, Kimberly Matalon of Miami; another son, Reid G. Miller of Gainesville, Florida; three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Also surviving is a brother, Randall Humpling of Barstow, California.

Several years ago, Miller penned a profile of his own career for Connecting, a newsletter written by and for former AP staffers. His piece ended with an emphatic statement from him, and so will this one:

“Would I do it all over again? In a heartbeat.”