NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE ).- Karl E. Meyer, a third-generation journalist who fortified his reporting as a foreign correspondent and editorial writer for The Washington Post and The New York Times with a scholar’s grasp of historical context, died Sunday in Manhattan. He was 91.

The cause was prostate cancer, his wife, Shareen Blair Brysac, said.

As one of the most adventurous reporters of his generation, Meyer covered Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba, the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion there, the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, the plundering of the world’s cultural patrimony and much more.

As a columnist and editorialist with a doctorate in politics, he shaped and supported his opinions through firsthand reporting, defying what he once called the patron of his “unruly calling,” St. Simeon Stylites, who pontificated for 30 years from atop a stone pillar (or column) in fifth-century Syria without abandoning his perch.

In 1962, Meyer, mining his sources for The Post, and Tad Szulc, a correspondent for The Times, jointly detailed the Bay of Pigs episode in the book “The Cuban Invasion: The Chronicle of a Disaster.”

Szulc had broken the news early in 1961 that a rebel army was being covertly trained to topple Castro. His editors at The Times agreed not to report that the invasion was imminent and that the plot was being financed and directed by the Central Intelligence Agency.

President John F. Kennedy had been publicly furious about disclosures about preparations for the raid. But he later confided to The Times’ managing editor at the time, Turner Catledge, “If you had printed more about the operation, you would have saved us from a colossal mistake.”

Meyer had also been among the first journalists to report on the failed coup.

It was not Meyer’s first encounter with Castro; in the late 1950s he interrupted a vacation to arrange a secret rendezvous with him in Castro’s mountain retreat. In a deliberately cryptic cable to Robert H. Estabrook, The Post’s editorial page editor, from Santiago de Cuba, on the island’s southeast coast, Meyer wrote: “Business good in our calling. Need more time to interview brothers. Unless I hear from you, I will be off.”

When Meyer did not hear back, he took off by horseback. He returned to Santiago de Cuba to find a return telegram from his editor. “Take all the time you need,” it said. He had already gathered enough information to produce a five-part series on Castro’s revolutionary agenda.

In 1968, Meyer scored a hard-to-get visa to Czechoslovakia after lunching with Joseph Alsop, the influential Post columnist. Alsop, he recalled, referred him to a photograph showing Czech leader Alexander Dubcek with Soviet leaders and observed: “Of course the Russians will invade. You can tell by their expressions. They want to eat him alive.”

Meyer arrived in Prague in time to cover the invasion.

He later said his diplomatic coverage had been guided by the advice of Flora Lewis, whom he succeeded as The Post’s London bureau chief when she became The Times’ foreign affairs columnist. He quoted her as saying: “Remember, Karl, it’s not the ambassadors you want to cultivate but the No. 2 person in the embassy. They have better information and can afford to be indiscreet.”

In 1990, as an editorial writer for The Times, Meyer was assigned the delicate task of responding to a new biography by S.J. Taylor, “Stalin’s Apologist,” which elaborated on serious reporting lapses by Walter Duranty, the Moscow bureau chief of The Times in the 1920s and early ’30s.

In a signed editorial, Meyer concluded that Duranty had been guilty of “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper” — including his indifference to the 1930-31 famine in which millions perished in Ukraine, a result of Stalin’s policy of forced collectivization of farms. Duranty had dismissed the reports of famine as “mostly bunk.”

“Having bet his reputation on Stalin, he strove to preserve it by ignoring or excusing Stalin’s crimes,” Meyer wrote. “He saw what he wanted to see.”

Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage. In 2003, despite continued controversy over the award, the Pulitzer board decided that it did not have enough grounds to revoke the prize.

Meyer’s opinion bore more fruit in another case, when ancient monuments were about to be lost to flooding with the construction of the Aswan Dam in Egypt in the 1960s.

He proposed in an editorial that one of the major artifacts be preserved and presented as a gift to the U.S., which was providing major financial support for the dam project. The Egyptians selected the gift: the Temple of Dendur. The first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, suggested the recipient: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The reconstructed temple remains a showpiece of the museum.

Karl Ernest Meyer was born May 22, 1928, in Madison, Wisconsin, a grandson of George Meyer, the editor of Die Germania, a German-language newspaper in Milwaukee in the early 1900s. Karl’s father, Ernest L. Meyer, was a columnist for The Capital Times in Madison and moved to New York in 1935 to write a column for The New York Post. His mother, Dorothy (Narevsky) Meyer, was a teacher.

After graduating from the Elisabeth Irwin School in Greenwich Village, Meyer earned a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Wisconsin in 1951. He received a master’s degree in public affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and a doctorate in politics from Princeton.

He was hired by The Times as a reporter in 1952 and left four years later for The Post, where he was an editorial writer for eight years, London bureau chief for five and New York bureau chief for two. He was the American correspondent for the British magazine New Statesman from 1961 to 1965.

A visit to Peru in 1959 sparked an enduring fascination with archaeology, leading to Meyer’s book “The Plundered Past” (1973). It was serialized in The New Yorker and became the basis of a 1974 ABC television documentary, “The Culture Thieves,” which helped inspire a cultural heritage restitution movement.

Meyer had been a contributing editor and television columnist for the magazine Saturday Review for four years when he joined the Times editorial board as a senior writer on foreign affairs in 1979. He retired in 1998.

He edited World Policy Journal, the flagship publication of the World Policy Institute, from 2000 to 2008. In an interview with The Times while in that post in 2002, he warned about “the emergence of a politically powerful Christian right.”

“It worries me, as I worry about the rise of militant Islam or Hindu nationalism,” he said. “These are all variations of the same problem. They seek a theological sanction for secular foreign policy choices.”

After he retired from The Times, Meyer and his wife, Brysac, who is also a journalist, wrote the first of five books on which they collaborated, “Tournament of Shadows: The Race for Empire in Central Asia” (1999), inspired by their trip through the Khyber Pass.

His first two marriages, to Iris Hill and Sarah Peck, ended in divorce. In addition to Brysac, whom he married in 1989, he is survived by three children from his second marriage, Ernest, Heather and Jonathan Meyer; three granddaughters; and his sister, Susan L. Meyer.

In 1990, Meyer edited an anthology, “Pundits, Poets and Wits: An Omnibus of American Newspaper Columns” (1990), in which he quoted an essayist’s prediction in 1866 that with “the rise of neutral, fact-based reporting,” editorials would soon be obsolete.

“The opposite happened,” Meyer wrote. “Opinion journalism acquired fresh life, as readers, swamped by fact, turned to editorials for selection and judgment, salted by adjectives not sanctioned in news departments.”

“They have been energetic advocates,” he added, “exerting influence through the quality of their arguments and their independence from an electorate that has learned to put up with them.”

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