Alvin Moscow, who wrote a best-selling account of the sinking of the ocean liner Andrea Doria in 1956, then collaborated on the memoirs of several public figures, including Richard M. Nixon soon after he lost the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy, died on Feb. 6 in North Las Vegas, Nev. He was 98.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his daughter Nina Moscow.
Mr. Moscow was a reporter for The Associated Press when he covered the court hearings focused on determining the cause of the violent collision between the Andrea Doria, which was en route from Genoa, Italy, to New York, and the European-bound Stockholm, in dense fog about 45 miles south of Nantucket Island in Massachusetts on the evening of July 25, 1956.
In all, 51 people died. But in a remarkable civil maritime rescue operation, more than 1,600 passengers and crew members survived.
In “Collision Course: The Andrea Doria and the Stockholm” (1959), Mr. Moscow described the moment of impact between the ships:
“With the force of a battering ram of more than one million tons, the Stockholm prow plunged into the speeding Italian ship, crumbling like a thin sheet of tin, until her energy was spent. With the Stockholm pinioned in her, the Andrea Doria, twice her size, pivoted sharply under the impact, dragging the Stockholm along as the giant propellers of the Italian liner churned the black sea violently to white.”
Walter Lord, who had described the sinking of the Titanic in his book “A Night to Remember” (1955), praised Mr. Moscow’s “magnificent analysis of the accident and sinking” in a review of “Collision Course” in The New York Times.
Mr. Moscow, he noted, wrote that the Andrea Doria was thought to be unsinkable “because it was difficult to imagine more than two of her watertight compartments flooded and she was designed to float if that happened.”
“This,” Mr. Lord added, “is precisely the reason why the Titanic was considered unsinkable.”
Mr. Moscow left The Associated Press after the publication of “Collision Course” and within two years was working with Nixon, the former vice president and presidential candidate, who was running an ultimately unsuccessful campaign for governor of California against Edmund G. Brown, the incumbent, in 1962.
The result was “Six Crises” (1962), in which Nixon recalled challenges that he had faced during his political career. They included, among other moments, his hot pursuit of accusations of Communism against the diplomat Alger Hiss while in Congress and his impassioned defense, as a senator from California, of his handling of about $18,000 quietly raised by his supporters during his 1952 campaign for the vice presidency on the Republican ticket with Dwight D. Eisenhower. It became known as the “Checkers speech” because at one point Nixon said he would not return a cocker spaniel, named Checkers, that had been given to his two daughters by an admirer from Texas that year.
Nixon did not credit Mr. Moscow as his co-writer (he thanked him in the book for “directing research and organizing material”). But Kenneth McCormick, the book’s editor, told The Times in 1979 that Mr. Moscow wrote all but the last chapter, about Nixon’s narrow loss in the 1960 campaign, which Nixon wrote himself because Mr. Moscow was still busy writing earlier sections.
By the time Nixon wrote the final chapter, Mr. McCormick said, he “had assimilated Al’s approach to the figure of Richard Nixon.”
Mr. Moscow was born Alvin Goldstein on Dec. 31, 1925, in Brooklyn. His mother, Sylvia (Pearlman) Goldstein, whose family immigrated from Siberia, opened a beauty salon after her husband, Ruby Goldstein, left the family when Alvin was a year old. About a dozen years later, she married Jacob Moscow, an executive with the Prudential Insurance Company, who adopted Alvin.
Mr. Moscow got an early start on a journalism career, his family said, when he was hired in 1943 as an assistant to the night city editor at The Times. He stayed in the job for a year until he entered the Navy, and he served as a radioman in the South Pacific from 1944 to 1946.
After his discharge, he earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Missouri in 1948. He was soon hired as a radio news writer by The A.P., and after a year he became a general news reporter.
After “Six Crises,” Mr. Moscow toggled between collaborations and books written under his own name. He wrote “Merchants of Heroin” (1968), about an international narcotics operation; “The Rockefeller Inheritance” (1977), an examination of the wealth bequeathed to the five grandsons of the oil billionaire John D. Rockefeller; and “As It Happened” (1979), which he wrote for William S. Paley, the influential builder of the CBS broadcast empire.
Sally Bedell Smith, who wrote “In All His Glory” (1990), a comprehensive biography of Mr. Paley, said in a phone interview that Mr. Moscow’s book “provided the scaffolding for my book — it had lots of dates and places — but it was very much sanitized.”
“There was a lot in ‘As It Happened,’” she added, “that was only partly as it happened.”
Mr. Moscow also wrote “Every Secret Thing” (1981) with the newspaper heiress Patty Hearst (who wrote it as Patricia Campbell Hearst and is now known as Patricia Hearst Shaw), who was abducted in 1974, when she was 19, from her apartment in Berkeley, Calif., by a small band of terrorists, the Symbionese Liberation Army.
After being confined in a closet, blindfolded and abused, she claimed a new identity as an urban guerrilla named Tania and wielded an assault rifle with other members of the terrorist group during a bank robbery. She was convicted of robbery and sentenced to seven years in prison. She was released after 22 months under an executive clemency order from President Jimmy Carter.
Mr. Moscow’s other books include “Managing” (1984), a collaboration with Harold Geneen, the longtime chief executive of the conglomerate International Telephone and Telegraph, and “Twice in a Lifetime: From Soap to Skyscrapers” (1988), which he wrote with Charles Luckman, the architect who was also the president of Lever Brothers.
In addition to his daughter Nina, Mr. Moscow is survived by his wife, Deirdre (Meadow) Moscow, whom he married in 1954; another daughter, Joanna Moscow; a son, Andrew; and one grandson.
“Collision Course,” which spent 15 weeks on The Times’s general best-seller list, remained Mr. Moscow’s best-known book. In it, he memorably wrote about the Andrea Doria’s sinking:
“The Andrea Doria plunged beneath the waves on her right side, bow first. Her stern rose higher in the air and then was gone, sending a small fountain spray of sea water up toward the sky. The Andrea Doria disappeared from sight at 10:09 on the morning of July 26, 1956, two miles southeast of where she and the Stockholm had collided exactly 11 hours earlier.”
