Kenneth Reich, 70; Times reporter covered effort to win '84 Olympics for L.A.

Reich, who had been in failing health the last several years with diabetes and heart disease, died in his sleep Monday at his home in Sherman Oaks, said his daughter Kathleen.

Hired by The Times in 1965, Reich was initially a reporter in the Westside bureau. He later covered the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy, George Wallace, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. He also served as Atlanta bureau chief from 1970-72, was briefly editor of the Op-Ed page in 1972, and spent the next five years as a political writer.

In 1977, while continuing to report on politics, he began a seven-year stint covering Los Angeles' efforts to capture and host the 1984 Olympic Games -- an assignment his daughter said he considered his greatest professional accomplishment.

"When Los Angeles won the bid to host the 1984 Summer Olympics, Ken went after the story like a bulldog . . ," Frank O. Sotomayor, Reich's former editor on Metro coverage of the Games, said in an e-mail Monday.

"Aware of the financial debacle of the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, his aggressive reporting ensured that the L.A. taxpayers would not foot the bill for the Games," Sotomayor said.

Bill Dwyre, The Times' sports editor from 1981 to 2006 and now a sports columnist for the paper, said Reich reported every aspect of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, from finances to site selection -- as well as writing stories about how the Olympics would affect traffic, the local economy and pollution.

Noting that a privately financed Olympics was highly unusual, Dwyre said committee President Peter Ueberroth "started with nothing, and he had to work to get sponsorships and get advances from the TV networks. That's what he used to pay the bills."

The committee's goal "was to just break even and present a great Games to the city," Dwyre said.

But Reich kept doing financial projections, he said, "and his reports predicted that the L.A. Olympics would turn a rather sizable profit." The Games earned more than $200 million.

"It was one of his best reporting coups," Dwyre said.

Reich, who wrote the book "Making It Happen: Peter Ueberroth and the 1984 Olympics," continued working in the sports department for a couple of years after the Olympics, doing business-related sports reporting.