Bonnie Angelo | Journalist and author, 93

Bonnie Angelo, 93, a Time magazine reporter who covered the White House, Britain, and wrote a well-received book about the impact of presidential mothers on their sons, died Sunday at a nursing home in Bethesda, Md.

The cause was complications from dementia, said her son, Christopher Levy.

Ms. Angelo cannonballed to the forefront of political journalism with a ferocious work ethic. Journalist Nan Robertson once called her "ninety-eight pounds of pepper out of North Carolina."

She hopscotched among papers including Long Island's Newsday, where she covered the Kennedy White House and the space race, before landing at Time in 1966.

In 1978, she was tapped as Time's bureau chief in London. The election the next year of Margaret Thatcher as British prime minister - the first woman to lead a major Western power - "kept me in cover stories," she later said. She returned to this country in 1985, first as New York bureau chief and later as a correspondent with a wide-ranging portfolio.

In 2000, she wrote the book First Mothers: The Women Who Shaped the Presidents, a corrective to a widely held notion that first ladies were the dominant female influence on the nation's commanders in chief. Ms. Angelo focused on the modern presidency and showed that the mothers often transferred their ambitions from their feckless husbands to their promising sons.

- Washington Post