Joel Brinkley, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who spent more than two decades at The New York Times, where he displayed range, rigor and lucid writing as a White House correspondent, as Jerusalem bureau chief and as an editor, died on Tuesday in Washington. He was 61.

The cause was acute undiagnosed leukemia, resulting in respiratory failure from pneumonia, said his wife, Sabra Chartrand.

Mr. Brinkley was a son of David Brinkley, the widely respected television news anchor, and he established his own journalism reputation early in his career. In 1980, while working at The Louisville Courier-Journal, he won a Pulitzer for international reporting for his coverage of the Cambodian refugee crisis. He was not yet 30.

He joined The Times in October 1983 as a general assignment reporter in the Washington bureau and quickly made a mark with a package of articles, written with the Times correspondent Philip Taubman, about a terrorist attack on the United States Marine headquarters in Lebanon, near the Beirut airport, on Oct. 23. A man driving a Mercedes truck had crashed into the headquarters and detonated the equivalent of six tons of dynamite, killing 241 American service members.