He provoked more outraged letters to the editor than any writer in memory at The Post, said Chalmers M. Roberts, a longtime correspondent.

In 1970, Mr. von Hoffman raised a storm of protest with a column that referred to American prisoners of war in Vietnam as a political issue involving “just 1,500 men.” Angry letters from prisoners’ families and support groups flooded in; many were published, along with a Post editorial disagreeing with the column but defending the author’s right to his opinion.

“My life would have been a lot simpler had Nicholas von Hoffman not appeared in the paper,” the publisher, Katharine Graham, wrote in her 1997 memoir, “Personal History.” But, she added, “I firmly believed that he belonged at The Post.”

Mr. von Hoffman, a thickset man, sometimes let his prematurely gray hair get a bit long. But he hardly looked the part of a radical. He wore spectacles, dressed casually in sports jackets and jeans, smoked a pipe and looked cool, smiling and relaxed, even when caught up in a dispute on national television.

In the early 1970s, he became a familiar commentator on the CBS program “60 Minutes,” paired on the “Point/Counterpoint” segment with the conservative James J. Kilpatrick. Don Hewitt, the producer, fired Mr. von Hoffman in 1974 after he called Nixon, on the air, “a dead mouse on the kitchen floor that everyone was afraid to touch and throw in the garbage.”

Nicholas von Hoffman was born in New York City on Oct. 16, 1929, to Carl von Hoffman and the former Anna Bruenn. His father was an immigrant Russian cavalry officer. After graduating from Fordham Preparatory School in the Bronx in 1948, Nicholas went to Chicago, intending to enroll at Loyola University. Instead, he took a research job at the University of Chicago, and in 1954 joined Mr. Alinsky as a field organizer in black and Hispanic communities on the South Side.