In the last article to carry his byline, in The Times on April 20, he wrote that while President Trump and Republicans in Congress say they are committed to protecting people with pre-existing medical conditions, many would have significantly less protection under their health care revisions.

Image Mr. Pear in an undated photograph. For years he worked standing up at a specially built desk that he had gotten after undergoing back surgery. Credit... The New York Times

In the early 1990s, much to the White House’s consternation, Mr. Pear regularly pierced the cone of silence that the Clinton administration had erected around its negotiations for a national health care consensus. A number of White House allies even accused him of undermining the process by publishing leaks about incremental developments.

Many of his colleagues rallied to his defense, as did many medical professionals. In an email, Adam Liptak, The Times’s Supreme Court correspondent, said, “Robert knew as much about health care policy as any politician, official, congressional staffer or supposed expert, and he let them get away with nothing.”

Robert Lawrence Pear was born in Washington on June 12, 1949, to Philip and Marion (Kopel) Pear. His father was an accountant and tax lawyer; his mother had moved to Washington from Massachusetts during World War II to translate intercepted Japanese messages for the Office of Strategic Services. She later worked for the World Bank.

Growing up in the nation’s capital, Robert (never Bob) and his younger brother were under orders from their father to read the front page of the local newspapers before turning to the sports section. Gripped by President John F. Kennedy’s assassination when he was 14, Robert recorded every moment of television that weekend on a reel-to-reel tape recorder and collected an archive of newspaper coverage from across the country.

Fascinated with policy and politics and the personalities that drove them, he soon embraced journalism as the vehicle through which he could transform what one former colleague, the legal correspondent Fred P. Graham, described as his greatest strength — being nosy — into a career.