Alastair Hetherington, who has died aged 79, was editor of the Guardian newspaper for most of the third quarter of the 20th century.
During that period he transformed the newspaper almost beyond recognition whilst managing to remain true to its purposes.
He was one of the great editors of his generation and bequeathed a paper modernised, esteemed and secure.
Alastair Hetherington's early life, like many others, was diverted and utterly changed by war. At 26, when he might have been pursuing a distinguished academic career similar to his father's, he was commanding tanks on the north German plain.
The effect was lasting. He was by nature intellectual, shy, even gauche and he always believed he lacked the common touch.
In war he developed a taste for action and, at an early stage, for responsibility.
When fighting ended he helped set up Die Welt, the federal republic's first national newspaper. He saw the indispensable uses of daily journalism in a free society.
He returned to Scotland and the Glasgow Herald in 1946. In 1950 he moved to the Manchester Guardian and soon became its defence correspondent and foreign editor.
In late 1956, somewhat to his surprise and due to the unexpected illness and retirement of the incumbent editor, Alastair Hetherington found himself catapulted into the editorship just as Anglo-French forces invaded Egypt to grasp the Suez Canal. He was 36.
With no hesitation the Guardian waded in, a lone voice against the British government, condemning the action as an act of folly, without justification in any terms but that of brief expediency.
Although he did not always initiate change, he willingly embraced it.
By the end of the 1950s news had replaced classified advertisements on the front page, and Manchester had been dropped from the title.
Together with Laurence Scott, chairman of the board, he became convinced that the Guardian had to become a truly national newspaper, printed and distributed from London as well as Manchester.
The move to London in 1961 was far-sighted and perilous. It almost scuppered the paper. Editorially the Guardian flourished but the Manchester management team was out of its depth, the printing unions avaricious, and costs soared.
In 1966 Scott concluded the Guardian could no longer be supported in its existing form. While Alastair Hetherington was in Israel, Scott proposed and almost sealed an amalgamation with the Times, the paper's main competitor.
He rushed back, appealed to the Scott Trust the ultimate owners, and prevented the almost certain obliteration of the Guardian.
Subsequently, he took a far greater interest in management; the commercial side of the paper was thoroughly reinforced and he was its undoubted master. Guardian readers (and its own journalists) probably never appreciated fully how close was the call, nor Alastair Hetherington's contribution to diversity in the British press.
Diversity was his gift to the Guardian as well. Fearsome in the face of a public outrage, with his staff he suggested, rarely directed. He was a good chooser of people and, having chosen gave them great freedom.
He and they widened and strengthened the paper.
He appointed Fleet Street's first woman news editor; he expanded foreign news coverage as other papers contracted it; he sensed the coming importance of news features that were to be the mark of broadsheet supremacy in Britain. He foraged a place for serious newspapers in the television age.
Alastair Hetherington edited the Guardian for almost 20 years. He left in 1975, four years short of normal retirement age, to run the BBC in his native Scotland.
His yearning for a greater degree of independence than Broadcasting House in London would allow led to disagreements and his departure. He became research professor of media studies at Stirling University, continued to write, broadcast and make films.
Entirely appropriately, between 1984 and 1989 he was chairman of the Scott Trust, the body ultimately responsible for the Guardian's spirited independence which he had done so much to enhance and defend.
Alastair Hetherington was married twice, first to Miranda Oliver by whom he had four children: Tom, Alex, Mary and Lucy; and latterly to Sheila Janet Cameron. All survive him.
Hector Alastair Hetherington: born 1919; died October, 1999