SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — James C. Lagier, a former Associated Press bureau chief in the U.S. and Japan whose four-decade career included covering nuclear tests in the Pacific, filing the bulletin on Robert F. Kennedy’s death and overseeing AP’s reporting of the 1995 Kobe earthquake that killed more than 6,000 people, has died.

Lagier’s niece, Sydney Lagier, said he died Saturday in Walnut Creek, California, after battling cancer. He was 80.

A native of Manteca, California, Lagier joined the AP in Honolulu in 1962 and retired in 2001 as chief of the Tokyo bureau. The two locations were fitting bookends to a career that also took Lagier to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, Columbus, Ohio, and Fresno, California, as a reporter, newsroom manager and executive.

“Across the decades, I never met anyone who didn’t like Jim Lagier,” said Louis D. Boccardi, AP’s president and chief executive officer from 1985 to 2003. “That was all the more remarkable, given that time and again we thrust him into difficult assignments, whether dealing with internal AP issues or taking on a challenge somewhere in the universe we served.”

Early in his career, Lagier covered America’s atmospheric nuclear tests in the Pacific and flew on a B-52 bombing mission over Vietnam from Guam. While serving as news desk editor in Los Angeles in 1968, he worked on coverage of the assassination of U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and filed the AP bulletin on Kennedy’s death. As bureau chief in San Francisco from 1972 to 1974, he oversaw coverage of the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst. And in Japan, he supervised reporting about the 1995 Kobe earthquake that killed more than 6,000 people.