CBS’ Ed Bradley Succumbs to Leukemia
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Allie @ Gone Hollywood | Thursday, November 9, 2006 |
Ed Bradley, the award-winning television journalist who broke racial barriers at CBS News and created a distinctive, powerful body of work during his 26 years on “60 Minutes,” died Thursday. He was 65.
Though he had been ill and had undergone heart bypass surgery about a year ago, he remained active on “60 Minutes.” In one of his last reports, an investigation of the Duke case that aired last month, he broke new ground with the first interviews with the accused.
“The first time I really understood that he was ill, on the air, was a couple of weeks ago,” said fellow “60 Minutes” correspondent Mike Wallace. “He was narrating a story, and his rich voice wasn’t there anymore. It was just thinner.”
Born June 22, 1941, Bradley grew up in a tough section of Philadelphia, where he once recalled that his parents worked 20-hour days at two jobs apiece. “I was told, `You can be anything you want, kid,’” he once told an interviewer. “When you hear that often enough, you believe it.”
After graduating from the historically black Cheyney State College (now Cheyney University of Pennsylvania), he launched his career as a jazz DJ — he was a lifelong jazz fan — and news reporter for a Philadelphia radio station in 1963. He moved to New York’s WCBS radio four years later.
He joined CBS News as a stringer in the Paris bureau in 1971, transferring a year later to the Saigon bureau during the Vietnam War. He was wounded while on assignment in Cambodia. He was named a CBS News correspondent in early 1973 and moved to the Washington bureau in June 1974. He later returned to Vietnam, covering the fall of that country and Cambodia.
Cronkite recalled first meeting Bradley in Vietnam: “He seemed to be fearless, an incredibly smart reporter in getting the story.”
After Southeast Asia, Bradley returned to the United States and covered Jimmy Carter’s successful campaign for the White House. He followed Carter to Washington, in 1976 becoming CBS’ first black White House correspondent — a prestigious position that Bradley didn’t enjoy.
He jumped from Washington to doing pieces for “CBS Reports,” traveling to Cambodia, China, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia. It was his Emmy-winning 1979 piece on Vietnamese boat refugees that eventually landed him on “60 Minutes.”
The latter piece still resonates for Wallace. “I’ll never forget the picture of Ed picking up a man who was about to drown,” he said. “… If Bradley told a story, you could be sure it was accurate, and at bottom it was done with integrity.”
“60 Minutes” producer Don Hewitt, in his book “Minute by Minute,” was quick to appreciate Bradley after he arrived at the show. “He’s so good and so savvy and so lights up the tube every time he’s on it that I wonder what took us so long,” Hewitt wrote.
Bradley recently served as a radio host for “Jazz at Lincoln Center,” where he won one of his four Peabody awards.
Wynton Marsalis, artistic director of Lincoln Center’s jazz department, called Bradley “one of our definitive cultural figures, a man of unsurpassed curiosity, intelligence, dignity and heart.”
Accepting his lifetime achievement award from the black journalists association, Bradley remembered being present at some of the organization’s first meetings in New York.
“I look around this room tonight and I can see how much our profession has changed and our numbers have grown,” he said. “I also see it every day as I travel the country reporting stories for ‘60 Minutes.’ All I have to do is turn on the TV and I can see the progress that has been made.”
But, he added, “There are many more rivers to cross, and many more stories to cover and, I hope, a lot left in this lifetime.”
Bradley is survived by his wife, Patricia Blanchet. source
