Ed Bradley Dies of Leukemia

Newsman Was Among Most Recognized Journalists

Ed Bradley, arguably the most visible black journalist of his generation and among the most recognizable television journalists of any race, died of leukemia Thursday morning, CBS News reported today.

Bradley, 65, joined the staff of the venerable “60 Minutes” newsmagazine 26 years ago.

“Bradley’s consummate skills as a broadcast journalist and his distinctive body of work were recognized with numerous awards, including 19 Emmys, the latest for a segment that reported the reopening of the 50-year-old racial murder case of Emmett Till,” CBS said.

Bradley was an inspiration to countless journalists and hoped to help more with a scholarship in his name administered by the Radio-Television News Directors Foundation. Bradley spoke of introducing deserving students of color to communications careers and, in 1994, endowed a $10,000 annual award under the RTNDF banner. A dozen young people of color have benefited.

“My formula for success has three elements: the talent you’re given, the hard work you do to get better at whatever it is that you do, and a certain amount of luck. And I always found that the harder I worked, the better my luck was, because I was prepared for that,” he told that organization’s magazine.

“I will not go into a story unprepared. I will do my homework, and that’s something I learned at an early age.”

When he was honored by the National Association of Black Journalists last year with its Lifetime Achievement Award, Bradley said:

“I would also like to thank all of those who came before me in our profession, the true pioneers who made it possible for all of us.

“. . . It doesn’t seem like it was a lifetime ago when we held the first meetings in New York—just a small band of brothers and sisters new to this business of journalism. There weren’t many of us then but we knew we needed to be together. It gives me great pleasure to know that I was there at the gestation of one of the early black journalists association[s]. I look around this room tonight and I can see how much our profession has changed and our numbers have grown. 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.

“In 1967, when I went to WCBS radio in New York, there were only three people of color in the newsroom: there was me, Willie Thrash, a radio technician, and Gus St Cyr who swept the floor. Today, almost one-third of the people at WCBS are minorities.

“That’s change in my lifetime.

“But, I should tell you I’m not finished yet. There are many more rivers to cross and, many more stories to cover and, I hope, a lot left in this lifetime.”

Just last month, he reported on the Duke lacrosse rape case on “60 Minutes,” raising doubt about the prosecution’s case.

In the interview with RTNDA’s Communicator, he recalled how he got into the business after graduating from Cheyney State University in 1964. He taught sixth grade for three and a half years.

“I guess it was over a year that I worked for no pay and when they did start paying me, I think I made about a dollar. It was either a dollar and a quarter or a dollar and a half; whatever the minimum wage was, that’s where I was. But you know, I always said that no one else on my block was on the radio, and it was fun. I knew that God put me on this earth to be on the radio.

“I did anything that would get me on the air. And I realized that there was no sports reporter, so I started covering sporting events. It got me into the games for free, and it got me on the air reporting on the games, the fights, things like that. And when Cheyney was in the middle of what became, I think, a 52-game winning streak over two seasons, I convinced the station that it should broadcast the games and that they should let me cover them. I had no experience with broadcasting basketball games, so I took a tape recorder and went to a playground where there was a summer league, and I stood up in the top of the stands and I called the game. Then I went home, listened to the tape, and I said, ‘Hell, I can do that.'”

He was asked whether his big break came during a riot.

“It was ’64 or ’65. I had had no training as a journalist and I used to listen to the CBS News hourly reports. That was my classroom. I would listen to how they told the story, to what elements they used, to how it sounded, and that’s who I patterned myself after, the people who were on CBS News.

“So I heard this reporter talking about a riot that was going on and I realized that he was a Philadelphia reporter. Then he signed off and I said, ‘Wow, that’s North Philly.’

“So I went up there, saw what was going on, called the station and they said, ‘Well, you know, do something and we’ll put you on the air.’ So I just got on the phone and the engineer just patched me in and I did reports. I’d get a community leader and bring him to the phone, call up the station and do an interview over the phone with the guy. Then I learned how to do wraparounds and things like that. I had no experience. The only thing I’d ever done with news was to read copy sitting at the microphone in the studio. I had never been out covering a story, but boy, was that fun. When I came back to the station, the general manager said, ‘Look, why don’t you go back out there and cover it?’ And they gave me a tape recorder and I just went out and covered it.”

Then he went to New York’s WCBS.

“I came to WCBS in 1967. During the interview, they asked if I could send in an actuality. I wasn’t sure what actuality was, but I couldn’t let them know that. So I said, ‘Well, just how do you mean? Specifically, what would you like?’

And they said, ‘Any actuality, anyone you’ve interviewed for stories. Just send us the air pieces.’ So I now know what actuality is. At that point I was FM program director and I was doing a five- or six-hour music show, so I wasn’t really doing news anymore. I knew I had no actuality and I said, ‘You know, we’re a small station, and we don’t save tape, so I don’t have anything to send you, but why don’t you give me a tape recorder and I’ll get you some actuality here?'”

“Ed Joyce, who was the news director, said they thought I was a little crazy, but they gave me a tape recorder, and I went out and I found a story-I read the paper and found a story. And part of the reason I got the job was because of the initiative I showed. Ed told me later, because of that, when reporters would come from out of town to interview for jobs, they would give them a tape recorder and look on the day book and say, ‘Here’s a news conference,’ or, ‘Here’s a demonstration, here’s a story, go cover it.’ And then they could see just what that person could do right there. So I was always real proud of that.”

The CBS announcement listed more of the achievements that followed.

“In 1983, two of Bradley’s reports for 60 Minutes won Emmy Awards: ‘In the Belly of the Beast,’ an interview with Jack Henry Abbott, a convicted murderer and author, and ‘Lena,’ a profile of singer Lena Horne.”

Bradley said last year, “If I arrived at the Pearly Gates and St. Peter said, ‘What have you done to deserve to get in here,’ I’d say, ‘Did you see my Lena Horne story?”

“He was honored with the Lifetime Achievement award from the National Association of Black Journalists. Three of his Emmys came at the 2003 awards: a Lifetime Achievement Emmy; one for a 60 Minutes report on brain cancer patients, “A New Lease on Life” (April 2002); and another for his hour on 60 Minutes II about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, ‘The Catholic Church on Trial’ (June 2002).

“Bradley’s 60 Minutes interview with condemned Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh (March 2000) was the only television interview ever given by the man guilty of one of the worst terrorist acts on American soil; it also earned Bradley an Emmy.

“His reporting on the worst school shooting in American history, ‘Columbine’ (April 2001), revealed on 60 Minutes II that authorities ignored telling evidence with which they might have prevented the massacre.

“Other hourlong reports by Bradley have prompted praise and action: ‘Death by Denial’ (June 2000) won a Peabody Award for focusing on the plight of Africans dying of AIDS and helped convince drug companies to donate and discount AIDS drugs; ‘Unsafe Haven’ (April 1999) spurred federal investigations into the nation’s largest chain of psychiatric hospitals; and “Town Under Siege’ (December 1997), about a small town battling toxic waste, was named one of the Ten Best Television Programs of 1997 by Time magazine.

“Prior to joining 60 Minutes, Bradley was a principal correspondent for ‘CBS Reports’ (1978-81), after serving as CBS News’ White House correspondent (1976-78). He was also anchor of the ‘CBS Sunday Night News’ (November 1976-May 1981) and of the CBS News magazine ‘Street Stories’ (January 1992-August 1993).

“Bradley joined CBS News as a stringer in its Paris bureau in September 1971. A year later, he was transferred to the Saigon bureau, where he remained until he was assigned to the CBS News Washington bureau in June 1974. He was named a CBS News correspondent in April 1973 and, shortly thereafter, was wounded while on assignment in Cambodia. In March 1975, he volunteered to return to Indochina and covered the fall of Cambodia and Vietnam.

“Prior to joining CBS News, he was a reporter for WCBS Radio, the CBS Owned station in New York (August 1967-July 1971). He had previously been a reporter for WDAS Radio Philadelphia (1963-67).”

Bradley, a subscriber to this column, was born June 22, 1941, in Philadelphia and graduated from Cheyney State College in 1964 with a B.S. in education.

• Ed Bradley video and oral history (Maynard Institute for Journalism Education History Project)
• Best of Ed Bradley video (CBS News)
• Ed Bradley remembers Vietnam (Newseum)
• NABJ mourns the loss of Ed Bradley
• Eric Deggans blog, St. Petersburg Times: Ed Bradley R.I.P.
• Brian Williams, NBC News: A tribute to Ed Bradley, 1941-2006

MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to post a comment on this subject and view those from others.

Remembering Ed Bradley, 1941-2006

Edited comments in remembrance of the CBS newsman:

• Ron Allen, NBC News correspondent:

A few weeks ago, while watching “60 Minutes,” my wife and I noticed that Ed Bradley didn’t introduce his story on camera sitting there in that familiar chair. Then, when his story began, we immediately noticed his voice sounded frail and weak. It was all a bit alarming. Just before that, he’d covered the Duke rape case. Yet another exclusive. Sometime before all of that, we had exchanged e-mails. I wanted to sit down for another chat. One of those talks we’d been having every now and then over the past 20 years or so, dating back to when I got my first job in this business at CBS News.

I’m writing this because, while we mourn his passing, and chronicle his extraordinary achievements as a reporter, it is not possible to overstate how important he was, and will continue to be, for a generation of African American journalists like myself. He, simply put, was “the man,” who so many of [us] dared dream that one day we could maybe, just maybe, achieve just a bit of what he did.

While there have been and continue to be influential black journalists in this business, Max Robinson, Hal Walker, Bernie Shaw, Bryant Gumbel, Jacqueline Adams, Carole Simpson, to name just a few, Ed was the dean of that rare club. Here was a guy who was a foreign correspondent. Only a handful of minority journalists ever have done that. He was a White House correspondent. The first black man CBS trusted to do that. Few of us ever get there. He was an anchor, and of course for the last 25 years or so, he was there in our living rooms Sunday evenings, often a bit late after the NFL football clock wound down, and then “60 Minutes'” clock began ticking away.

I can remember years ago asking him, “So, how the heck did you do it?” The answer, as I recall was, “hard work.” Doing your homework. Never getting typecast to do only the “black stories.” And, something he said to me recently again, “you’ve got to really believe you can get where you want to go.” Sounds so simple. And like all things we watched him do on television, he said it simply, painly, but with a powerful and compelling matter-of-factness that made even the most complicated elusive notion seem so obvious and clear.

Just to be clear, we weren’t close friends. I do wish I’d known him better. I last saw him briefly at an Emmy awards event, and before that over coffee in New York, during yet another “Ed, how should I handle this?” moment. Our connection was from that knowingness he had of everything younger reporters like me were experiencing, and his openness and willingness to share his wisdom and time.

On that day, ironically, he talked about how he was feeling much better, heading to the gym before all the young guys got there, and got in the way, how the travel covering the nation and the world was wear[y]ing, and how though approaching retirement age, he wasn’t going anywhere.

Don’t get me wrong; this isn’t just a black and white thing. But it is not possible to overstate how much of an inspiration he has been, because he was in so many ways able to transcend so many barriers, and to do it years ago, when the country and our business was not nearly as “diverse” as it now strives to be.

He was a real genuine authentic guy who even had the audacity, or self-assuredness, to wear an earring on TV, on CBS News. You’ve got to be sure of who you are to do that. That’s probably one reason he was such a great reporter. It’s easy to imagine him in the streets of Philadelphia years ago, or at Cheyney State College, a proud historically black college, not Harvard or Yale, or spinning records at WDAS-FM. Years later, he had a distinctive ease and confidence about him, whether interviewing criminals, comedians, politicians or just plain folks.

His contributions to broadcast journalism and to our nation’s knowledge of the world we live in are immense. His contributions to our culture, and to the hopes and dreams of other journalists of color, are beyond the words and stories he told with such elegance, compassion and grace.

• Melissa Cornick, investigative producer, ABC News “20/20”

I remember very early in my career, I was working in the Cronkite Documentary Unit and after pondering for a while, I walked across the hall to “60 Minutes” to Ed’s office and told him I wanted to work there. He left to talk to another person, who I won’t name. Later, she told me I would be “60 Minutes'” “affirmative action hire.” I was stunned by the comment, but believe I was the first black associate producer at “60 Minutes.” Ed was helpful, patient and no matter the story, he always had a world of knowledge behind his eyes.

One day, he had a bright idea of giving a house party for the staff after taking a class in French culinary arts. When we arrived, we discovered that he had decided to prepare rabbit for dinner. (He was having a ball—chef’s hat and apron.) I told him I wouldn’t eat it. Either he was really angry or he feigned it, but he teased me in French so badly all night. To my surprise, when we all sat down to dinner, he revealed a plate of delectable flounder that he’d whipped up just for me. I hope Ed continued to live life the way he wanted. His death is completely unexpected; almost unbelievable. The world will lose a pretty good chef, an aficionado of great music, a top journalist and a wonderful man.

• Jackie Jones, veteran journalist, Jones Coaching, LLC:

My lasting memory of Ed was seeing him throw down on the dance floor at a party after the NABJ awards ceremony one year, celebrating with Charlayne Hunter-Gault, who had won an award. Earlier that evening, he had been the epitome of poise, grace and class in his tuxedo, introducing prize winners. Later that night, still tuxedo-clad, he was on the dance floor woofing to “Atomic Dog.” He was funny and self-effacing and never thought he was too big to rub elbows with the hoi polloi.

• Debra Lee, chair and CEO, Black Entertainment Television:

Ed Bradley represented a special generation of African-American journalists—one who proudly, but somewhat quietly, carried the mantle of pioneer. He was the consummate professional whose most probing and controversial questions still represented the very best in journalist ethics and news judgment. Ed was a favorite of our BET News division. He often lent his voice and expertise to help us deliver the news from an African-American perspective. We will miss him. [CBS journalists often appeared on the old “BET Nightly News” after BET was bought by Viacom, which also owns CBS. Bradley also hosted a “town hall” meeting, “BET Open Mic: Secretary Colin Powell Speaks to Our Youth,” in the runup to the war in Iraq in February 2003.]

• Wynton Marsalis, musician, artistic director, “Jazz at Lincoln Center.”

Marsalis asked that announcers read this introduction to public radio’s “Jazz at Lincoln Center Radio,” which Bradley hosted:

Perhaps you’ve already heard the sad news that a great journalist and a great lover and supporter of jazz, Ed Bradley, has died at the age of 65. Ed was a deep fan of jazz and a board member and special friend to us at “Jazz at Lincoln Center.” He was the host of many of our live events, and we could see his love of the music as we watched him keeping time and smiling. We could feel his love of the music in the time he took from his “60 Minutes” schedule to host these radio programs.

You are about to hear one of the programs that was recorded shortly before he died, and we know that as you listen, you’ll hear Ed’s great love for jazz culture and jazz music.

Thank you, Ed, for sharing your time and your passion with us.

• Greg Morrison, broadcast producer, former news director, Black Family Channel:

When NABJ was in St. Louis, Ed Bradley was a speaker. He reminded us that during times of slavery, Blacks who could not worship with whites on Sunday would have their own services, often in a “clearing in the woods.” They would sing, dance. shout and offer praise in their own fashion. Bradley told the group that NABJ was “our clearing in the woods.” Today, there is sadness and grief in that space

• Gary Anthony Ramsay, president, New York Association of Black Journalists:

NYABJ joins the chorus of journalists from around the globe who are pained by the loss of Ed Bradley. He was not only a lifetime member of this organization, he was one of the cornerstones of its creation. Without his work and leadership, it is safe to say that many of us would not be in journalism today.

Ed was an inspiration to generations of journalists of all races, everywhere. When you say his name, it means “Excellence in reporting,” something many aspire to. Seeing Ed in Vietnam and Africa as a child was one of many moments that led my feet to Kosovo, Haiti and Iraq. His work has led a countless number of us to our own travels to cover stories here and around the world. Knowing someone who looked like us was involved in the very important task of recording history told us that we could do the same thing.

Even after arriving and continuing to work at the pinnacle of his career, Ed remained one of the most accessible correspondents at the national level. A month ago, I called Ed for advice on a career matter and during what would now be our final conversation, he ended with, “If there is anything you think I can do to help, please don?t hesitate to call.” The first time I met him it was in a jazz club, a place he loved to be. That is the Ed Bradley I knew and will never forget.

There will many more eulogies and memories more eloquent, passionate and poetic that this. So of Ed Bradley and of his inspiration and his place in making a place for us, I will borrow from Langston Hughes:

I, too, sing America

I am a darker brother

They send me to the kitchen

When company comes

But I laugh and eat well

And grow strong

Tomorrow

I’ll be at the table,

When company comes

Nobody’ll dare say to me

“Eat in the kitchen” then

Besides

They’ll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed

I, too, am America.

Go with God Ed, We miss you already.

• Sree Sreenivasan, professor at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, co-founder of the South Asian Journalists Association:

Ed was an inspiration to ALL of us. He set the standard by which every journalist of color will always be compared. No reporter—of any color—had his range, his drive and his style.

• Robin Washington, editorial page editor, Duluth (Minn.) News Tribune:

All I can say is that in my younger days in NABJ, I remember being on the dance floor a few feet from Bradley. He had received an award at the convention, but after all the formal stuff, he partied with the rest of us. And what really struck me was he couldn’t dance any better than I could! Made me feel better about myself and my be-like-Ed ambitions in innumerable ways.

• Rep. Melvin L. Watt, D-N.C., chairman, Congressional Black Caucus:

. . . a skilled broadcast journalist with a distinctive body of work. During his extraordinary career, Mr. Bradley was one of broadcast journalism’s luminaries who worked on an incredible array of stories after joining the CBS newsmagazine in 1981. Mr. Bradley set an exceptional standard for journalism students and professionals everywhere, particularly African Americans.

• Marc Watts, president, Signature Management Group, former CNN national correspondent:

Ed Bradley was the ultimate role model for any African-American male broadcast journalist. He knocked down so many barriers for us. “60 Minutes” to this day is still my favorite television program, and to watch it from hereon without seeing him will seem like something is missing.

I have so many fond memories of interactions with him during my days at CNN. Whenever he showed up on the scene, we all knew to ratchet it up because we didn’t want to get scooped by him, but no matter what story it was, he always scooped us! I can remember during the Simpson criminal trial, he showed up at the courthouse. He was just as big as any other celebrity who rolled through. Later that week, on Sunday night, I turned on “60 Minutes” and there he was with a sit down one-on-one interview with Johnnie Cochran. I knew Ed was up to something. I was mad, too, because I knew I had gotten beat on something during the O.J. trial. That’s the kind of journalist he was. No matter what his friendships were in the press corps, his desire was to beat us all on the story.

He was in L.A. so much during the early 90s that I used to joke with him that he might want to get an apartment here. Brush fires, floods, Rodney King beating, Reggy Denny beating trial and O.J. –he filed reports on all of that.

In New York once, we were sitting down having a drink and I asked him whether he considered himself a Black reporter or a reporter who happens to be Black. He said, “Marc, I’ll never forget where I came from, but when you boil it all down, I’m just a journalist who happens to be Black.”

Today the news world lost a great journalist.