After reading the stories below, check out these interviews. And don’t forget to watch the “60 Minutes” tribute this Sunday night.

NEW YORK (CNN) — Ed Bradley, the longtime “60 Minutes” correspondent who reported on subjects ranging from jazz musicians to the Columbine school shootings, has died. He was 65. 

Bradley died Thursday at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital of leukemia, according to staff members at the CBS program.

Bradley joined “60 Minutes” during the 1981-82 season after two years as White House correspondent for CBS News and three years at “CBS Reports.” His reporting over the years won him a Peabody Award, 19 Emmys and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, among many others.

CNN’s John Roberts, who worked with Bradley at CBS, said the newsman was “always a person you could sit down with and he could keep you intrigued for hours at a time with the stories he could tell.”

Roberts called Bradley a “first-rate” journalist.

“He clearly was a field reporter,” said Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post media reporter. “He did not want to be chained to a desk.” Kurtz also hosts CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”

“He was somebody who liked being out there on the story, whether it was in the Vietnam War or whether it was doing investigative work or bringing alive the plight of families who were dealing with illnesses or violence or other issues he covered,” Kurtz added.

Bradley was known for his thoughtful, mellifluous voice and often deceptively relaxed interviewing style. In 2000, he conducted the only television interview with condemned Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. His hourlong report on the plight of Africans dying of AIDS, “Death by Denial,” won a Peabody.

Bradley, a great music lover, also interviewed Miles Davis, Lena Horne and Paul Simon, among other performers. He once moonlighted as a disc jockey, earning $1.50 an hour spinning records while working as a teacher by day.

Bradley began his career in radio at WDAS in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1963. In 1967 he moved to New York and radio station WCBS, and then joined CBS News as a stringer in the Paris bureau in 1971.

After a stint in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), Vietnam, he came to Washington in 1974. He covered Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign in 1976.

CNN’s David Fitzpatrick, a former CBS producer who worked with Bradley, said there were tears in the halls of CBS News after word of his passing.

“He was gracious,” Fitzpatrick said. “He would always have a smile.”

Bradley is survived by his wife, Patricia Blanchet.

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Ed Bradley, The News Pioneer Who Never Lost His Cool

By Wil Haygood
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 10, 2006; C01

 

Ed Bradley had cool like a vault has money.

The celebrated “60 Minutes” newsman, who died yesterday of leukemia at 65, was certainly learned, absolutely a globe-trotter, and highly honored. But it was his cool that drew bearhugs from men and cheek-to-cheek kisses from women all over the world.

Deborah Willis, a professor of photography and imaging at New York University, came of age in Philadelphia — Bradley’s birthplace — during the 1970s, when the newsman was routinely showing up on national news broadcasts. Women were pointing to his picture in Jet and Ebony, in Time and Newsweek. Ed Bradley came to the American party with crossover cachet.

“He had this style that everyone tried to emulate,” says Willis.

Willis chatted with Bradley two months ago in Manhattan. Bradley had arrived at the New York Historical Society to listen to her interview the artist Betye Saar. Afterward, “He complimented me on my interview! Do you know how much that meant to me?” she says.

Willis noticed how people watched Bradley at her lecture. “There was the cool pose that wasn’t posing. He personified this look. It was a constructed self, constructed from a history of men who knew what it meant to be masculine and cool.”

After college, Bradley taught school and did some unpaid disc jockey work. But he knew he had a voice, and the kind of diction that might lend itself to a job with a microphone. He started on the news side of CBS radio in 1967. Soon enough he was in Vietnam. It was a kind of trial assignment.

“They made no promises to him when he went to Vietnam,” says Lee Thornton, who covered Jimmy Carter’s White House for CBS along with Bradley, both among the first blacks to do so.

But reputations were made in the Vietnam jungle. When Bradley emerged, with a thick but well-coiffed Afro and beard, his profile began to soar.

“He had his own kind of jazz,” says Thornton, who now hosts the cable talk show “A Moment With,” which is taped at the University of Maryland.

“He had a swagger and class. Mind you, he was not the first generation of black males at the networks. Hal Walker preceded him [at CBS]. But he brought his generation’s feeling of: ‘I have a right to be here. So let me show you.’ ”

Thornton remembers overhearing Bradley talking to “60 Minutes” producers as he made a follow-up pitch on the telephone shortly after his initial job interview for the program. “He was not, in the beginning, wanted by ’60 Minutes.’ I was there the day he kept making his case to them. I listened from one of those little booths near him. His case to them was: ‘I’m good, period.’ ”

He often turned his interviews into gabfests, into something akin to a kitchen chat at Thanksgiving. (They took on far more intensity when he was interviewing murderers or bombers.) And there were those across black America who wondered if as many black legends — Lena Horne, Muhammad Ali — would have been profiled were it not for his presence.

“Ed was as comfortable talking to Lena Horne as standing out on the White House lawn,” says Thornton. “What he brought to ’60 Minutes’ was not only the diversity of his person — his hipness, his music — but he extended that to the stories he covered. Thereby introducing America to those things.”

Thornton never saw meanness in Bradley. But a temperamental moment does stand out: “I was at CBS when an assignment editor asked Ed to do something. Ed didn’t like the story idea. He didn’t think it was up to his level. Ed stood up and looked at the editor and said, ‘Find. Yourself. Another. Dude.’ Oh, Lord, he was funny.”

Bradley’s pioneering presence on the air was widely noted. Last year he received a lifetime achievement award from the National Association of Black Journalists, in a ceremony here in Washington. He seemed genuinely moved at the event, staring at a screen as snatches of his memorable interviews scrolled by.

His hair had long gone gray. He had an earring. And he had raindrops in his eyes when he accepted the award from longtime BET newscaster Ed Gordon.

“Ed’s demeanor said to America: ‘Not everybody comes from the same cookie cutter,’ ” Gordon said yesterday. ” ‘But here we are.’ ”

Gordon says many black journalists are bedeviled by the prospect of being labeled “a black journalist,” convincing themselves they are shortchanging their breadth and scope. Bradley never ran away from his cultural pride, Gordon says, finding poetry where it existed. “Ed knew he was smart enough to do any story, be it on the Oklahoma City bomber or Lena Horne. That’s what was great about Ed.”

A bevy of friends had been gathering at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York in the waning days of Bradley’s life. Among them was Charlayne Hunter-Gault, a longtime friend.

Hunter-Gault, who has had her own distinguished career in journalism, used to run into Bradley all the time. He’d be on his way someplace. Lugging bags, looking bleary-eyed, off to another time zone, just back from another time zone. She didn’t understand it: All those honors, well into his 60s, running like a college intern. “I’d say, ‘Ed, you’ve got nothing to prove.’ He’d say, ‘I’ve got a job to do.’ ”

She walked into his hospital room the other day and he was tussling with the covers, moving his legs, his arms. “He was fighting,” says Hunter-Gault. “It made me think of that Sterling Brown poem, ‘Strong Men Keep A’Comin.’ ”
You sang Me an’ muh baby gonna shine, shine

Me an’ muh baby gonna shine

The strong men keep-a-comin’ on

The strong men git stronger