Reporter Ed Bradley Dies at 65

'60 Minutes' Reporter Ed Bradley Dies

By FRAZIER MOORE, AP Television Writer

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.

Bradley died of leukemia at Mount Sinai hospital, CBS News announced.

With his signature earring, Bradley was "considered intelligent, smooth, cool, a great reporter, beloved and respected by all his colleagues here at CBS News," Katie Couric said in a special report.

"He certainly was a reporter's reporter," fellow "60 Minutes" correspondent Mike Wallace told CBS News Radio.

Bradley's consummate skills were recognized with numerous awards, including 19 Emmys, the latest for a segment on the reopening of the 50-year-old racial murder case of Emmett Till.

Three of his Emmys came in 2003: for lifetime achievement; a 2002 "60 Minutes" report on brain cancer patients; and a "60 Minutes II" report about sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. He also won a lifetime achievement award from the National Association of Black Journalists.

"He was a great journalist who did the most serious work without ever seeming to take himself seriously," Barbara Walters said in a statement.

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 Cheyney State, a historically black college, he launched his career as a DJ and news reporter for a Philadelphia radio station in 1963, moving 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.

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