Ed Bradley, the most prominent African-American in television journalism, died today in New York’s Mt. Sinai Hospital at age 65.
The longtime CBS “60 Minutes” correspondent had battled leukemia but continued to work after undergoing heart surgery last year.
Bradley won 19 news Emmy Awards over a high-profile career that ranged from the Vietnam War and the White House to celebrity interviews. He recently was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Association of Black Journalists.
More than his formal awards, Bradley will be remembered as the embodiment of “hip” to a generation of younger journalists. The sight of Bradley carrying Vietnamese boat people ashore in a documentary, interviewing Lena Horne on “60 Minutes” and reporting from political conventions through the years is indelible.
“He was doing pioneering work, long-form journalism on ’60 Minutes’ in an era when it was hard to find anybody of color on the air at the network level,” according to Tom Rosensteil, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Project for Excellence in Journalism. “He seemed utterly original and yet himself on the air. He was cool in the cultural sense and yet compassionate and natural in the human sense, and he broadened the definition of what was a story in network TV without cheapening things.”
Born in Philadelphia, Bradley graduated from Cheyney (Pa.) State College in 1964 with a B.S. in education. After briefly working as a teacher, he moved on to journalism.
Bradley lived in New York and Colorado, citing the mountains as a sustaining force.
He bought a home in Woody Creek, in the Roaring Fork River valley northwest of Aspen, shortly after writer Hunter S. Thompson introduced him to the area during the 1976 presidential campaign. Thompson described Bradley as “a charter member of the Woody Creek Rod and Gun Club” which, the gonzo journalist noted, “is super-naturally cool.”
Bradley married artist Patricia Blanchet in 2004 in a small private ceremony at Woody Creek for which Jimmy Buffett provided the music.
When the Denver Press Club honored Bradley with its Damon Runyon Award in 2003, Bradley spoke of his love of Colorado. “I’ve been to a lot of press dinners in New York and you guys are a lot more fun,” he told the crowd.
The pioneering black journalist stood out as the younger, jazz-loving, earring-wearing member of the more staid “60 Minutes” team. (Bradley told an interviewer he was inspired to have his ear pierced in 1986 after Liza Minnelli encouraged him following an interview).
Bradley’s introduction to news reporting came during the Philadelphia riots in the 1960s. In 1967 he landed a job with WCBS in New York where he reported news and spun jazz records. After a stint in Paris, he became a stringer for CBS News, covering the peace talks seeking to end the Vietnam War. In 1972 he was transferred to the CBS Saigon bureau. While reporting in Cambodia he was wounded by a mortar round and had shrapnel wounds to his back and arm.
Following the war he moved to the network’s Washington, D.C., bureau. He covered the Jimmy Carter presidential campaign for CBS in 1976 and became CBS News’ White House correspondent until 1978. From then until 1981 he was principal correspondent for the documentary series “CBS Reports,” succeeding Dan Rather on “60 Minutes” in 1981 when Rather took Walter Cronkite’s anchor chair on the CBS Evening News.
Among his journalistic coups was a 2001 report on the Columbine High School massacre, revealing that authorities ignored warnings about the shooters. One of his last “60 Minutes” reports broke new ground in interviews with the accused in the Duke University Lacrosse rape case.
“One measure of a great journalist is someone whose stories you recall years later,” PEJ’s Rosensteil said. “I remember stories from when I was a teenager that Ed Bradley was doing: Cambodian and Vietnamese pirates and people being kidnapped at the high seas. He ran into the waves, it was not stagey. At that moment, you thought, ‘Yes! You should go save her.”‘
Bradley once told a newspaper interviewer, “In my obit, I hope they’ll mention a documentary on being black in America, “With All Deliberate Speed?”
That 1979 “CBS Reports” was an in-depth examination of African-American progress, or lack thereof, since the Brown v. Board of Education decision.
Contact TV critic Joanne Ostrow at 303-954-1830 or at jostrow@denverpost.com.
