KEY POINTS:
LOS ANGELES - Veteran CBS newsman Ed Bradley, a pioneering black American journalist who won acclaim as a Vietnam War correspondent and later as a reporter for 60 Minutes, died on Thursday of complications from leukemia. He was 65.
Bradley, whose illness was not widely known, had just
begun his 26th year as one of the team of reporters featured on the landmark CBS News magazine show when he died at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, a network spokeswoman said.
In his last two broadcasts, both aired on 60 Minutes in October, Bradley scored an exclusive interview with three Duke University lacrosse players accused of raping an exotic dancer, and presented an expose of safety failures at a BP refinery where 15 oil workers died in a 2005 explosion.
Bradley's death was announced on the air by CBS News anchor Katie Couric, who broke into regular programming to deliver the news.
White House spokesman Tony Snow said, "Our thoughts and prayers are not only with Ed's family but with all of his colleagues at CBS."
Among the first black Americans to become a household name in US network television news, Bradley's work earned 19 Emmy Awards, his latest for a piece about the reopening of the murder investigation into the 1955 racial murder of Emmett Till, a black youth in Mississippi.
His 60 Minutes interview with Timothy McVeigh in 2000 was the only television interview ever given by the man later executed for the Oklahoma City bombing.
Award for Aids report
Bradley's hour-long report that same year on the devastation wrought by the AIDS epidemic in Africa won a Peabody Award and helped lead pharmaceutical companies to donate and discount anti-AIDS drugs and his 1999 expose "Unsafe Haven" sparked federal investigations into the nation's largest chain of psychiatric hospitals.
Along with African American contemporaries like Max Robinson of ABC News and Bernard Shaw of CNN, Bradley began his career as a broadcast journalist in the midst of the nation's civil rights movement.
"But he superseded that very early on in his career and was judged not as a triumph of affirmative action but because he was very good at his job," independent network news analyst Andrew Tyndall said of Bradley. "He wasn't just the black guy on 60 Minutes. He was just on 60 Minutes."
Tyndall said Bradley could have gone much further in TV news but chose to remain with 60 Minutes, where he was well known for "the empathetic quality of his interviewing," evident in a memorable interview with boxing champion Muhammad Ali.
"When he talked to someone he really treated someone as a human being, but he could do anything, hard news and soft," Tyndall said. "In the mixture of people at '60 Minutes,' you needed someone who was urbane, sophisticated, and he had that ingredient that none of his colleagues had - that hipness."
After a career as a radio reporter, Bradley joined CBS News as a freelancer in its Paris bureau in September 1971 and was transferred a year later to the network's bureau in Saigon, where he covered the Vietnam War until assigned to the CBS News Washington bureau in June 1974.
He was officially 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 to Communist forces.
Prior to joining CBS News, Bradley was a reporter for WCBS Radio, the CBS-owned station in New York. He started out in 1963 as a reporter for WDAS Radio Philadelphia.
- REUTERS