Bradley, Ed 1941–

views updated May 17 2018

Ed Bradley 1941

Television journalist

At a Glance

Covered the Carter White House

The New Face on 60 Minutes

Sources

As a correspondent for CBSs 60 Minutes since 1981, Ed Bradley has become one of the most visible African-Americans on network television news. As Morgan Strong observed in Playboy, Bradleys soft-spoken and often intensely personal reports made him the first black reporter to become a comfortable part of Americas extended TV family.

Bradleys easygoing style belies his many achievements. Some have commented that he seems to have scaled the heights of the television news business more by a knack for being in the right place at the right time than by driving ambition. Michele Wallace of Essence called him a maverick by happenstance, a trailblazer by accident, an inadvertent explorer on the frontier of racial barriers. But Bradley is driven not by ambition in the usual senseIf I never anchor the national news, thats fine, he told Wallacebut by a less tangible standard. I think I always need a new challenge, he commented to Kristin McMurran in People. I do need some adventure in my life. And he pointed out to Wallace: Ive always been drivenbut Im not the kind of person who says This is going to take me here and thats going to take me there. I dont have goalsI have standards of achievements.

Bradley grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in a neighborhood where if you didnt fight, you got beat up, he recalled to McMurran. We were poor, but there was always food on the table. I was raised by people who worked 20-hour days at two jobs each. I was told You can be anything you want, kid. When you hear that often enough, you believe it.

When Bradley graduated from college in 1964 he went to work as an elementary school teacher while moonlighting as an unpaid disc jockey at a local jazz radio station. He gradually moved into Philadelphias WDAS news operation, reading hourly newscasts and still receiving no wages. He got the chance to cover his first hard news story when rioting broke out in north Philadelphia and WDAS found itself short-staffed.

It must have been about two oclock in the morning. I was coming out of a club and turned on the radio, Bradley related to Tony Vellela in the Christian Science Monitor. I heard Gary Shepard reporting on this rioting that was going on. Bradley proceeded to the station to get a tape recorder and an engineer. For the

At a Glance

Born Edward R. Bradley, January 22, 1941, in Philadelphia, PA; son of Edward R. and Gladys Bradley; married first wife, 1964 (divorced); married Priscilla Coolidge, 1981 (divorced, 1984). Education: Cheyney State College, B.A., 1964.

Teacher in Philadelphia, PA, beginning in 1964; WDAS Radio, Philadelphia, disc jockey and news reporter, 196367; WCBS Radio, New York City, radio journalist, 1967-71; Columbia Broadcasting System, stringer in Paris, France, 1971, correspondent in Indochina, 1972-74 and 1975, correspondent in Washington, DC, 1974-78, anchor for CBS Sunday Night News, 1976-81, principal correspondent for CBS Report, 1978-81, correspondent for 60 Minutes, 1981, host of prime time weekly newsmagazine Street Stories, 1992.

Awards: Emmy Awards for broadcast journalism, National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, three in 1979, two in 1983, one in 1985, and one in 1986; Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for broadcast journalism, 1978 and 1980; George Foster Peabody Broadcasting Award, 1979; George Polk Award, 1980; NCAA Anniversary Award, 1989.

Address: Office CBS News, 524 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019.

next 48 hours, without sleep, I covered the riots. I was getting these great scoops. And that kind of hooked me on the idea of doing live stuff, going out and covering the news.

Bradley proved himself a capable newsman, and the station began paying him a small salary. In 1967 he moved to WCBS, an all-news CBS Radio affiliate in New York City. He worked there for three and a half years before restlessness prompted him to take a vacation in France. I decided that I was born to live in Paris, he told Strong. After quitting his $45,000-a-year job and moving to the French capital, he planned to write the great American novel, according to McMurran. I didnt go to Paris for a career, Strong quoted him as saying, I went to Paris for my life. Bradley wrote poetry and enjoyed the cultural life of the city until he ran out of money. He subsequently took the only opportunity that would allow him to stay in Paris, becoming a stringer for CBSs Paris bureau where peace talks between the United States and North Vietnam were in progress. Paid by the story, Bradley was able to earn a modest living covering the conference. If they held the talks, I made the rent money, he told Strong. I remember once when the talks were suspended for 13 weeks and I got a check for $12.50. But I managed to survive.

After a year, the journalist decided he wanted to get back into the news business full time. My ego wouldnt let me be part time, he admitted in People. He noted in Playboy, I decided I was either going all the way in or getting out. Bradley became a war correspondent in Indochina for CBS-TV, spent most of the next three years in Vietnam and Cambodia, and was wounded in a mortar attack on Easter Sunday in 1973. Reassigned to Washington, D.C., in 1974, the journalist returned to Vietnam in 1975 to report on the end of the war.

Covered the Carter White House

After the fall of Saigon, South Vietnam, which marked the defeat of the anti-Communist government, Bradley returned to the United States to cover Jimmy Carters campaign for the U.S. presidency. Following the election, CBS assigned him to its Washington, D.C., bureau, where he became the networks first black White House correspondent. Though the White House beat is considered a prestigious position, Bradley hated it. For one thing, he was CBSs second-string reporter in the capital. Secondly, as he told Strong, it was an office job. You go to the same place every day and check in down in the basement in this little nook in the back of the White House press room. And if Jimmy Carter jumps, I [had] to be there to say how high. But it [was] no great fun, and it wasnt the kind of work I wanted to do.

Chafing under the constraints of the assignment, Bradley acquired a reputation for being hard to get along with, one which has followed him ever since. He admits that his work in Washington did not bring out the best in him, but he feels the charge is unjustified. I dont think Im abrasive or egocentric. I think I have a healthy ego, but my problem in Washington was that there were too many bullshit assignments, he explained to Strong. I had always worked overseas. When I went out, I was the producer. So then to come back and have to report to a desk it was all a big change for me. I had not come up through the system.

As soon as he could, Bradley left the Washington bureau to join CBS Reports and produce documentaries. The new job took him back to Southeast Asia to make Whats Happening in Cambodia?, a program about refugees fleeing the country during the 1970s. While filming in the refugee camps in Thailand, Bradley and cameraman Norman Lloyd encountered some young Cambodians who were searching for missing relatives. Its the kind of thing that Norman and I do best, Bradley recalled in TV Guide. We breeze into this Cambodian joint, throw down some beers and say What are you guys doing here, man? No kidding! Youre going to do what? Can we go with you? You cant get in, huh? Well get you in. Bradley and Lloyd succeeded in getting the youths into the camp and after following them around for most of the day, captured a tearful mother-son reunion on camera.

Though Bradley resists being pigeonholed as a black reporter and is said to hate covering black stories, some of his finest moments with CBS Reports came while focusing on racial issues. In MurderTeen-age Style, for example, the reporter examined the problem of violence among black gangs in Los Angeles. Producer Howard Stringer, who had to talk Bradley into taking the assignment, was quoted by TV Guides Rod Townley as saying [Bradley]s black hes younger than most of our correspondents, hipper than most of our correspondents, and knows the world better than most of our correspondents. Stringer also noted that Bradley doesnt like and doesnt do well at really abstract stories. Ed is a reporter. But the journalist combined both reportage and analysis in his Blacks in America: With All Deliberate Speed, a 1979 look at race relations in the United States that won him an Emmy and a Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award. The documentary contrasted the status of blacks in Mississippi and Philadelphia in 1954 and 1979. To the credit of Bradley and his producer, Philip Burton, Jr., wrote Axel Madsen in 60 Minutes: The Power and the Politics of Americas Most Popular News Show, the program reported both failures and occasional improvements and concluded that court actions, attempted enforcement, and massive media attention hadnt brought much change.

CBS Reports also sent Bradley to China and Saudi Arabia and to Malaysia to make a documentary on the Vietnamese refugees known as boat people. The Boat People aired in 1979, earning Bradley an Emmy and several other awards. It was also excerpted on 60 Minutes and may have been a deciding factor in the choice of Bradley to join the staff of Americas most popular news program.

Bradley had been considered for 60 Minutes when a fourth correspondent was added in the late 1970s, but Harry Reasoner was chosen instead. Then when Dan Rather left the news program to take over Walter Cronkites position as anchor of the CBS Evening News, Bradley was asked to join Reasoner, Morley Safer, and Mike Wallace. In his book Minute by Minute, producer Don Hewitt wrote of Bradley, Hes so good and so savvy and so lights up the tube every time hes on it that I wonder what took us so long.

Bradley, as quoted by Hewitt, said, It soon became apparent that I was the front runner, if I believed Hewitt, who went around saying to everybody but me, If theres a better reporter than Bradley, I wish someone would point him out, but still he never said it to me. Finally I was in Los Angeles for a [question] and [answer] session with the TV critics, when a reporter in the back of the room asked Bob Chandler, the CBS News vice president who looked after 60 Minutes, about who was going to replace Rather. Either Chandler was writing Hewitts lines or Hewitt was writing his: If there is a better reporter than Bradley, etc. was the answer. The next week I was named to replace Dan Rather.

The New Face on 60 Minutes

Bradleys presence changed the chemistry of 60 Minutes, with the substitution of his sensitive, compassionate approach to interviewing and reporting for Rathers more aggressive, sometimes pugnacious tactics. Aware that television audiences are notoriously fickle, Bradley felt that if ratings slipped, he would get the blame. But viewers seemed to accept him readily, though some critics have reacted less favorably. In 1983, for example, Mark Ribowsky wrote in TV Guide that Bradley had not succeeded in establishing a familiar persona for viewers, or made a story sizzle. And four years later, David Shaw, in the same magazine, called Bradley one of the least impressive of the correspondents [on 60 Minutes]. Shaw faulted several of Bradleys stories for being simple and superficial and others for overlooking important questions, but nevertheless praised his tough-minded report on defects in the Audi 5000, a story which helped focus attention on a problem that led to the recall of 250,000 cars.

Coworkers and critics alike have pointed out Bradleys ability to establish a rapport with his subjects. Mike Wallace remarked that Bradleys approach is instinctivehe has no idea how he does it. Bradley himself resists analyzing his style; he remarked to Townley, Id rather not think about it and just go out and do it, and it will come naturally. When Bradley profiled singer Lena Home in December of 1981, for example, John Weisman of TV Guide described the journalists work as a textbook example of what a great television interview can be. Intercutting Homes performances with interview segments in which Home discussed her personal and professional life, Bradley and producer Jeanne Solomon drew an intimate portrait of the singer that, as Bradley observed to Weisman, told a lot of things about our society. It told a lot about the way women are treated, a lot of things about the way blacks are treated. It told a lot of things about interracial marriages, difficulties in the film and entertainment industries and how those things have changed and not changed. Bradley has said that he feels Lena is among his best work, and Wallace called it as good a piece as I have seen on television in my life. Lena won Bradley his first Emmy as a member of the 60 Minutes team.

Bradleys gift for winning his subjects confidence was also crucial when he interviewed actor Laurence Olivier, who was ill at the time. There was some doubt about whether Olivier would have the stamina to complete the interview, but as Hewitt retold it, gradually, prodded by Eds questions, the frail old man who had tottered into the room became Laurence Olivier, the actor. The interview went on for another hour and a half as Laurence Olivier and Ed Bradley jousted with each other. When Jeanne finally said cut neither had fallen off his horse, and we wrapped one of the more memorable 60 Minutes interviews.

Not all of Bradleys interviews have been cordial ones. In one of his first pieces for 60 Minutes, The Other Face of the IRA, Bradley spoke with Northern Irish activist Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, prompting a heated discussion of politics and religion, which culminated with McAliskey declaring, At the end of the day, God will be on the side of the winner, regardless of who wins, regardless of how he wins, because God always was and always will be. Other stories that required a more aggressive approach were Bradleys Emmy-winning study of convicted killer-turned-author Jack Henry Abbott, and the story that Bradley described to TV Guide as the toughest hed ever done: a report on the murder of CBS correspondent George Polk in post-World War II Greece.

The Polk investigation presented several difficulties. Many of the principals were dead, and as Bradley explained to Stephen Galloway in Tv Guide, for the people who are still alive, youre asking them to talk about something that happened 45 years ago. Its difficult to trust their memory. The piece presented a personal difficulty for Bradley as well: he discovered that one of his journalistic heroes, retired CBS correspondent Winston Burdett, might have been involved in a cover-up to protect Polks killers. Id grown up listening to [Burdett] on the radio, reflected Bradley after what Galloway called one of the most riveting interviews of one journalist by another.

After more than a decade of investigating and presenting thought-provoking subjects on 60 Minutes and with six Emmy awards and numerous other honors to his credit, Bradley is no longer a new face but an ominous and undeflectable presence imperturbable and arguably beyond reproach, commented J. Schwartz in Gentlemens Quarterly. He is adored without worship. Bradleys need for adventure does not seem to have diminished, though. In 1992, he took on an additional television project for CBS, hosting the prime time weekly newsmagazine Street Stories. The journalist summed up his attitude about his career in People in 1983: The bottom line in this job is fun. And when it stops being fun, then Ill stop doing it.

Sources

Books

Hewitt, Don, Minute by Minute, Random House, 1985.

Madsen, Axel, 60 Minutes: The Power and the Politics of Americas Most Popular News Show, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1984.

Periodicals

Christian Science Monitor, October 16, 1986.

Ebony, August 1983.

Essence, November 1983.

Gentlemens Quarterly, May 1989.

People, November 14, 1983.

TV Guide, October 18, 1980; February 20, 1982; January 22, 1983; February 25, 1984; March 28, 1987; January 19, 1991.

Tim Connor

Bradley, Ed

views updated Jun 27 2018

Ed Bradley

1941–2006

Television journalist

As a correspondent for CBS's 60 Minutes, Ed Bradley became one of the most visible African Americans on network television news. But more importantly, he was "one of America's best," Dan Rather told the New York Daily News. As Morgan Strong observed in Playboy, Bradley's "soft-spoken and often intensely personal reports made him the first black reporter to become a comfortable part of America's extended TV family."

Bradley's easygoing style belied his many achievements. Some have commented that he seemed to have scaled the heights of the television news business more by a knack for being in the right place at the right time than by driving ambition. Michele Wallace of Essence called him "a maverick by happenstance, a trailblazer by accident, an inadvertent explorer on the frontier of racial barriers." But Bradley was driven not by ambition in the usual sense—"If I never anchor the national news, that's fine," he told Wallace—but by a less tangible standard. "I think I always need a new challenge," he commented to Kristin McMurran in People. "I do need some adventure in my life." And he pointed out to Wallace: "I've always been driven—but I'm not the kind of person who says 'This is going to take me here and that's going to take me there.' I don't have goals—I have standards of achievement." His standards were high; during his career Bradley won 19 Emmy awards, one for lifetime achievement, and a host of other prestigious awards.

Considered the World Open to Him

Edward R. Bradley was born on June 22, 1941, and grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in a neighborhood where "if you didn't fight, you got beat up," he recalled to McMurran. "We were poor, but there was always food on the table. I was raised by people who worked 20-hour days at two jobs each…. I was told 'You can be anything you want, kid.' When you hear that often enough, you believe it."

When Bradley graduated from college in 1964 he went to work as an elementary school teacher while moonlighting as an unpaid disc jockey at a local jazz radio station. He gradually moved into Philadelphia's WDAS news operation, reading hourly newscasts and still receiving no wages. He got the chance to cover his first hard news story when rioting broke out in north Philadelphia and WDAS found itself short-staffed.

"It must have been about two o'clock in the morning…. I was coming out of a club and turned on the radio," Bradley related to Tony Vellela in the Christian Science Monitor. "I heard Gary Shepard reporting on this rioting that was going on." Bradley proceeded to the station to get a tape recorder and an engineer. "For the next 48 hours, without sleep, I covered the riots…. I was getting these great scoops…. And that kind of hooked me on the idea of doing live stuff, going out and covering the news."

Bradley proved himself a capable newsman, and the station began paying him a small salary. In 1967 he moved to WCBS, an all-news CBS Radio affiliate in New York City. He worked there for three and a half years before restlessness prompted him to take a vacation in France. "I decided that I was born to live in Paris," he told Strong. After quitting his $45,000-a-year job and moving to the French capital, he planned to "write the great American novel," according to McMurran. "I didn't go to Paris for a career," Strong quoted him as saying, "I went to Paris for my life." Bradley wrote poetry and enjoyed the cultural life of the city until he ran out of money. He subsequently took the only opportunity that would allow him to stay in Paris, becoming a stringer for CBS's Paris bureau where peace talks between the United States and North Vietnam were in progress. Paid by the story, Bradley was able to earn a modest living covering the conference. "If they held the talks, I made the rent money," he told Strong. "I remember once when the talks were suspended for l3 weeks and I got a check for $12.50. But I managed to survive."

Dove into Full-Time Reporting

After a year, the journalist decided he wanted to get back into the news business full time. "My ego wouldn't let me be part time," he admitted in People. He noted in Playboy, "I decided I was either going all the way in or getting out." Bradley became a war correspondent in Indochina for CBS-TV, spent most of the next three years in Vietnam and Cambodia, and was wounded in a mortar attack on Easter Sunday in 1973. Reassigned to Washington, D.C., in 1974, the journalist returned to Vietnam in 1975 to report on the end of the war.

After the fall of Saigon, South Vietnam, which marked the defeat of the anti-Communist government, Bradley returned to the United States to cover Jimmy Carter's campaign for the U.S. presidency. Following the election, CBS assigned him to its Washington, D.C., bureau, where he became the network's first black White House correspondent. Though the White House beat is considered a prestigious position, Bradley hated it. For one thing, he was CBS's second-string reporter in the capital. Secondly, as he told Strong, "it was an office job. You go to the same place every day and check in … down in the basement in this little nook in the back of the White House press room. And if Jimmy Carter jumps, I [had] to be there to say how high. But it [was] no great fun, and it wasn't the kind of work I wanted to do."

Chafing under the constraints of the assignment, Bradley acquired a reputation for being hard to get along with. He later admitted that his work in Washington did not bring out the best in him, but he felt the charge was unjustified. "I don't think I'm abrasive or egocentric. I think I have a healthy ego, but my problem in Washington was that there were too many bullshit assignments," he explained to Strong. "I had always worked overseas…. When I went out, I was the producer. So then to come back and have to report to a desk … it was all a big change for me…. I had not come up through the system."

At a Glance …

Born Edward R. Bradley, June 22, 1941, in Philadelphia, PA; died on November 9, 2006, in New York, NY; son of Edward R. and Gladys Bradley; married first wife, 1964 (divorced); married Priscilla Coolidge, 1981 (divorced, 1984); married Patricia Blanchet, 2004. Education: Cheyney State College, BA, 1964.

Career: Philadelphia, PA, public school teacher, 1964–67; WDAS Radio, Philadelphia, disc jockey and news reporter, 1963–67; WCBS Radio, New York City, radio journalist, 1967–71; Columbia Broadcasting System, Paris, France, stringer 1971; CBS, correspondent in Indochina, 1972–74, 1975; CBS, correspondent in Washington, DC, 1974–78; CBS Sunday Night News, anchor, 1976–81; CBS Reports, principal correspondent, 1978–81; 60 Minutes, correspondent, 1981–2006; Street Stories, prime-time weekly newsmagazine host, 1992–93.

Selected awards: National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, 19 Emmy Awards for broadcast journalism; four George Foster Peabody Broadcasting Awards; Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for broadcast journalism, 1978 and 1980; George Polk Award, 1980; NCAA Anniversary Award, 1989; National Association of Black Journalists, Lifetime Achievement Award, 2005.

As soon as he could, Bradley left the Washington bureau to join CBS Reports and produce documentaries. The new job took him back to Southeast Asia to make "What's Happening in Cambodia?," a program about refugees fleeing the country during the 1970s. While filming in the refugee camps in Thailand, Bradley and cameraman Norman Lloyd encountered some young Cambodians who were searching for missing relatives. "It's the kind of thing that Norman and I do best," Bradley recalled in TV Guide. "We breeze into this Cambodian joint, throw down some beers and say 'What are you guys doing here, man? No kidding! You're going to do what? Can we go with you? You can't get in, huh? We'll get you in.'" Bradley and Lloyd succeeded in getting the youths into the camp and after following them around for most of the day, captured a tearful mother-son reunion on camera.

Though Bradley resisted being pigeonholed as a black reporter and was said to hate covering "black" stories, some of his finest moments with CBS Reports came while focusing on racial issues. In "Murder—Teen-age Style," for example, the reporter examined the problem of violence among black gangs in Los Angeles. Producer Howard Stringer, who had to talk Bradley into taking the assignment, was quoted by TV Guide's Rod Townley as saying "[Bradley]'s black … he's younger than most of our correspondents, hipper than most of our correspondents, and knows the world better than most of our correspondents." Stringer also noted that Bradley "doesn't like and doesn't do well at really abstract stories…. Ed is a reporter." But the journalist combined both reportage and analysis in his "Blacks in America: With All Deliberate Speed," a 1979 look at race relations in the United States that won him an Emmy and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award. The documentary contrasted the status of blacks in Mississippi and Philadelphia in 1954 and 1979. "To the credit of Bradley and his producer, Philip Burton, Jr.," wrote Axel Madsen in 60 Minutes: The Power and the Politics of America's Most Popular News Show, "the program reported both failures and occasional improvements and concluded that court actions, attempted enforcement, and massive media attention hadn't brought much change."

Joined 60 Minutes

CBS Reports also sent Bradley to China and Saudi Arabia and to Malaysia to make a documentary on the Vietnamese refugees known as "boat people." "The Boat People" aired in 1979, earning Bradley an Emmy and several other awards. It was also excerpted on 60 Minutes and may have been a deciding factor in the choice of Bradley to join the staff of America's most popular news program in 1981.

Bradley had been considered for 60 Minutes when a fourth correspondent was added in the late 1970s, but Harry Reasoner was chosen instead. Then when Dan Rather left the news program to take over Walter Cronkite's position as anchor of the CBS Evening News, Bradley was asked to join Reasoner, Morley Safer, and Mike Wallace. In his book Minute by Minute, producer Don Hewitt wrote of Bradley, "He's so good and so savvy and so lights up the tube every time he's on it that I wonder what took us so long."

Bradley, as quoted by Hewitt, said, "It soon became apparent that I was the front runner, if I believed Hewitt, who went around saying to everybody but me, 'If there's a better reporter than Bradley, I wish someone would point him out,' but still he never said it to me. Finally I was in Los Angeles … for a [question] and [answer] session with the TV critics, when a reporter in the back of the room … asked Bob Chandler, the CBS News vice president who looked after 60 Minutes, about who was going to replace Rather. Either Chandler was writing Hewitt's lines or Hewitt was writing his: 'If there is a better reporter than Bradley, etc….' was the answer…. The next week I was named to replace Dan Rather."

Bradley's presence changed the chemistry of 60 Minutes, with the substitution of his sensitive, compassionate approach to interviewing and reporting for Rather's more aggressive, sometimes pugnacious tactics. Aware that television audiences are notoriously fickle, Bradley felt that if ratings slipped, he would get the blame. But viewers seemed to accept him readily, though some critics reacted less favorably. In 1983, for example, Mark Ribowsky wrote in TV Guide that Bradley had "not succeeded in establishing a familiar persona for viewers, or made a story sizzle." And four years later, David Shaw, in the same magazine, called Bradley one of 60 Minutes' "least impressive of the correspondents." Shaw faulted several of Bradley's stories for being "simple" and "superficial" and others for overlooking important questions, but nevertheless praised his "tough-minded report" on defects in the Audi 5000, a story which helped focus attention on a problem that led to the recall of 250,000 cars.

Brought in Powerful Interviews

Coworkers and critics alike pointed out Bradley's ability to establish a rapport with his subjects. Mike Wallace remarked that Bradley's approach was "instinctive—he has no idea how he does it." Bradley himself resisted analyzing his style, remarking once to Townley that "I'd rather not think about it and just go out and do it, and it will come naturally." When Bradley profiled singer Lena Horne in December of 1981, for example, John Weisman of TV Guide described the journalist's work as "a textbook example of what a great television interview can be." Intercutting Horne's performances with interview segments in which Horne discussed her personal and professional life, Bradley and producer Jeanne Solomon drew an intimate portrait of the singer that, as Bradley observed to Weisman, "told a lot of things about our society. It told a lot about the way women are treated, a lot of things about the way blacks are treated. It told a lot of things about interracial marriages, difficulties in the film and entertainment industries and how those things have changed and not changed." Bradley counted his interview with Horne among his best work, and Wallace called it "as good a piece as I have seen on television in my life." "Lena" won Bradley his first Emmy as a member of the 60 Minutes team.

Bradley's gift for winning his subjects' confidence was also crucial when he interviewed actor Laurence Olivier, who was ill at the time. There was some doubt about whether Olivier would have the stamina to complete the interview, but as Hewitt retold it, "gradually, prodded by Ed's questions, the frail old man who had tottered into the room became Laurence Olivier, the actor. The interview went on for another hour and a half as Laurence Olivier and Ed Bradley jousted with each other. When Jeanne finally said 'cut' neither had fallen off his horse, and we wrapped one of the more memorable 60 Minutes interviews."

Not all of Bradley's interviews were cordial ones. In one of his first pieces for 60 Minutes, "The Other Face of the IRA," Bradley spoke with Northern Irish activist Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, prompting a heated discussion of politics and religion, which culminated with McAliskey declaring, "At the end of the day, God will be on the side of the winner, regardless of who wins, regardless of how he wins, because God always was and always will be." Other stories that required a more aggressive approach were Bradley's Emmy-winning study of convicted killer-turned-author Jack Henry Abbott, and the story that Bradley described to TV Guide as the toughest he'd ever done: a report on the murder of CBS correspondent George Polk in post-World War II Greece.

The Polk investigation presented several difficulties. Many of the principals were dead, and as Bradley explained to Stephen Galloway in TV Guide, "for the people who are still alive, you're asking them to talk about something that happened 45 years ago. It's difficult to trust their memory." The piece presented a personal difficulty for Bradley as well: he discovered that one of his journalistic heroes, retired CBS correspondent Winston Burdett, might have been involved in a cover-up to protect Polk's killers. "I'd grown up listening to [Burdett] on the radio," reflected Bradley after what Galloway called "one of the most riveting interviews of one journalist by another."

Bradley honed his interviewing skills over his more than a quarter-century with 60 Minutes. "He conducted interviews in a manner that drew less attention to himself and more to what the person interviewed was actually saying," George E. Curry, editor-in-chief, National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service in Washington, D.C. told Jet. "That's the mark of a first-rate professional." One-time Bradley interviewee Aretha Franklin remembered to Jet that "He was very focused on what it was he wanted to get out of the interview. But with all that, he still had a very delightful sense of humor, which kind of softened everything." Bradley's skill enabled him to land interviews with a host of disparate people, from Michael Jordan to Michael Jackson, over the years. In 2000 Bradley landed the only television interview with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who revealed in the interview that his service in the Gulf War had left him angry. The interview added to Bradley's stash of Emmy Awards. Some of his most memorable last reports include coverage of the reopening of the Emmett Till murder case and a rape scandal involving Duke University lacrosse team members.

"The bottom line in this job is fun." Bradley had told People in 1983. "And when it stops being fun, then I'll stop doing it." Bradley had yet to stop having fun when complications of leukemia claimed his life on November 9, 2006. News of his death shocked all but his closest friends, as Bradley had kept his health issues private. Praise for Bradley came quickly. Wynton Marsalis remembered him as "one of our definitive cultural figures, a man of unsurpassed curiosity, intelligence, dignity and heart," according to the Associated Press. Don Kaplan of the Chicago Tribune called Bradley an "iconic broadcaster," who "will be remembered as one of the most prominent African-American TV journalists in history."

Sources

Books

Hewitt, Don, Minute by Minute, Random House, 1985.

Madsen, Axel, 60 Minutes: The Power and the Politics of America's Most Popular News Show, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1984.

Periodicals

Associated Press, November 10, 2006.

Chicago Tribune, November 10, 2006, p. 12.

Christian Science Monitor, October 16, 1986.

Ebony, August 1983.

Essence, November 1983.

Gentlemen's Quarterly, May 1989.

Jet, November 27, 2006, p. 62.

Los Angeles Times, May 13, 2000, p. 12.

New York Daily News, November 10, 2006, p. 3.

New York Post, November 10, 2006, p. 3.

People, November 14, 1983; November 27, 2006, p. 68-9.

TV Guide, October 18, 1980; February 20, 1982; January 22, 1983; February 25, 1984; March 28, 1987; January 19, 1991.

Ed Bradley

views updated May 21 2018

Ed Bradley

An award-winning broadcast journalist, Ed Bradley (born 1941) remains best known for his work on the weekly news program 60 Minutes.

Born on June 22, 1941, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Edward R. Bradley received a B.S. degree in education from Cheyney State College in Cheyney, Pennsylvania. From 1963 to 1967 Bradley worked as a disc jockey and news reporter for WDAS radio in Philadelphia. From there he moved on to WCBS radio in New York. He joined CBS as a stringer in the Paris bureau in 1971. Within a few months he was transferred to the Saigon bureau, where he remained until he was assigned to the Washington bureau in June 1974.

Until 1981, Bradley served as anchor for CBS Sunday Night News and as principal correspondent for CBS Reports. In 1981 he replaced Dan Rather as a correspondent for the weekly news program, 60 Minutes. In 1992 Bradley was made host of the CBS news program, Street Stories.

Bradley has won seven Emmy Awards for broadcast journalism, two Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards for broadcast journalism, a George Foster Peabody Broadcasting Award, a George Polk Award, and an NCAA Anniversary Award.

As a correspondent for CBS's 60 Minutes since 1981, Bradley has become one of the most visible African-Americans on network television news. As Morgan Strong observed in Playboy, Bradley's "soft-spoken and often intensely personal reports made him the first black reporter to become a comfortable part of America's extended TV family."

Bradley's easygoing style belies his many achievements. Some have commented that he seems to have scaled the heights of the television news business more by a knack for being in the right place at the right time than by driving ambition. Michele Wallace of Essence called him "a maverick by happenstance, a trailblazer by accident, an inadvertent explorer on the frontier of racial barriers." But Bradley is driven not by ambition in the usual sense—"If I never anchor the national news, that's fine, " he told Wallace— but by a less tangible standard. "I think I always need a new challenge, " he commented to Kristin McMurran in People. "I do need some adventure in my life." And he pointed out to Wallace: "I've always been driven—but I'm not the kind of person who says 'This is going to take me here and that's going to take me there.' I don't have goals—I have standards of achievement."

Bradley grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in a neighborhood where "if you didn't fight, you got beat up, " he recalled to McMurran. "We were poor, but there was always food on the table. I was raised by people who worked 20-hour days at two jobs each…. I was told 'You can be anything you want, kid.' When you hear that often enough, you believe it."

Drifted Into Broadcast News

When Bradley graduated from college in 1964 he went to work as an elementary school teacher while moonlighting as an unpaid disc jockey at a local jazz radio station. He gradually moved into Philadelphia's WDAS news operation, reading hourly newscasts and still receiving no wages. He got the chance to cover his first hard news story when rioting broke out in north Philadelphia and WDAS found itself short-staffed.

"It must have been about two o'clock in the morning…. I was coming out of a club and turned on the radio, " Bradley related to Tony Vellela in the Christian Science Monitor. "I heard Gary Shepard reporting on this rioting that was going on." Bradley proceeded to the station to get a tape recorder and an engineer. "For the next 48 hours, without sleep, I covered the riots…. I was getting these great scoops…. And that kind of hooked me on the idea of doing live stuff, going out and covering the news."

Bradley proved himself a capable newsman, and the station began paying him a small salary. In 1967 he moved to WCBS, an all-news CBS Radio affiliate in New York City. He worked there for three and a half years before restlessness prompted him to take a vacation in France. "I decided that I was born to live in Paris, " he told Strong. After quitting his $45, 000-a-year job and moving to the French capital, he planned to "write the great American novel, " according to McMurran. "I didn't go to Paris for a career, " Strong quoted him as saying, "I went to Paris for my life." Bradley wrote poetry and enjoyed the cultural life of the city until he ran out of money. He subsequently took the only opportunity that would allow him to stay in Paris, becoming a stringer for CBS's Paris bureau where peace talks between the United States and North Vietnam were in progress. Paid by the story, Bradley was able to earn a modest living covering the conference. "If they held the talks, I made the rent money, " he told Strong. "I remember once when the talks were suspended for 13 weeks and I got a check for $12.50. But I managed to survive."

After a year, the journalist decided he wanted to get back into the news business full time. "My ego wouldn't let me be part time, " he admitted in People. He noted in Playboy, "I decided I was either going all the way in or getting out, " and became a war correspondent in Indochina for CBS-TV. He spent most of the next three years in Vietnam and Cambodia and was wounded in a mortar attack on Easter Sunday in 1973. Reassigned to Washington, D.C., in 1974, the journalist returned to Vietnam in 1975 to report on the end of the war.

Covered the Carter White House

After the fall of Saigon, South Vietnam, which marked the defeat of the anti-Communist government, Bradley returned to the United States to cover Jimmy Carter's campaign for the U.S. presidency. Following the election, CBS assigned him to its Washington, D.C., bureau, where he became the network's first African American White House correspondent. Though the White House beat is considered a prestigious position, Bradley hated it. For one thing, he was CBS's second-string reporter in the capital. Secondly, as he told Strong, "it was an office job. You go to the same place every day and check in … down in the basement in this little nook in the back of the White House press room. And if Jimmy Carter jumps, I [had] to be there to say how high. But it [was] no great fun, and it wasn't the kind of work I wanted to do."

Chafing under the constraints of the assignment, Bradley acquired a reputation for being hard to get along with, one which has followed him ever since. He admits that his work in Washington did not bring out the best in him, but he feels the charge is unjustified. "I don't think I'm abrasive or egocentric. I think I have a healthy ego, but my problem in Washington was that there were too many bullshit assignments, " he explained to Strong. "I had always worked overseas…. When I went out, I was the producer. So then to come back and have to report to a desk … it was all a big change for me…. I had not come up through the system."

As soon as he could, Bradley left the Washington bureau to join CBS Reports and produce documentaries. The new job took him back to Southeast Asia to make "What's Happening in Cambodia?, " a program about refugees fleeing the country during the 1970s. While filming in the refugee camps in Thailand, Bradley and cameraman Norman Lloyd encountered some young Cambodians who were searching for missing relatives. "It's the kind of thing that Norman and I do best, " Bradley recalled in TV Guide. "We breeze into this Cambodian joint, throw down some beers and say 'What are you guys doing here, man? No kidding! You're going to do what? Can we go with you? You can't get in, huh? We'll get you in."' Bradley and Lloyd succeeded in getting the youths into the camp and after following them around for most of the day, captured a tearful mother-son reunion on camera.

Though Bradley resists being pigeonholed as a African American reporter and is said to hate covering "black" stories, some of his finest moments with CBS Reports came while focusing on racial issues. In "Murder—Teen-age Style, " for example, the reporter examined the problem of violence among African American gangs in Los Angeles. Producer Howard Stringer, who had to talk Bradley into taking the assignment, was quoted by TV Guide's Rod Townley as saying "[Bradley]'s black … he's younger than most of our correspondents, hipper than most of our correspondents, and knows the world better than most of our correspondents." Stringer also noted that Bradley "doesn't like and doesn't do well at really abstract stories…. Ed is a reporter." But the journalist combined both reportage and analysis in his "Blacks in America: With All Deliberate Speed, " a 1979 look at race relations in the United States that won him an Emmy and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award. The documentary contrasted the status of African Americans in Mississippi and Philadelphia in 1954 and 1979. "To the credit of Bradley and his producer, Philip Burton, Jr., " wrote Axel Madsen in 60 Minutes: The Power and the Politics of America's Most Popular News Show, "the program reported both failures and occasional improvements and concluded that court actions, attempted enforcement, and massive media attention hadn't brought much change."

CBS Reports also sent Bradley to China and Saudi Arabia and to Malaysia to make a documentary on the Vietnamese refugees known as "boat people." "The Boat People" aired in 1979, earning Bradley an Emmy and several other awards. It was also excerpted on 60 Minutes and may have been a deciding factor in the choice of Bradley to join the staff of America's most popular news program.

Bradley had been considered for 60 Minutes when a fourth correspondent was added in the late 1970s, but Harry Reasoner was chosen instead. Then when Dan Rather left the news program to take over Walter Cronkite's position as anchor of the CBS Evening News, Bradley was asked to join Reasoner, Morley Safer, and Mike Wallace. In his book Minute by Minute, producer Don Hewitt wrote of Bradley, "He's so good and so savvy and so lights up the tube every time he's on it that I wonder what took us so long."

Bradley, as quoted by Hewitt, said, "It soon became apparent that I was the front runner, if I believed Hewitt, who went around saying to everybody but me, 'If there's a better reporter than Bradley, I wish someone would point him out, ' but still he never said it to me. Finally I was in Los Angeles … for a [question] and [answer] session with the TV critics, when a reporter in the back of the room … asked Bob Chandler, the CBS News vice president who looked after 60 Minutes, about who was going to replace Rather. Either Chandler was writing Hewitt's lines or Hewitt was writing his: 'If there is a better reporter than Bradley, etc…'was the answer…. The next week I was named to replace Dan Rather."

The New Face on 60 Minutes

Bradley's presence changed the chemistry of 60 Minutes, with the substitution of his sensitive, compassionate approach to interviewing and reporting for Rather's more aggressive, sometimes pugnacious tactics. Aware that television audiences are notoriously fickle, Bradley felt that if ratings slipped, he would get the blame. But viewers seemed to accept him readily, though some critics have reacted less favorably. In 1983, for example, Mark Ribowsky wrote in TV Guide that Bradley had "not succeeded in establishing a familiar persona for viewers, or made a story sizzle." And four years later, David Shaw, in the same magazine, called Bradley one of the "least impressive of the correspondents [on 60 Minutes]. " Shaw faulted several of Bradley's stories for being "simple" and "superficial" and others for overlooking important questions, but nevertheless praised his "tough-minded report" on defects in the Audi 5000, a story which helped focus attention on a problem that led to the recall of 250, 000 cars.

Coworkers and critics alike have pointed out Bradley's ability to establish a rapport with his subjects. Mike Wallace remarked that Bradley's approach is "instinctive—he has no idea how he does it." Bradley himself resists analyzing his style; he remarked to Townley, "I'd rather not think about it and just go out and do it, and it will come naturally." When Bradley profiled singer Lena Horne in December of 1981, for example, John Weisman of TV Guide described the journalist's work as "a textbook example of what a great television interview can be." Intercutting Horne's performances with interview segments in which Horne discussed her personal and professional life, Bradley and producer Jeanne Solomon drew an intimate portrait of the singer that, as Bradley observed to Weisman, "told a lot of things about our society. It told a lot about the way women are treated, a lot of things about the way blacks are treated. It told a lot of things about interracial marriages, difficulties in the film and entertainment industries and how those things have changed and not changed." Bradley has said that he feels "Lena" is among his best work, and Wallace called it "as good a piece as I have seen on television in my life." "Lena" won Bradley his first Emmy as a member of the 60 Minutes team.

Bradley's gift for winning his subjects' confidence was also crucial when he interviewed actor Laurence Olivier, who was ill at the time. There was some doubt about whether Olivier would have the stamina to complete the interview, but as Hewitt retold it, "gradually, prodded by Ed's questions, the frail old man who had tottered into the room became Laurence Olivier, the actor. The interview went on for another hour and a half as Laurence Olivier and Ed Bradley jousted with each other. When Jeanne finally said 'cut' neither had fallen off his horse, and we wrapped one of the more memorable 60 Minutes interviews."

Not all of Bradley's interviews have been cordial ones. In one of his first pieces for 60 Minutes, "The Other Face of the IRA, " Bradley spoke with Northern Irish activist Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, prompting a heated discussion of politics and religion, which culminated with McAliskey declaring, "At the end of the day, God will be on the side of the winner, regardless of who wins, regardless of how he wins, because God always was and always will be." Other stories that required a more aggressive approach were Bradley's Emmy-winning study of convicted killer-turned-author Jack Henry Abbott and the story that Bradley described to TV Guide as the toughest he'd ever done: a report on the murder of CBS correspondent George Polk in post-World War II Greece.

The Polk investigation presented several difficulties. Many of the principals were dead, and as Bradley explained to Stephen Galloway in TV Guide, "for the people who are still alive, you're asking them to talk about something that happened 45 years ago. It's difficult to trust their memory." The piece presented a personal difficulty for Bradley as well: he discovered that one of his journalistic heroes, retired CBS correspondent Winston Burdett, might have been involved in a cover-up to protect Polk's killers. "I'd grown up listening to [Burdett] on the radio, " reflected Bradley after what Galloway called "one of the most riveting interviews of one journalist by another."

After more than a decade of investigating and presenting thought-provoking subjects on 60 Minutes and with six Emmy awards and numerous other honors to his credit, Bradley is no longer a new face but an "ominous and undeflectable presence … imperturbable and arguably beyond reproach, " commented Johnathan Schwartz in Gentlemen's Quarterly. "He is adored without worship." In 1995 Bradley was the highest scorer in seven of eight categories among active CBS journalists in a viewers poll in TV Guide.

Occasional rumors of conflict with the 60 Minutes production staff have subsided, as have speculations that Bradley is unhappy with his job. His need for adventure does not seem to have diminished, though, and he travels often, spending much of his life in hotels. The journalist summed up his attitude about his career in People in 1983: "The bottom line is this job is fun. And when it stops being fun, then I'll stop doing it."

Further Reading

Hewitt, Don, Minute by Minute, Random House, 1985.

Madsen, Axel, 60 Minutes: The Power and the Politics of America's Most Popular News Show, Dodd, Mead and Company, 1984.

Christian Science Monitor, October 16, 1986.

Ebony, August 1983.

Essence, November 1983.

Gentlemen's Quarterly, May 1989.

Jet, February 20, 1995.

People, November 14, 1983.

TV Guide, October 18, 1980; February 20, 1982; January 22, 1983; February 25, 1984; March 28, 1987; January 19, 1991. □

Bradley, Ed

views updated May 11 2018

Ed Bradley

Born: June 22, 1941
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

African American television and radio journalist

Award-winning American journalist Ed Bradley remains best-known for his work on the weekly news program 60 Minutes.

Early days

Edward R. Bradley was born on June 22, 1941. His parents separated soon after he was born. His father moved to Detroit, Michigan, where he owned a vending-machine business and a restaurant. Bradley lived with his mother in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and spent part of each summer with his father. His parents worked very hard. Often they held two jobs that kept them busy twenty hours a day. Even so, they never let him think he could not make a better life for himself. They told him he could be anything he wanted to be and he believed it.

Drifting into broadcast news

Bradley received a bachelor's degree in education from Cheyney State College in Cheyney, Pennsylvania, in 1964. To make extra money during his college years, he delivered telephone books and gave fellow students rides at fifty cents a trip. After graduating from college he taught sixth grade. He got a chance to work in radio as a disc jockey and news reporter for WDAS-FM radio in Philadelphia, but he was not paid for his work.

Bradley covered his first news story when rioting broke out in north Philadelphia. WDAS found itself short-staffed (without enough people). Bradley went to the station and got a tape recorder and an engineer (a technical person). He said, "For the next 48 hours, without sleep, I covered the riots. I was getting these great scoops [first interviews]. And that kind of hooked me on the idea of doing live stuff, going out and covering the news."

Bradley proved himself to be a capable newsman. The station began to pay him a small salary$1.25 an hour. From there he moved on to WCBS radio, an all-news station, in New York City. He worked there for three and a half years. Then he became bored with his work. He quit and decided to move to Paris, France. Bradley enjoyed the cultural life of Paris. He thought he would write novels and poetry until he ran out of money. Then he took the only job he could find. He joined CBS again as a stringer (an occasional writer) in their Paris office in 1971. Like all stringers, he was only paid for the stories that were accepted.

Bradley wanted to get back into the real news business. He was transferred to the Saigon, Vietnam, office of CBS news in Southeast Asia to cover the Vietnam War (195575; a war in which North Vietnam fought against U.S.-backed South Vietnam). While there he was wounded in an attack and eventually was sent back to the United States.

Covering the White House

After other assignments Bradley covered Jimmy Carter (1924) in his 1976 campaign for the presidency. After the election CBS assigned him to its Washington, D.C., office where he became the first African American to be a White House correspondent (reporter). Even though it was a very important position, Bradley hated it. It required him to be in a small office, doing the same things day after day. He wanted action.

From that time until 1981, Bradley also served as the anchor (main newscaster) for the CBS Sunday Night News and also as principal correspondent for CBS Reports. In 1981 he replaced Dan Rather (1931) as a correspondent for the weekly news program 60 Minutes.

Bradley's work has won him many Emmy Awards (awards for excellence in television) for broadcast journalism as well as other awards for his achievements. A correspondent for CBS's 60 Minutes since 1981, Bradley has become one of the most visible African Americans on network television news.

Work on 60 Minutes

Though Bradley resists being pigeonholed (narrowly described) as an African American reporter and is said to hate covering African American stories, some of his finest moments with CBS occurred when he covered racial issues. "MurderTeen-age Style" is one example. His report "Blacks in America: With All Deliberate Speed" was a look at race relations in the United States. He won an Emmy and other awards for the program. The documentary contrasted the status of African Americans in Mississippi and in Philadelphia between 1954 and 1979.

CBS sent Bradley to report on the Vietnamese refugees known as "boat people." "The Boat People" aired in 1979, earning Bradley another Emmy and several other awards. It was also shown on 60 Minutes in an edited form. Bradley had been considered for 60 Minutes in the late 1970s, but reporter Harry Reasoner was chosen instead. Then, when Dan Rather left the news program to take over Walter Cronkite's (1916) position as anchor of the CBS Evening News, Bradley was asked to join the program.

The new face on 60 Minutes

Bradley's presence changed the chemistry (the way things work) of 60 Minutes, with his sensitive, compassionate approach to interviewing. Dan Rather had been more aggressive. Coworkers and critics alike have pointed out Bradley's ability to establish a rapport (relationship) with his subjects. Mike Wallace, a cohost on 60 Minutes, remarked that Bradley's approach is "instinctivehe has no idea how he does it." Bradley himself resists analyzing his style. He said in an interview, "I'd rather not think about it and just go out and do it, and it will come naturally." When Bradley interviewed singer Lena Horne (1917) in December 1981, TV Guide described the journalist's work as "a textbook example of what a great television interview can be." Bradley alternated Horne's performances with interview segments in which Horne discussed her personal and professional life. Bradley created an intimate (personal) portrait of the singer. Bradley said "it told a lot about the way women are treated, a lot of things about the way blacks are treated. It told a lot of things about interracial marriages, difficulties in the film and entertainment industries and how those things have changed and not changed." Bradley has said that he feels "Lena" is among his best work. "Lena" won Bradley his first Emmy as a member of the 60 Minutes team.

Not all of Bradley's interviews have been friendly ones. He has had many unpleasant interviews because he refuses to back down from unpleasant issues. In a 1995 TV Guide viewers poll of active CBS journalists, Bradley was the highest scorer in seven out of eight categories.

Bradley today

Bradley's need for adventure has not lessened and he still travels often. Bradley summed up his attitude about his career in an interview with People magazine in 1983. He said, "The bottom line of this job is fun. And when it stops being fun, then I'll stop doing it." Bradley marked his twenty-first season with 60 Minutes during the 20002001 season. He continues to produce the news stories that made him famous.

For More Information

Hewitt, Don. Minute by Minute. New York: Random House, 1985.

Madsen, Axel. 60 Minutes: The Power and the Politics of America's Most Popular News Show. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1984.

Bradley, Ed

views updated May 18 2018

Bradley, Ed

Born Edward Rudolph Bradley Jr., June 22, 1941, in Philadelphia, PA; died of complications related to leukemia, November 9, 2006, in New York, NY. CBS News correspondent and anchor. For a quarter of a century, Ed Bradley worked as a roving correspondent for 60 Minutes, becoming one of the most recognized and well-respected journalists of his time. Over the course of his career, Bradley won nearly every broadcasting award available, including 19 Emmys, a George Foster Peabody Award, and a Lifetime Achievement honor from the National Association of Black Journalists.

Bradley was born in 1941 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father was an entrepreneur who worked long hours running a vending machine business and a restaurant. Bradley was raised mostly by his mother after his parents divorced but spent his summers in Detroit with his father. Bradley studied education at Cheyney State College, now Cheyney University of Pennsylvania. Here, the 6foot, 235pound Bradley played center and defensive end on the football team, earning the nickname “Big Daddy.”

Bradley became interested in radio during college after a friend, who worked as a disc jockey, let him read some news on the air one night. After graduating from Cheyney in 1964, Bradley took a job teaching sixth grade. His real passion, however, lay in music and radio so he began moonlighting—without pay—as a DJ for WDAS-FM in Philadelphia. Bradley hosted a jazz show, provided play-by-play announcing for basketball games, and did a little reporting for the station. In the mid1960s, when race riots broke out in the city, Bradley began covering them and did such a fine job the station took notice and started paying him for his work.

Soon, Bradley gave up teaching and in 1967 secured a job as a reporter with WCBS Radio in New York. He left after four years and in 1971 began working as a stringer for CBS News, joining its Paris bureau. As the Vietnam conflict heated up, CBS dispatched Bradley to Saigon, Vietnam, where he became adept at war zone reporting. In 1973, while he was in Cambodia covering the conflict, Bradley was injured when shrapnel from a mortar attack ripped into his back. Cameras rolled as he was carried off on a stretcher.

After the incident, Bradley returned to the United States to work at the CBS bureau in Washington and was given the high-profile job of covering Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign. Bradley returned to Vietnam, however, to cover the fall of Saigon in 1975, as the South Vietnamese army collapsed and the North Vietnamese Communists captured the city. Bradley was there with U.S. troops during their last hours in Vietnam and was one of the last U.S. citizens to be evacuated from the area.

In 1976, CBS tapped Bradley to be its chief White House correspondent and he began covering Carter’s presidency. He also began anchoring the CBS Sunday evening news. Bradley, however, preferred working abroad and in 1978 took a job as a correspondent for CBS Reports and was happily dispatched to Cambodia, China, Malaysia, and Saudi Arabia.

One of Bradley’s most memorable stories came from this time. Following the fall of Saigon, countless Vietnamese fled the war-torn area in rickety boats.

In 1979, Bradley was covering the story and one day ended up in the waters off Malaysia helping rescue refugees from a sinking craft. Bradley won his first Emmy for the story.

Soon after the poignant report, CBS asked Bradley to join 60 Minutes. He started during the 1981-82 season and although the news program already showcased the talents of seasoned veterans Mike Wallace and Morley Safer, Bradley found his way into the spotlight.

The key to Bradley’s reporting involved his meticu-lous research and his empathy. He had an uncanny ability to explore any story and look genuine doing it, whether it was politics, human interest, or an expose. During his 25 years on 60 Minutes, Bradley brought viewers tantalizing interviews with such sports stars as Muhammad Ali and Tiger Woods and music icons Lena Horne and Michael Jackson. He spoke with 9/11 widows, covered stories about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, and the shortage of AIDs drugs in Africa. Bradley earned an Emmy for a 2000 interview with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh; it was the only television interview McVeigh agreed to do.

“He could do a story about anything,” Face the Nation moderator and former Bradley colleague Bob Schieffer told the Los Angeles Times’ Matea Gold. “What made him so good was that he had this ability when interviewing people to get them to be themselves. Sometimes that was to their advantage and sometimes it wasn’t.” Bradley was also a bit rebellious. In the 1980s, he started wearing a gold earring, which caused a stir in the broadcast world. Yet for Bradley, who came across to viewers as a dignified gentleman, the jewelry never took away from his credibility as some feared.

During the early years of his career, Bradley was a rare African American in the news world. He was the first black White House correspondent for CBS News. Bradley, however, worked hard not to let his race define him. He refused to cover only stories related to race—he wanted to cover everything. In the end, Bradley succeeded in his goal of becoming a trailblazer for good journalism, not just one for black journalists.

While Bradley took his work seriously, he also knew there was more to life than reporting. He took vacations to his ski home near Aspen, Colorado, and spent his lunch breaks at the gym. There was also music. Bradley’s lifelong interest in jazz led to a friendship with legendary trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, musical director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Up until his death, Bradley hosted a weekly radio show from Lincoln Center. Bradley also befriended singer Jimmy Buffett and was known to get onstage and play the tambourine alongside Buffett.

Bradley filed his last story less than two weeks before his death. On October 29, 2006, his expose on a Texas oil refinery explosion aired on 60 Minutes. When he finished taping the segment, Bradley checked himself into a hospital. Most of Bradley’s colleagues did not even know he was ill.

Bradley died on November 9, 2006, at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City of complications due to chronic lymphocytic leukemia. He was 65. Married three times, he is survived by his wife, artist Patricia Blanchet. Sources: CNN.com, http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/TV/11/09/obit.bradley/index.html (November 10, 2006); Entertainment Weekly, November 24, 2006, p. 16; Los Angeles Times, November 10, 2006, p. B8; New York Times, November 10, 2006, p. A1, p. A29; Times (London), November 13, 2006, p. 63; Washington Post, November 10, 2006, p. A1, p. A18.

—Lisa Frick

Bradley, Ed 1941–2006

views updated May 23 2018

Bradley, Ed 1941–2006

PERSONAL

Full name, Edward R. Bradley; born June 22, 1941, in Philadelphia, PA; died of chronic lymphocytic leukemia, November 9, 2006, in New York, NY. Broadcast journalist and correspondent. Award-winning broadcast journalist and correspondent Bradley was a familiar face to viewers of the news series 60 Minutes. Bradley began his news career as a radio reporter in his native Philadelphia and then joined CBS News in the early 1970s; he reported on the Vietnam War from the Saigon Bureau and was a reporter for the Washington bureau before becoming White House correspondent in 1976. He worked as a news anchor and correspondent with CBS News beginning in 1978, landing the role on 60 Minutes in 1981. He appeared in 60 Minutes for some 25 years, contributing investigative pieces and interviews of a range of individuals, from entertainers to criminals to leaders of countries. Bradley won a number of awards, including Emmy Awards, George Foster Peabody Broadcasting Awards, and Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Awards.

PERIODICALS

Broadcasting & Cable, November 13, 2006.

Entertainment Weekly, November 24, 2006.

Jet November 27, 2006.

Newsweek, November 20, 2006.

People Weekly, November 27, 2006.