Bradley's '60 Minutes' Legacy

This segment originally aired on Nov. 12, 2006.

On Nov. 9, 2006, 60 Minutes lost one of its pillars, when Ed Bradley succumbed to CLL, a form of leukemia.

Correspondent Morley Safer remembers Ed the way we think he would want us to: as a dedicated reporter, who represented the highest standards of this craft, a man who inspired a whole generation of journalists with a calm elegance that was never an act. He was the genuine article.

Bradley made an extraordinary contribution to the news magazine. He spent 26 years of rooting out the truth, exposing the dark side of the human condition and celebrating the best of it, and having a high old time along the way.

For example, one highlight was the day 42-year-old Ed Bradley met the delicious 64-year-old Lena Horne. It was Ed's favorite story.

"Yeah, but you can't help your sexual nature, you know, that's what that line means," the singer replied. "If a lady treats other people as she'd like to be treated, then she's allowed to go roll in the grass, if she wants to."

"Even if she's 64?" Ed asked.

"Even if she's 64, particularly then," Horne replied.

Ed would say of the interview, "If I arrived at the pearly gates and St. Peter said, 'What did you do to deserve entry?' I'd just say, 'Did you see my Lena Horne story?'"

Ed Bradley let people reveal themselves, whether they are angels, or demons like Timothy McVeigh.

"Am I pure evil? Am I the face of terror, sitting here in front of you, or am I able to talk to you man to man?" McVeigh asked Ed.

"Most people in this country think you are the face of evil, don't they?" Ed replied.

"They do," McVeigh said. "I'm just being me."

"Everyone in America saw the pictures on television heard the news on the radio. What was your reaction when you saw those pictures?" Ed asked the Oklahoma City bomber.

"I think like everyone else, I thought it was a tragic event. And that's all I really want to say," McVeigh replied.

"And the children?" Ed asked.

"I thought it was – it was terrible that there were children in the building," McVeigh said.

Ed could not resist the call of the great stories. And most of the great stories are about killing and dying in the dusty and forlorn ends of the earth, places like Kosovo and Somalia.

Working for 60 Minutes, for Ed, in fact for the entire team, was the great liberation from the routine.

He was in the best playground a reporter could ask for, and did he make the most of it, for example trudging through the jungle to keep an appointment with the Mexican rebel Subcomandante Marcos, an international man of mystery, or traveling to eastern Arkansas on a calm reflective sojourn, where he paddled his way in search of the elusive, ivory-billed woodpecker.

In one story, he shared a sauna and a dinner with the general commanding the Soviet nuclear strike force and stayed more or less sober after a force-feeding of vodka. It was just one more "sacrifice" at the altar of journalism.Ed relished his job and all 500 stories he did over 25 years. His interviews varied greatly, from spending time in the kitchen with celebrity chef Jamie Oliver to spending time on the driving range with Tiger Woods.

He could project his own coolness with the best of them, hanging out with the entertainment giants of his time, the truly great, like Laurence Olivier, Aretha Franklin, the Rolling Stones, Bono and Bob Dylan.

He played a little blackjack with Ray Charles and got taken for a ride.

"The first hand you got blackjack? And I shuffled the cards. How do I know you're not cheating me?" Ed asked the legendary singer.

"Well, how can I cheat you if you gave me the cards? I ain't touched the cards," Charles replied.

Ed on-camera was the same Ed off-camera. But he did have a playbook of body language that accompanied every interview: the dubious sage, get to the point, and puzzled disbelief.

Ed would ask the un-askable, for example asking Michael Jackson about his sleeping habits. "Do you still think that it's acceptable to share your bed with children?" Ed asked Jackson.

"Of course," the singer replied.

And he asked Kathleen Willey, who claimed she was groped by Bill Clinton, the un-askable. During the interview, he asked her what the state of the president's anatomy was at the time.

It's practically in the 60 Minutes charter that correspondents shift from the silly, even slightly salacious, to the weightiest of issues.

Just as in America, race was an important fact of life for Ed Bradley. In Tulia, Texas, Ed met the undercover narcotics agent who was accused of framing poor blacks, a man who used the word nigger.

"Yes, sir, I've used that word. I've used it a lot. Yeah. What's up, nigger?" the agent asked him.

"Is that a greeting you'd use with me?" Ed asked.

"Oh, no, sir. Not you," the agent replied.

Many themes coursed through the life of Ed Bradley, like justice - justice served and justice denied. As a boy he read about the murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old killed by white racists in Mississippi.

"Emmett Till and I were the same age when he died," Bradley once explained. "It was the first time that I had a sense of what life was like in the South. Here was a kid who whistled at a white woman and was tortured beaten and killed. For a whistle? So to go back years later to do that story and to knock on the door of the woman he whistled at, there was a lot of emotion involved in that."

When Ed tried to interview that woman, her son, Frank Bryant arrived, and in a curt exchange told Ed and his team to leave.

It was end of conversation, but not the end of the story. The Justice Department re-opened the case. And there was Johnny D. and Rolando Cruz, both released from death row after Ed's reports.

They are among a whole raft of stories that are the bread and butter of 60 Minutes, stories of outrages against the poor, industrial and official criminality and disregard of human life, stories that became a forum for the powerless.He rarely let his emotions show, but he did make it clear that he would not accept any BS.

He could be persistent, stubborn and fair. And when he had the goods — as he did when he checked into a welfare hotel that was ripping off the city of New York — he was relentless.

"Alright call the police! These guys are here against my will," the hotel manager said.

"I've got two rooms here, I'm in room 10-03, why should I go outside? I'm a guest at this hotel," Bradley replied.

"Go outside!" a hotel employee insisted.

"No! I'm staying in room 10-03," Bradley shot back.

He was also quick to cover the story that broke the heart of the nation: 9/11. Just days after the planes hit, he listened to the desperate disbelief of one woman who could not accept that her husband was gone.

"Can you help us Ed in any way? Just help," she asked.

"I will do everything I can…," he replied.

"He's my whole life," she said.

Ed was a big man with a big heart. He never had children of his own but he had the instincts any father could envy. And those instincts were reflected in many of his stories, that demonstrated his tenderness.

The oldest kid he ever interviewed was a mischievous cigar-smoking 92-year-old named George Burns.

After singing a tune together during their interview, Ed asked the entertainer, "You've got room for me in your act?"

"You kick the back of your head and we'll have a great finish," Burns replied.

And what could be a greater finish in summing up the life of Ed Bradley, than his visit with Muhammad Ali, a silent Ali, who got Ed Bradley as he's never been gotten.

"Sometimes he does that," Ali's wife Yolanda told Ed, after the boxing legend let out the sound of snoring over a meal.

"It happened after the Frazier fight in Manila," she said.

Asked what happened, Yolanda Ali said, "I don't know, I wasn't there. But ever since the Frazier fight in Manila, Muhammad will, it's sort of like narcolepsy. He'll just start sleeping, but he'll have these flashbacks. And he'll have, it's like nightmares. And his face will twist up, like he's boxing, and he'll throw punches at people. And he does it at night sometimes. Sometimes, I figured out the thing. Whenever he starts snoring heavily, I have to get out of the bed because I know it's going to start."

"So he's not putting on when he's doing this?" Ed asked.

"No. This actually happens," she replied. "And the doctor told us not to really try to wake him if that does happen because he might end up with a heart attack because it might frighten him. So I don't."

"I just get up and move," she said. "That's the hard part. You have to sort of...," she continued, as Ali playfully swung at Ed again, this time with a snort.

"You got me!" Ed said, laughing.