'Butch' Bradley, The Early Years

This segment originally aired on Nov. 12, 2006.

Those qualities that made Ed Bradley a great reporter grew out of the experiences of early years. Ed was born on June 22, 1941 in Philadelphia to parents who divorced when he was a little boy, when everyone called him "Butch Bradley."

As correspondent Lesley Stahl reports, he was raised as an only child by his mother Gladys, who was ambitious for her son. As Ed told Charlie Rose, she and he would argue over how little they had when he was growing up. She would ask him: "But were you ever hungry?"

"I said, 'No, I wasn't hungry.' But we were poor. She didn't see it that way. I mean, my mother worked. My mother, everyone in my family always had more than one job," Bradley said during an interview on Charlie Rose's show on PBS. "Even in the extended family. I mean, my mother worked at Horn and Hardart's restaurant in Philadelphia. It was an automat. She worked on her days off as a domestic."

"The marks of his childhood were all over his soul," says Ruth Streeter, who was Ed's producer at 60 Minutes for 22 years.

Asked whether Ed talked about his mother during their long trips on cars and planes while on assignment, Ruth says, "She was his North Star, his guiding light. And she organized her life so that she could provide him every chance to get out of Philadelphia and become someone."

"My father lived in Detroit. He was in the vending machine business and he had a restaurant," Ed told Charlie Rose.

His relationship with his father was strained; Ed told Ruth about the car rides they took every summer to Detroit. "For the first 15 minutes of the trip while they were in Philadelphia, they would have this awkward conversation, having not seen each other and then once they got outside of Philadelphia there would be silence, and the only sound between them that they shared was the radio," she explains.

When he was nine years old, his mother sent him to a Catholic boarding school, to get him off the streets.

"I can remember a nun I had in school telling me 'You can be whatever you want to be,'" Ed told Rose during their interview. "And I believed her against all the odds then. I mean, thinking of what segregation was about. And I mean, I went to a school for poor children, but someone who told me, 'You can be whatever you want to be.'"

"I believed her," he said.

But Ed was miserable at boarding school. He hated it. "Ed knew what it was like to be lonely, to be displaced," Ruth says. "Those were the kinds of experiences you see in his reporting. He's able to connect with people from all kinds of backgrounds, and any kind of place, because he understands what it's like to be different and the outsider and not fit in."

He went to historically black Cheyney State College to become a teacher. Even then he loved jazz, and soon he was moonlighting as a disc jockey on a Philadelphia station for free.

"I would say, 'Good Evening, welcome to the Sound of Modern Music. I'm your host Little Jazz-Bo, Ed Bradley,'" Ed once said, recalling his radio DJ gig.He moved on to WCBS radio in New York. After four years covering local stories, he moved to Paris. His old friends Marie Brown and Jimmy Wilson say that's where Ed became cool.

"He always had style. It just came out," Jimmy says.

"He had a purse!" Marie recalls, laughing. "It was during that time. It was just the beginning in men's fashions where men started wearing bags, you know. And he had on clogs. And he had a fabulous blue velvet blazer, and we said, 'Oh, wow!'"

After Paris, he went to Vietnam. CBS News hired him in 1972, and he volunteered to go to Saigon to cover the war for the CBS Evening News.

"I got to be a war correspondent, that I got to go to a place where there was no assignment desk, where you could do where the bureau chief would say, 'You know, why don't you go over to Cambodia, see what's going on,'" Bradley recalled during the Charlie Rose interview.

Ed covered everything from firefights to the fall of Saigon, from drug use by soldiers to the plight of refugees.

"You'd just take off down the road and look for smoke. And, see the planes were bombing and stuff. And you'd just walk into the fight," remembers Norman Lloyd, who was Ed's cameraman and spent three years with him covering the war.

Asked what Ed was like under fire, Norman says, "He was very cool. I have never seen Ed panic under fire."

Norman was there in Cambodia when shrapnel for a mortar round tore into Ed's elbow. "A Cambodian medic came along and he wanted to give Ed a shot, you know," Norman recalls.

"A shot of what?" Stahl asks.

"Well, I don't know what it was. But he had this needle. It was like a horse needle, you know. And Ed's laying there. And this guy was having all sorts of problems jabbing this needle into Ed. And the tear rolling down his face was probably caused by the medic jabbing this needle into him," he replies.

Ed may not have shown his fear in battle, but that doesn't mean he didn't feel it.

"We're walking across this rice paddy and there must have been a half dozen Viet Cong," Ed once said, recalling his Vietnam experiences. "I hear these guys talking on either side. How can they not see me? You talk about scared. I was petrified. I said, 'If I ever get out of this.' I said, 'Please Lord, just let me. I'll never do anything like this again in my life.' Course, I got out and of course you did it the next time."

Ed and Norman did it time after time, one battle after the next.

"If you go into combat and you're in close combat where people are literally being killed around you, and wounded around you, you know, you develop this bond with your buddy. You never lost that," Norman explains. "He was more a brother to me than my own brothers. And this something is gone from me with his death. I loved him."

Ed was one of the last Americans evacuated out of Saigon before it fell to the communists.

After his war zone reporting, CBS rewarded him with a high profile assignment in the 1976 election: he became the first black White House television correspondent, and anchored his own news broadcast.

The White House was supposed to be the best job in the business, but Ed chafed at being locked inside the White House press room day after day, in a suit and tie.

"I went to the White House every day. I never went anywhere unless the president went somewhere," Bradley told CNN's Larry King during an interview."He was not a correspondent who wanted to stay at home. He liked foreign countries. He especially liked Asia," remembers Sir Howard Stringer, who today runs Sony Corporation. In 1978 he ran the documentary unit, "CBS Reports." When he offered Ed a job, Ed jumped at it.

"What distinguished him, in your mind, as a journalist, when he was working at CBS Reports?" Stahl asks Stringer.

"Well, I think his emotional involvement with stories, without losing his objectivity. I mean, he was a journalist who had real feelings, and a real ability to empathize and care about people. All kinds of people but essentially the underdog," he replies.

Ed got really involved while reporting on the boat people, who were fleeing from Vietnam three years after the American withdrawal. Instead of staying on the sidelines, he got into the waves and helped exhausted people ashore.

They came, 23,000 in all, to an uninhabited island. Many of them asked Ed to take and mail the letters they had written to their relatives in the United States.

Ed didn't like classical music that much, so when he went to Shanghai for a program on the Boston Symphony's tour of China, what he really wanted to do was meet some ordinary people.

"We went out and talked to young people in the streets, there are shots in the film of people all around him, ready to touch him and talk to him," Stringer remembers.

"He had this magnetic presence; this sort of, almost bear-like quality that, with such an infectious smile, and a twinkle in his eye. Nobody feared him, nobody worried about him. He never made anybody tense," Stringer adds.

When he would return to his old neighborhood in West Philadelphia, he would tell people there that he never quite believed what his life had turned into.

"There was is a picture in my office. I remember standing in the Khyber Pass and thinking, 'Would you believe this? Little Butch Bradley from West Philly standing in the Khyber – Alexander the Great came through here; probably stood right here and looked at this view. And here's little Butch Bradley from West Philly.' I mean, that was wonderful," Bradley once reminisced. "That made it worth everything."