Remembering Bob Simon: "He was a seeker"

CBS News Senior White House Correspondent Bill Plante offers some thoughts on his friend and colleague Bob Simon, who died in a car accident Wednesday in New York City.

My friend Bob Simon spent a lifetime seeking answers. He explored and reported on them with searing honesty, which elevated his reporting and writing above the everyday.

He risked his life for those answers -- in Vietnam, Israel, the Middle East, the Balkans and a dozen other star-crossed places.

Bob was the reporter when my wife Robin and I went to Vietnam in 1995 to find the spot where her father's Marine fighter jet had been shot down almost three decades earlier.

When -- with the help of a villager who remembered and led us -- we reached the mountainside glen, we knew were in the right place. Small debris was still scattered in the dirt.

After Robin had had a chance to grieve alone in a sun-dappled clearing, Bob approached her with a question. "Did you find what you came for?"

Rest in Peace, my friend.