'Butch' Bradley, The Early Years

How A Boy From Philadelphia Became A World-Class Reporter

(CBS)  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.