'Butch' Bradley, The Early Years

How A Boy From Philadelphia Became A World-Class Reporter

(CBS)  "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."