Bradley's '60 Minutes' Legacy

A Look Back At The Reporter's Body Of Work

(CBS)  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.