Ed Bradley of '60 Minutes' Dies at 65

He told the Radio Television News Directors Association magazine: "My formula for success has three elements: the talent you're given, the hard work you do to get better at whatever it is that you do, and a certain amount of luck. And I always found that the harder I worked, the better my luck was, because I was prepared for that. I will not go into a story unprepared. I will do my homework, and that's something I learned at an early age."

Edward R. Bradley was born June 22, 1941, in a tough section of west Philadelphia, where, he recalled, his parents worked 20-hour days, with two jobs each. He graduated from what is now Cheyney University of Pennsylvania, a historically black college.

As a center and defensive end on the school's football team, the six-foot, 235-pound Bradley was nicknamed "Big Daddy." Forty-three years, a heart bypass operation and 45 fewer pounds later, "my new nickname is 'Tiny Daddy,' " he told Shister.

Bradley taught sixth grade after college and worked at night and without pay as a disc jockey playing jazz and doing play-by-play for basketball games on WDAS-FM radio in Philadelphia.

His first news story was covering riots in north Philadelphia, which won him a minimum-wage salary of $1.25 an hour. By 1967, he was hired at the all-news WCBS Radio in New York City. In 1971, Bradley moved to Paris and broke into TV as a stringer for CBS News.

He went to the Saigon bureau and was in Cambodia in 1973 when he was wounded in the left arm by mortar fire and shrapnel peppered his back. The soldier standing next to him was killed.

Bradley returned to the United States, in the CBS Washington bureau, covering Carter's presidential campaign. He became White House correspondent from 1976 to 1978 and anchored the Sunday evening newscast. He hated being tied to an office and soon jumped to "CBS Reports" as its principal correspondent, traveling to Cambodia, China, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia.

It was his Emmy-winning 1979 work on a story about Vietnamese boat people that brought him wide attention. In it, he plunged into the South China Sea off Malaysia to help pull them to safety. Later in the piece, he was besieged by thousands of refugees at a shantytown who were desperate to get messages to relatives around the world.

The work landed him on "60 Minutes" in 1981, the first African American on that program.

He always remembered where he came from, said another old friend, Acel Moore, an associate editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

He visited Philadelphia regularly and kept in touch with old friends, Moore said, never bragging but seeming to delight in his success. In 1985, while being interviewed by Playboy magazine, Bradley pointed to a photo on his office wall. "For me to be able to stand up in the Khyber Pass and say, 'Boy, here's little Butch Bradley from West Philly. Alexander the Great passed through here 2,500 years ago' -- God, I mean, that's a kick!"

His death took most colleagues by surprise. Schieffer, who last saw Bradley in September, said he was "struck that day by how frail he looked." Bradley, who had coronary bypass surgery in 2003, entered the hospital last week, Schieffer said, for what friends thought was pneumonia.

Bradley became one the most recognized journalists in America when he joined "60 Minutes" and was described as one of the most trusted TV personalities and ranked second only to retired CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite in competence in a 1995 TV Guide poll.

Cronkite told the Associated Press that Bradley "was tough in an interview, he was insistent on getting an interview, and at the same time when the interview was over, when the subject had taken a pretty heavy lashing by him -- they left as friends. He was that kind of guy."

His first marriage ended in divorce, as did his second, to Priscilla Coolidge.

Survivors include his wife, Patricia Blanchet of New York.

"I should tell you I'm not finished yet," he told the NABJ last year. "There are many more rivers to cross, and many more stories to cover, and I hope, a lot left in this lifetime."

Staff researcher Karl Evanzz contributed to this report.