Ed Bradley Dies Veteran CBS News and 60 Minutes correspondent

Bradley died on Thursday of leukemia in New York, a network spokeswoman said. He was 65.

By Steve Gorman
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Veteran CBS newsman Ed Bradley, a pioneering black American journalist who won acclaim as a Vietnam War correspondent and later as a reporter for "60 Minutes," died on Thursday of complications from leukemia. He was 65.
Bradley, whose illness was not widely known, had just begun his 26th year as one of the team of reporters featured on the landmark CBS News magazine show when he died at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, a network spokeswoman said.
In his last two broadcasts, both aired on "60 Minutes" in October, Bradley scored an exclusive interview with three Duke University lacrosse players accused of raping an exotic dancer, and presented an expose of safety failures at a BP refinery where 15 oil workers died in a 2005 explosion.
Bradley's death was announced on the air by CBS News anchor Katie Couric, who broke into regular programming to deliver the news.
White House spokesman Tony Snow said, "Our thoughts and prayers are not only with Ed's family but with all of his colleagues at CBS."
Among the first black Americans to become a household name in U.S. network television news, Bradley's work earned 19 Emmy Awards, his latest for a piece about the reopening of the murder investigation into the 1955 racial murder of Emmett Till, a black youth in Mississippi.
His "60 Minutes" interview with Timothy McVeigh in 2000 was the only television interview ever given by the man later executed for the Oklahoma City bombing.
AWARD FOR AIDS REPORT
Bradley's hour-long report that same year on the devastation wrought by the AIDS epidemic in Africa won a Peabody Award and helped lead pharmaceutical companies to donate and discount anti-AIDS drugs and his 1999 expose "Unsafe Haven" sparked federal investigations into the nation's largest chain of psychiatric hospitals.
Along with African American contemporaries like Max Robinson of ABC News and Bernard Shaw of CNN, Bradley began his career as a broadcast journalist in the midst of the nation's civil rights movement.
"But he superseded that very early on in his career and was judged not as a triumph of affirmative action but because he was very good at his job," independent network news analyst Andrew Tyndall said of Bradley. "He wasn't just the black guy on '60 Minutes.' He was just on '60 Minutes."'

Thanks Mr. Bradley for being awesome and a trailblazer.............