Award Recipients

CBS' Ed Bradley 2000 Paul White Award Recipient

AN INTERVIEW WITH ED BRADLEY

Paul White Award winner Ed Bradley on journalism, hard work, growing up, moving up and close calls.

By John Sears for August 2000 Communicator

Ed Bradley, co-editor of CBS News' 60 Minutes, is in his 19th year on 60 Minutes. He joined CBS News as a stringer in its Paris bureau in 1971. In his early years at the network he covered the Vietnam War and in 1973 was wounded while on assignment in Cambodia. He served as White House correspondent from 1976 to 1978, and as a principal correspondent for CBS Reports from 1978 to 1981, before joining 60 Minutes in 1981. He also anchored the CBS Sunday Night News from 1976 to 1981, and Street Stories from 1992 to 1993. Before coming to CBS News he was a reporter for WCBS Radio in New York and for WDAS Radio in Philadelphia. Bradley has received numerous awards throughout his career, including 11 Emmys, and in his free time is an avid skier and a jazz fan. He will receive the Paul White Award from the Radio-Television News Directors Association on September 16. John Sears, RTNDA past chairman and news director at KPTV in Portland, OR, talked to Bradley about his career.

I've heard the words "compassionate listener," "soft-spoken," "instinctive," "intelligent," "maverick," and "trailblazer" used to describe you. How do you define Ed Bradley?
I guess all of those things fit. I probably would have started with "hard worker" because that's the example I've had all my life. I grew up in a single-parent home, raised by my mother, but I spent time with my father who lived in another city.

I'd watch my father get up at 5 o'clock and go down to the Eastern Market in Detroit to do the shopping for his restaurant, and get that business going and then go out on his vending machine business. He spent the day servicing those machines, came back in the afternoon and made sure the afternoon/evening shift was under way. Then he went home, had dinner and went to sleep, and got up to go close the restaurant at midnight, came back for a few more hours sleep, and got up again the next morning.

He never said to me, "Work hard," but he didn't have to say anything. I saw it. My mother worked in factories, worked as a domestic, worked in a restaurant, always had a second job. There was no one around me who didn't work hard.

But you had to have something more than hard work.
I think everybody is blessed with some talent, and you have absolutely nothing to do with that. It's God-given, or whoever it is that you believe in. You can work hard to sharpen your talent, to get better at whatever it is that you do, and I think that's what it comes back to.

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.

Let me go back to 1964. You graduated from Cheyney State and became a sixth-grade teacher?
I taught sixth grade for three and a half years.

And you worked gratis for a radio station for awhile.
I guess it was over a year that I worked for no pay and when they did start paying me, I think I made about a dollar. It was either a dollar and a quarter or a dollar and a half; whatever the minimum wage was, that's where I was.

But you know, I always said that no one else on my block was on the radio, and it was fun. I knew that God put me on this earth to be on the radio.

You did play-by-play basketball.
I did anything that would get me on the air. And I realized that there was no sports reporter, so I started covering sporting events. It got me into the games for free, and it got me on the air reporting on the games, the fights, things like that. And when Cheyney was in the middle of what became, I think, a 52-game winning streak over two seasons, I convinced the station that it should broadcast the games and that they should let me cover them. I had no experience with broadcasting basketball games, so I took a tape recorder and went to a playground where there was a summer league, and I stood up in the top of the stands and I called the game. Then I went home, listened to the tape, and I said, "Hell, I can do that."

Your big break came during a riot?
It was '64 or '65. I had had no training as a journalist and I used to listen to the CBS News hourly reports. That was my classroom. I would listen to how they told the story, to what elements they used, to how it sounded, and that's who I patterned myself after, the people who were on CBS News.

So I heard this reporter talking about a riot that was going on and I realized that he was a Philadelphia reporter. Then he signed off and I said, "Wow, that's North Philly." So I went up there, saw what was going on, called the station and they said, "Well, you know, do something and we'll put you on the air." So I just got on the phone and the engineer just patched me in and I did reports. I'd get a community leader and bring him to the phone, call up the station and do an interview over the phone with the guy. Then I learned how to do wraparounds and things like that. I had no experience. The only thing I'd ever done with news was to read copy sitting at the microphone in the studio. I had never been out covering a story, but boy, was that fun.

When I came back to the station, the general manager said, "Look, why don't you go back out there and cover it?" And they gave me a tape recorder and I just went out and covered it.

You jumped to WCBS.
I came to WCBS in 1967. During the interview, they asked if I could send in an actuality. I wasn't sure what actuality was, but I couldn't let them know that. So I said, "Well, just how do you mean? Specifically, what would you like?"

And they said, "Any actuality, anyone you've interviewed for stories. Just send us the air pieces." So I now know what actuality is. At that point I was FM program director and I was doing a five- or six-hour music show, so I wasn't really doing news anymore. I knew I had no actuality and I said, "You know, we're a small station, and we don't save tape, so I don't have anything to send you, but why don't you give me a tape recorder and I'll get you some actuality here?"

Ed Joyce, who was the news director, said they thought I was a little crazy, but they gave me a tape recorder, and I went out and I found a story--I read the paper and found a story. And part of the reason I got the job was because of the initiative I showed. Ed told me later, because of that, when reporters would come from out of town to interview for jobs, they would give them a tape recorder and look on the day book and say, "Here's a news conference," or, "Here's a demonstration, here's a story, go cover it." And then they could see just what that person could do right there. So I was always real proud of that.

A couple of years later your wanderlust took you to Paris.
I went to Paris simply on vacation. I stayed three weeks in Paris, fell in love with the city, and decided that I was born to live in Paris. I made the decision to come back to New York, quit my job and move to Paris. I worked to save up enough money to pay off my bills and have enough money to live for a little while, and then I moved to Paris. I ran out of money in Paris. Fortunately, about the same time I ran out of money, CBS offered me a job as a stringer.

The Paris peace talks kept a roof over my head and food on the table and clothes on my back because if something was said going in or coming out, I had the rent for the month. When you're a stringer, that's the way you look at it. But I had fun. I had a lot of fun.

Fun in Paris, not so much fun in Vietnam and Cambodia.
You know, not true. I had a lot of fun in Cambodia, much more so in Cambodia than Vietnam. I always felt more emotionally attached to Cambodia than I did to Vietnam.

It was the ambience, the people. It was a much smaller war, a war of much shorter duration. The Vietnamese had had a war for most of their lives. There was an edge of hostility about Saigon that didn't exist in Phnom Penh, where they had only been at war for five years. It was a much quieter, more peaceful country.

It was on Easter Sunday in Vietnam that you were injured in a motor attack. You could have died.
I was lucky. The guy who was standing two feet from where I had been standing was killed. We were in the middle of this hill with all these armored personnel carriers, and it was then that I learned how fast the mind is. I heard an explosion and I remembered thinking, "What's that?" And I said, "Oh, it's the recoilless rifle in this armored personnel carrier." And my next thought was, "There's no recoilless rifle in this armored personnel carrier, so what the hell was that?" That's when I hit the ground. So in the instant that that round landed and blew me in the air, I had those separate and distinct thoughts. The guy who was standing right next to where I had been standing had a hole in his back I could put my fist into. I got some shrapnel in my back and it blew a hole through my arm. It just sliced through my arm, so I was lucky. I was lucky.

Any heroes for Ed Bradley?
You know, I had heroes in my life who people outside of my life have never heard of. My uncle was a hero, Lewis Roundtree. He was not even related to me really, but he was always called my uncle. He was like a father to me. I was closer to him than I was my father. He was a hero to me, because he was someone. He was an aviator in the second world war, and there weren't many. You had the Tuskegee airmen and that was about it.

Professionally, I remember Cronkite as a kid growing up, and more so for me, the importance of Cronkite was not him sitting there at the anchor desk, but him out there doing things. I remember Walter going through some of the astronaut training in the early days of the space program. I remember Walter with Dwight Eisenhower after his presidency. Walter always went somewhere and did something. He wasn't just sitting at a desk, so in that sense, Walter was someone I looked up to.

Where did you learn your compassion, your ability to relate to people?
Probably my mother. She was a very compassionate woman, and always kept me on my feet. And I think part of it is just the way you are, the way you're raised. And she had the responsibility for raising me.

You've interviewed entertainers, political figures and world leaders. What's left for you to do?
Maintain the standards this broadcast has had for all of these years, maintain the standards I have, and continue to try and have fun and enjoy it. Because when it gets to the point where it's not fun anymore, I've always hoped that I would have the courage to say goodbye and walk away from it. I think it was easier to walk away from it at 30, to go to Paris, than it would be today.

Every year, kids graduate from college, and every year those kids are ready to conquer the world and find that they can't. What advice do you give to aspiring journalists?
The same advice when I describe my formula. Be prepared, work hard, and hope for a little luck. Recognize that the harder you work and the better prepared you are, the more luck you might have. And part of that luck is being willing to take a risk. Because it's easy to go down that well-traveled path. It's difficult when you have to make a diversion and you think that this diversion might be worthwhile. It might pay off.

Somebody may be better than you, somebody may have more talent than you, but they can't out-prepare you. They can't study more than you can, they can't be as ready for a story as you can. That's the kind of advice I would give.

What are your thoughts on minority journalists and minority ownership?
More than there used to be, less than there should be. As the old lady said in the amen corner of the church, "Thank God it ain't what it used to be." But is there room for improvement? Yeah, there's a lot of room for improvement. I'd like to see more minority executives. I'd like to see more opportunity for minorities off the air as well as on the air because that's where a lot of the decisions are made. I'm always looking for producers and associate producers.

What was your most memorable interview?
I've never been able to answer that question. It changes from moment to moment. Two stick with me more than any others. Lena Horne was one. The other was an interview I did with a teenager named Richard Jenky. He was in Wyoming or Montana--I forget which--but he killed his father who had sexually and physically abused both his mother and his sister. And I remember asking him a question and there just being a minute of silence while he thought about the answer. He was so lost in thought and I just sat there and waited. A very, very powerful interview and I've never forgotten this kid. Never.

What do you understand now more than you did in 1964 when you graduated from college?
You know, I think I still have a sense that no matter what you do, no matter what you achieve, no matter how much success you have, no matter how much money you have, relationships are important. The people in your life are important. Meaningful relationships with those people are very important. I don't think I realized that in '64. I think there was a lot I took for granted then.