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| FILE - In this Feb, 1, 2010 file photo, journalist Bob Simon attends the premiere screening of "Faces of America With Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr." at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York. CBS says Simon was killed in a car crash on Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2015, in Manhattan. Police say a town car in which he was a passenger hit another car. He was 73. |
NEW YORK (AP)
-- Bob Simon was kidnapped in Iraq, beaten in Belfast and held at
gunpoint in Romania during a nearly 50-year career at CBS News. His
bravery made the mundane way he died - in the back seat of a car on
Manhattan's West Side Highway Wednesday night - seem all the more
tragic.
Simon's work outlives him, and not
just on reputation. A story he was working on with his producer,
daughter Tanya Simon, about searching for an Ebola cure, is scheduled to
air on "60 Minutes" this weekend.
The newsmagazine will have a full
tribute to Simon on Feb. 22.
He died at age 73.
Simon
was a foreign correspondent in the heyday of CBS News and broadcast
news in general. He was one of the last to leave Vietnam following the
fall of Saigon in 1973, and reported on conflicts in Northern Ireland,
Nigeria, Portugal, Cyprus, Argentina, India, Romania, Bosnia and, most
indelibly, the Middle East.
He often said he
was better known in Israel when he was stationed there than he was in
the U.S., something he may have wished was untrue. A story in the late
1980s that showed Israeli soldiers beating Palestinian boys during the
Intifada earned him so many threats that he needed to hire security for
his home.
During the first Gulf War in 1991,
he was taken by Iraqi forces near the Kuwait-Saudi border. He and three
colleagues were held and beaten severely for six weeks, after which he
said he hoped his interrogators "die soon and painfully."
While
he was held, one of his New York colleagues prepared an obituary reel -
kind of a reverse psychology, hoping it would never be used. Following
his release and return to New York, it was handed to him. It took Simon
months to watch.
"When you look at your obit, it sort of reminds you how close you came to being dead," he said.
Jeffrey
Fager, then a young producer at CBS News and now executive producer of
"60 Minutes," said he was always eager to hear Simon's take on a story,
even if many others covered it. Simon would usually notice something
others hadn't, he said.
Simon had the
hardware, including some 27 Emmy Awards. His impact may be better felt
in the words of younger correspondents who followed his path. Anderson
Cooper nearly broke down speaking about his death on CNN Wednesday
night, saying he felt intimidated walking the same hallways with Simon.
"When
I try to write really well, I listen for Bob's voice," said NBC News
correspondent Richard Engel, in an email from Iraq Thursday. "Sometimes I
can just hear it - the ups and downs, the simple phrase to button up a
complex thought - but then when I think I've got it, it's gone too
quickly, just like Bob.
"He was a brilliant
writer and journalist who had the amazing ability to be brave,
intelligent and witty all at the same time and make it look effortless,"
Engel said. "He was the gold standard. Without him, our profession is
diminished."
Simon joined "60 Minutes II" in
1999 and the Sunday night broadcast in 2005. He carved out a new niche
with a willingness to travel the world for all manner of stories, given a
freedom and budget increasingly rare in the realm of broadcast news
today. He found a symphony in the Congo, hunted for jaguars in Brazil,
visited monks on a mountaintop in Greece.
The
jaguar story displayed his subtle wit: "It was good to be in a car," he
said, as the camera showed a crocodile-like creature lurking in a swamp.
"You
can tell the difference when a reporter can't wait to get out there and
cover a story and one who goes out reluctantly or would rather stay
home," Fager said. "You're born with this. You're born with desire and a
curiosity about the world. And he was born with an extra gift, with an
ability to tell a story that sets him apart."
One
of his favorite stories, from 2011, was a visit with the Orthodox
Christian monks on Greece's Athos - a place where newspapers, computers,
televisions and - for the past 1,000 years, women - are not allowed.
After two years of cajoling, he was permitted to bring the first camera
crew there in 30 years. With graceful language, Simon captures the
rhythm of the place: "On a typical day -and every day is a typical day,"
he explained the never-deviating routine. One bearded monk, he said,
"could have risen from a Rembrandt."
This past
Sunday, he profiled "Selma" filmmaker Ava DuVernay. The story had
personal touches - DuVernay's father watched the march in Selma that her
daughter recreated for the movie - and hit on serious issues like the
lack of diversity in Hollywood.
"We think of
him as a foreign correspondent, but he could do everything well," Fager
said. "He was a brilliant thinker and he could go into any kind of
situation and tell it in a way you haven't heard before. I just think he
was a master story-teller."
