Ed Bradley: the TV Newsman Who Asked “Is That Who You Are?”
ED BRADLEY, the television reporter born in 1941, was a pioneering African-American reporter, and one of the most gifted journalists of his era.
His full name was Edward Rudolph Bradley, Jr. but he grew up in West Philadelphia as “Butch” Bradley. He was an only child in an extended family without a lot of money but with pride and a sense of possibility — hope and hazard and action all wrapped up together. His parents worked very hard and constantly told their son, “You can do anything you want to do.”
His parents were divorced; his mother, Gladys Gaston Bradley, worked at the automat Horn & Hardart’s and, on her “day off,” as a domestic.
Ed’s father, Edward Rudolph Bradley, Sr., lived in Detroit, ran a restaurant, had a second job servicing jukeboxes, and was content to sleep four or five hours a night. Nine months a year, Ed, Jr. was under the care of Gladys, though she tried for a time to send him to a boarding school in Rhode Island. Summers Ed spent with his father in Detroit.
Ed Jr. was responsible for the arrival of the first television set in the Bradley household. Around 1954, there was a supermarket contest — Guess the weight of this turkey and win a free TV! Ed’s guess was the closest, so the Bradleys got a TV. Before that, if he wanted to watch “The Lone Ranger,” he had to go over to a neighbor’s apartment. Ed kept a fond association with television because of the way he’d brought the family its first TV.
As a student, Ed got good marks on tests, but was fidgety and restless in class — not malicious, but mischievous. He loved music, especially jazz, and thought idly of becoming a radio deejay with a jazz show. In 8th grade, he met a chemical engineer and thought that sounded like an interesting career. But he felt no burning ambition to do anything.
Then on a day when Ed’s high school had “Career Day,” a man from local radio station WDAS-FM came to the school, and he and Ed struck up a conversation. The man invited Ed to come down and see the station and, when Ed did, he was fascinated.
He went to a local black college, Cheyney State, and played offensive tackle for the football team, at 6 feet tall and 235 pounds. He was an Education major, and graduated in 1964 with a job in hand: as a 5th grade math teacher at the Charles W. Henry School in the Mount Airy section of Philadelphia.
He kept volunteering at WDAS until they gave him his own jazz show. He wasn’t paid, but at least he was on the air, playing jazz records.
In 1963, when Dr. King made his famous “I Have a Dream” speech and talked about the desire for his children to be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character, that touched Ed Bradley. He felt himself constantly under pressure from white people because of the color of his skin. He was confident that if he had enough time with anyone, he could show them his talent, his work ethic and the content of his character. But often there wasn’t enough time.
Then in 1964 came the three-day “Columbia Avenue Riot” in North Philadelphia and suddenly Ed’s dark skin was an advantage. He could move through the riot corridor without being as conspicuous as a white man. There was deep resentment in North Philadelphia about police brutality, and it was much easier for people of color to trust the reporter when it was a black man asking the questions and holding a microphone in front of their face. So Ed Bradley did some reporting for WDAS on the story.
WDAS liked his work and hired him for $1.50/hour to do more news. The station had just one typewriter, and hardly any paper — but he was learning how to be a journalist. His instincts were there, and his voice was clear and resonant, ideal for radio.
Around 1965, Bradley was promoted to assistant principal of the Charles W. Henry School. The first year of teaching had held his attention, but the second year was much less interesting, because the material was the same. He realized he didn’t want to return to the classroom; he would either make a career as a public school administrator, or in journalism.
He chose journalism largely because it was NOT the same material; life kept changing and every day brought new stories to cover.
Upbeat and hardworking, Bradley began thinking about making the transition to TV. He got into local TV and, with an excellent broadcasting voice, and his confidence and work ethic, he thrived. In 1967, he went to WCBS Radio, a first-class radio station, with ample resources.
Then in 1971 Ed Bradley went to Paris for a few days and decided he was born to live there. He worked as a stringer in Paris, covered the Paris Peace Talks, which were supposed to be ending the Vietnam War, made $175 a week, and ate well. He was happier in some ways than he’d ever been in his life, and he tried to write the great American novel.
But too much happiness is dangerous for a fledgling novelist. Bradley wasn’t sure he was right to return to the States, but he knew two things for sure: he wasn’t a Frenchman; and he’d failed to write the great American novel. Part of coming home was putting some distance between himself and that failure.
There was always a tension in his mind because he knew how often the African-Americans experience was distorted, or ignored. He knew there were “black” stories begging to be covered… On the other hand, he was determined NOT to be pegged as a reporter only interested in, or qualified for, “the race issue.” He was an intelligent man with broad interests, and he wanted to cover the biggest, most interesting stories he could find.
Back in New York, Bradley volunteered to go to Vietnam and in 1972 CBS-TV sent him to Saigon. The whole backwards quality of it seemed to him typical of the Vietnam War: first he covered the peace talks, the settlement… then, a year later, he covered the fighting.
He also covered the Cambodian Civil War, in which the United States was doing a lot of aerial bombing, despite the futility of similar campaigns in Vietnam.
There were certainly exotic and convoluted aspects of the Vietnam War story but the elements of reporting were as basic and elemental as high-level journalism can be. The Saigon bureau chief sent Bradley out for a story, with no producers, nobody writing copy for him. Ed Bradley, one cameraman and one sound man went out together, and came back with reporter’s notes, film footage and sound. Bradley decided what the story was, wrote the script, matched it with footage and sound, and sent it back to New York.
It was dangerous work; there were exploding shells all around and in Cambodia, Bradley got shrapnel in his back, and mortar fire in his left arm. One day, a soldier standing right next to him was killed. But his work was very good, and it was noticed at the higher echelons of CBS News.
Bradley joined the CBS network news staff and was handed a mediocre assignment — covering the long shot presidential campaign of an obscure Georgia governor named Jimmy Carter. But when Carter won the 1976 Democratic nomination and then the presidential election, Ed Bradley became the first African-American from one of the three networks to cover the White House. He also contributed pieces to “CBS Reports.”
When Walter Cronkite retired and Dan Rather took his place anchoring the CBS Evening News, a spot opened up on “60 Minutes.” Ed Bradley applied for it and, after a long wait, in 1981 he got it.
The first African-American correspondent on “60 Minutes,” he did celebrated profiles on two African-American performers: Lena Horne and Muhammad Ali. The Lena Horne piece was just his second “60 Minutes” piece, and the pressure he always felt to excel was stronger because he felt many viewers and the top brass at CBS might doubt that he was good enough for “60 Minutes.” He prepared very hard for the Lena Horne piece, read everything he could find, felt he knew every story she had to tell.
He got permission to film Horne performing her autobiographical one-woman show on Broadway, and Bradley and his producer were able to cut from concert material to his intimate interview with Lena. He was deeply pleased that Lena Horne told him and the “60 Minutes” camera crew things she’d never said before publicly.
Everything seemed to work; they filmed some footage in Central Park and then Bradley was walking Lena back to her car, and as he was helping her over a curb he took her hand, and they walked for a while hand-in-hand. Afterward, his cameraman told Bradley, “I got a great shot of the two of you holding hands.”
Bradley was surprised they’d held hands; he hadn’t been aware of it. But he knew they’d felt a rapport, and that Lena had trusted him enough to open up. Bradley felt the Lena Horne piece was his best profile, and it won him his first and most treasured Emmy Award.
He also did harder-edged interviews and had a knack for making his interview subjects like and respect him, even as he asked tough questions. Why are we allowing AIDS to devastate Africa? How could the sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church have been concealed by men who cared deeply about children? Bradley’s team at “60 Minutes” won 19 Emmy’s.
Ed Bradley was a stubborn man and something of a loner. The Catholic boarding school where his mother sent him had echoed the “You can do anything” line he heard at home — but Catholic school teachers hardly encouraged him to open up and share his feelings.
Two marriages fell apart partly because of that cranky, stubborn, private quality in Ed Bradley. Women who dated him found parts of him inaccessible, and the accessible parts resistant to change.
He needed leeway with people. Part of the reason he loved jazz so much was its freedom of movement. Within a solid structure, there was great room for improvisation.
But he was a good and gifted man who cared about the world and wanted to make it better. If he was reluctant to open up to others, he had a genius for getting others to open up to him, to forget the lights and cameras pointed at them, and speak from the heart.
He was reflective in both senses of the word. He was thoughtful; and he was also capable of reflecting the man or woman he was interviewing back to them, saying ‘This is what I see. Is that who you are?’
He dressed with style, and wore an earring in his left ear. He’d arrive for an interview with a smile, and might tell someone who seemed nervous before an interview: “It’s not live television. If you make a mistake, we’ll stop.” He was very understanding then, helping the subject to relax.
But when the camera was on, he was tougher — ‘Come on, Jack,’ he often seemed to be saying. His eyes narrowed and he made a face that said ‘That’s just not credible, what you’re telling me. You’re holding something back.’ His whole body seemed to be saying ‘Tell me the rest of it.’ And he’d lock eyes with the person, and hold that glance.
Curious but not gullible, eager to learn, proud of what he knew but skeptical that he had the whole story, he challenged those he interviewed to fill in the rest, and very often they did.
For 25 years, he did stories for “60 Minutes,” about 500 stories in all. He did insightful portraits of hard-to-know characters like George Burns, Bob Dylan, and Tiger Woods, and his “60 Minutes” colleague Leslie Stahl was struck by how easy he made it seem to slip past the image of these men and find the real man inside.
There were always flowers on his desk (“And he took the time to smell them”) marveled another colleague Steve Kroft. There was jazz playing in his office, and a smile playing on his face, and he made this very hard work seem easy, of presenting a famous and multifaceted person on television.
Bradley relished exceeding even his parents’ high expectations. His father, a hard man to impress, said very little about his son’s visibility on television. But, late in life, father asked his son: ”How much do you make?”
After Bradley told him, his father paused, then said, with respect: “That’s a good job.”
Bradley’s mother, when she was quite elderly and growing a little confused, visited her son and saw all the art work in his apartment. She looked at a painting and said, ‘Who owns this painting?’
‘I do,’ said Ed.
‘And this sculpture, who owns this?”
“It’s also mine, Mom.”
“And what about this one over here?”
He finally said: “Mom, everything here is mine.” She beamed to think her son had all these fine art works in his own apartment.
In November 2006, at age 65, Ed Bradley died suddenly in Mount Sinai Hospital, from complications from lymphocytic leukemia. Very few people had even known he was sick — which is how he wanted it.
Bradley once said, “If I arrive at the pearly gates and St. Peter said, ‘What have you done to deserve entry?’ I’d ask: ‘Did you see my Lena Horne story?’”