Manhattan, NY – Longtime “60 Minutes” correspondent Bob Simon, who covered riots, Academy Award-nominated movies and wars and was held captive for more than a month in Iraq two decades ago, was killed in a car crash on Wednesday. He was 73.
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A town car in which Simon was a passenger hit another car in Manhattan, police said. Simon and the town car’s driver were taken to a hospital, where Simon was pronounced dead.
Simon was among a handful of elite journalists to cover most major overseas conflicts and news stories since the late 1960s, CBS said. He covered stories including the Vietnam War and the Oscar-nominated movie “Selma” in a career spanning five decades.
He had been contributing to “60 Minutes” on a regular basis since 1996. He also was a correspondent for “60 Minutes II.”
Anderson Cooper, who does occasional stories for “60 Minutes,” was near tears talking about Simon’s death. He said that when Simon presented a “60 Minutes” story “you knew it was going to be something special.”
“I dreamed of being, and still hope to be, a quarter of the writer that Bob Simon is and has been,” the CNN anchor said. “… Bob Simon was a legend, in my opinion. He was someone I was intimidated by.”
Simon won numerous awards, including his fourth Peabody and an Emmy for his story from Central Africa on the world’s only all-black symphony 2012. Another story about an orchestra in Paraguay, one whose poor members constructed their instruments from trash, won him his 27th Emmy, perhaps the most held by a journalist for field reporting, CBS said.
He also captured electronic journalism’s highest honor, the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, for “Shame of Srebrenica,” a “60 Minutes II” report on genocide during the Bosnian War.
Simon joined CBS News in 1967 as a reporter and assignment editor, covering campus unrest and inner-city riots, CBS said. He also worked in CBS’ Tel Aviv bureau from 1977 to 1981 and in Washington, D.C., as its U.S. Department of State correspondent.
Simon’s career in war reporting began in Vietnam, and he was on one of the last helicopters out of Saigon when the U.S. withdrew in 1975. At the outset of the Gulf War in January 1991, Simon was captured by Iraqi forces near the Saudi-Kuwaiti border. CBS said he and the other three members of CBS News’ coverage team spent 40 days in Iraqi prisons, an experience Simon wrote about in his book “Forty Days.” Simon returned to Baghdad in January 1993 to cover the American bombing of Iraq.
Simon was born May 29, 1941, in the Bronx. He graduated from Brandeis University in 1962 with a degree in history. He and his wife have a daughter, who is a producer for “60 Minutes” in New York.
Was it a Uber black car?
What can you say, אל תענה כסיל באולתו,, One Evils opinion,
t. He did his job whether you liked it or not
Really? No one could manage Bd’e for a fellow yid?
To all of you Jewish haters who take joy in the death of another Jew, YOU are actually the busha.
BDE; Bob Simon was a good man, and I will miss him. He reported all over the world on various conflicts. His journalistic standards were very high. Shame on all of you, who pass judgments at this time.
I remember watching ’60 Minutes’ and every time this self-hating Jew came on, I kniew it would be a dig at some portion of Israel. I can’t recall him ever knocking the Syrian civil war or anything else in the Middle East – always some minor point of Israel- always blowing it up way over proportion
To all of you, who posted vicious remarks about the late Bob Simon, especially referring to him as a “self-hating Jew”, or a non-religious Jew”, I can only state this. When he was captured by the Iraqi Army in the desert in 1991, the Iraqis knew immediately that he was a Jew. In fact, they shouted “Yahud” and beat him and spit at him. He was treated very badly, during the two months that he was imprisoned. As far as the Iraqis were concerned, Bob Simon was a Jew from New York-not a self hating Jew, or a non-religious Jew, but just a Jew, period. How many of you would like to have endured what he went through, because he was identified as a Jew?