Tag: Aaron Neville

Big Birthday Memory #5: Ed Bradley – Fini Bi Bi 41 Years Ago Today

Ed Bradley 1 sized
NOTE: As I approach my 70th birthday, I’ll reprise a milestone post here each day until the end of May. Today – from November 9, 2006 – the last from this year.

Ed Bradley died today – of leukemia.  He was not a usual man — not at all.  Good, funny, gifted, fierce, loving and decent, he was a gentleman to the core. For two political convention seasons in the 80s I was his CBS News floor producer.  In the midst of one of them, his mother had a stroke and was very ill in Philadelphia.  She wouldn’t let him miss work though – insisted that he be on the convention floor every night.  The convention was in New York , so Ed drove to Philadelphia after we were off the air each night, sleeping in a limo on the way to Philly – spending the night and morning with his mother and then returning in the limo the next day.  He was there for her — and for his work, as she insisted that he be.

If you saw him on 60 Minutes, interviewing Aretha Franklin in the kitchen with a dish towel over his shoulder, chopping while they talked, or jamming with Aaron Neville, you saw another, wonderful Ed — no pretense, no baloney.  And if you saw him with his godchildren – daughters of the wonderful Vertamae Grovesnor, you saw yet another part of this wonderful man.

Frantic efforts to escape on the last US choppers to leave Vietnam 4/75
Frantic efforts to escape from the US Embassy roof on the last US choppers to leave Saigon 4/75

Somehow though, when I read the CNN Alert just an hour ago — what I remembered at once was that night in 1975, 41 years ago this month, when Saigon fell.  I was just back from maternity leave and alone on the overnight for the foreign desk at CBS.  As a long-time CBS correspondent in Vietnam, Ed was the last guy out — or just about.  What I can’t get out of my head is his account of walking down the deserted embassy hallway — where almost all the lights were out except one far down the hall — and his description of thinking of “the light at the end of the tunnel” — and then – as he signed off for the last time from Saigon – ending with the words of Saigon hookers “fini bi bi.”  I’m not sure I can describe the sensitivity and sadness of this report – but I do remember sending him an email “Ernie Pyle, move over.”

The thing is – he was at least as wonderful as he was gifted and as talented as he was dear. It’s just so sad to think of him gone and of such a miserable disease.  He’s leaving a beautiful legacy but that doesn’t make it OK.  Not at all.

THE OBAMA LANDMARK: RACIAL ATTITUDES ON MY BIRTHDAY

Obama_older_ladyToday is my 62nd birthday.  It’s pretty amazing.  Not only am I, while still healthy and not rickety, able to witness a Democratic primary where a white woman (for the first time) and an African-American man (for the first time) are the major Democratic Presidential candidates.  Not only am I, while still healthy and not rickety, able to witness the probable nomination of the 46 year old product of an interracial marriage, who has lived outside the U.S. in the developing world, and who is running on a platform of unity and commitment to helping our country have a better future.  AND who is the first candidate to sit for a video interview with BlogHer, thus demonstrating a comprehension of women who blog — and those women who read them.

Not only that.  This morning, half-awake, watching C-Span footage of the Obama Iowa rally last night, I saw a nice white Iowa lady of a certain age, like the one in this photo, put one hand on either site of Obama’s face and kiss him on the forehead.  And it wasn’t even a big deal.

You need to realize that in my lifetime as someone old enough to notice – probably the past 40 years — that would have been unthinkable.  That a highly regarded TV drama was canceled after one season because it featured a white male and black female social worker working together and stations across the south refused to carry it.  Slowly, as the Civil Rights movement brought us forward, things changed.  And here, I’m really only talking about symbols – not all those individual life moments that remain so difficult for so many. I believe that when symbols change, real change will follow.  And some of that appears to be true.

Dean_rusk_daughter_2
In September of 1967 Peggy Rusk, daughter of then Secretary of State Dean Rusk, married Guy Smith – and it was so unusual it made the cover of TIME Magazine.  Which wrote this:

Resignation  Offer. As recently as 1948, California law would have made the union a criminal offense in the state. Until last June, when the U.S.
Supreme Court killed Virginia’s miscegenation law, 16 states still banned interracial marriage. More to the
point, and more poignant, in a year when black-white animosity has reached a
violent crescendo in the land, two young people and their parents showed that
separateness is far from the sum total of race relations in the U.S.—that to
the marriage of true minds, color should be no impediment. Indrawn as usual,
Rusk pronounced himself “very pleased.” Clarence Smith, Guy’s father,
said simply: “Two people in love.”

That’s right – Rusk offered to resign because of the wedding – that was
how unusual it was.  In the early 90s I visited a high school
near Cincinnati, OH, which was once KKK country.  I was producing a “space
bridge” — a satellite conversation between high schools in Ohio and Moscow.  The night
before the show I gave a reception for the families of the kids featured
in the program.  As they wandered in, there in the middle of Ohio, I noticed that one couple was comprised of a white man and an African American woman.  Apparently I was the only one who did though.  One of the boys’ parents had divorced and his dad had married this woman who was now the kids’ stepmom.  And in the middle of semi-rural Ohio, close to the Kentucky border, nobody cared.  I guess you’d need to have been around for canceled TV shows and Secretaries of State offers to resign, to be so struck by what happened.

Fast forward to the Grammys, 1990, this winning song and video, with this kiss.


I guess it’s just that we forget how bad things used to be; a kiss like Neville and Ronstadt’s once could ruin both careers.

There’s lots more. But what does all this have to do with a presidential candidate? In Iowa?  I don’t know why but as I watched this morning I was so struck by the changes I’ve seen in my lifetime.  Probably it’s just the birthday.  Whatever happens in the campaign, and I am worried about the race stuff that came out of Kentucky and West Virginia, it was a reminder that at least things are better than they were before.  OH and last week I read that there has not been a white male Secretary of State in the US for 11 years!  Nobody’s been yelling about that, either.