{"id":1747,"date":"2006-11-09T13:21:37","date_gmt":"2006-11-09T13:21:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2006\/11\/09\/fini_bi_bi\/"},"modified":"2014-08-04T05:06:39","modified_gmt":"2014-08-04T05:06:39","slug":"fini_bi_bi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2006\/11\/09\/fini_bi_bi\/","title":{"rendered":"Fini Bi Bi"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Ed_bradley\"<\/a> Ed Bradley<\/a> died today – of leukemia.\u00a0 He was not a usual man — not at all.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In the midst of one of them, his mother had a stroke and was very ill in Philadelphia.\u00a0 She wouldn’t let him miss work though – insisted that he be on the convention floor every night.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He was there for her — and for his work, as she insisted that he be.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 And if you saw him with his godchildren – daughters of the wonderful Vertamae Grovesnor, you saw yet another part of this wonderful man.<\/p>\n

Somehow though, when I read the CNN Alert just an hour ago — what I remembered at once was that night in 1975 when Saigon fell.\u00a0 I was just back from maternity leave and alone on the overnight for the foreign desk at CBS.\u00a0 As a long-time CBS correspondent in Vietnam, Ed was the last guy out — or just about.\u00a0 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.”\u00a0 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.”<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 He’s leaving a beautiful legacy but that doesn’t make it OK.\u00a0 Not at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ed Bradley died today – of leukemia.\u00a0 He was not a usual man — not at all.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In the midst of one of them, his mother … Continue reading Fini Bi Bi<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,27,2764,7,97],"tags":[2470,2468,1620,2467,2469],"class_list":["post-1747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-current-affairs","category-i-seem-to-write-a-lot-of-obits","category-life","category-television","tag-60-minutes","tag-cbs","tag-cbs-news","tag-ed-bradley","tag-saigon"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4gBq8-sb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1747"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1747\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2469,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1747\/revisions\/2469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}