{"id":2027,"date":"2014-04-01T01:30:40","date_gmt":"2014-04-01T01:30:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/?p=2027"},"modified":"2014-04-01T01:30:40","modified_gmt":"2014-04-01T01:30:40","slug":"remembering-ed-bradley-fini-bi-bi-one-more-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2014\/04\/01\/remembering-ed-bradley-fini-bi-bi-one-more-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Ed Bradley: Fini Bi Bi One More Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Ed<\/a><\/p>\n

Ed was part of a 60 Minutes piece<\/a> reported by Wynton Marsalis on Sunday. \u00a0I thought again of his gifts and his wonderful self, and decided to republish this piece, written on the day he died. \u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Ed Bradley<\/a>\u00a0died today \u2013 of leukemia.\u00a0 He was not a usual man \u2014 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\u2019t let him miss work though \u2013 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 \u2013 spending the night and morning with his mother and then returning in the limo the next day.\u00a0 He was there for her \u2014 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 \u2014 no pretense, no baloney.\u00a0 And if you saw him with his godchildren \u2013 daughters of the wonderful Vertamae Grosvenor<\/a>, you saw yet another part of this remarkable man.<\/p>\n

Somehow though, when I read the CNN Alert just an hour ago \u2014 what I remembered at once was that night in 1975 when Saigon fell.<\/a>\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 \u2014 or just about.\u00a0 What I can\u2019t get out of my head is his account of walking down the deserted embassy hallway \u2014 where almost all the lights were out except one far down the hall \u2014 and his description of thinking of “the light at the end of the tunnel” \u2014 and then \u2013 as he signed off for the last time from Saigon \u2013 ending with the words of Saigon hookers “fini bi bi.”\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure I can describe the sensitivity and sadness of this report \u2013 but I do remember sending him an email “Ernie Pyle, move over.”<\/p>\n

The thing is \u2013 he was at least as wonderful as he was gifted and as talented as he was dear. It\u2019s just so sad to think of him gone and of such a miserable disease.\u00a0 He\u2019s leaving a beautiful legacy but that doesn\u2019t make it OK.\u00a0 Not at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ed was part of a 60 Minutes piece reported by Wynton Marsalis on Sunday. \u00a0I thought again of his gifts and his wonderful self, and decided to republish this piece, written on the day he died. \u00a0\u00a0 Ed Bradley\u00a0died today \u2013 of leukemia.\u00a0 He was not a usual man \u2014 not at all.\u00a0 Good, funny, … Continue reading Remembering Ed Bradley: Fini Bi Bi One More Time<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"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":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,27,7,9,97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-current-affairs","category-life","category-politics","category-television"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4gBq8-wH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2027","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\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2027"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2029,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2027\/revisions\/2029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}