{"id":4267,"date":"2016-04-30T09:20:55","date_gmt":"2016-04-30T16:20:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/?p=4267"},"modified":"2016-04-29T16:44:09","modified_gmt":"2016-04-29T23:44:09","slug":"big-birthday-memory-5-ed-bradley-fini-bi-bi-41-years-ago-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2016\/04\/30\/big-birthday-memory-5-ed-bradley-fini-bi-bi-41-years-ago-today\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Birthday Memory #5: Ed Bradley – Fini Bi Bi 41 Years Ago Today"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Ed<\/a>
\nNOTE: As I approach my 70th birthday, I\u2019ll reprise a milestone post here each day until the end of May. Today \u2013 from\u00a0November 9, 2006 – the last from this year.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\u00a0towel 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

\"Frantic<\/a>
Frantic efforts to escape from the US Embassy roof on the last US choppers to leave Saigon 4\/75<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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.\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":"

NOTE: As I approach my 70th birthday, I\u2019ll reprise a milestone post here each day until the end of May. Today \u2013 from\u00a0November 9, 2006 – the last from this year. Ed Bradley died today – of leukemia.\u00a0 He was not a usual man — not at all.\u00a0 Good, funny, gifted, fierce, loving and decent, … Continue reading Big Birthday Memory #5: Ed Bradley – Fini Bi Bi 41 Years Ago Today<\/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":"Big Birthday Memory #5: Ed Bradley - Fini Bi Bi 41 Years Ago Today","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":[3799,3800,3,4,3798,3801,27,2764,97],"tags":[2470,1501,3815,3813,2468,1620,2467,3812,2469,3814],"class_list":["post-4267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-3799","category-3800","category-aging","category-baby-boom","category-big-birthday","category-big-birthday-70-1946-2016","category-current-affairs","category-i-seem-to-write-a-lot-of-obits","category-television","tag-60-minutes","tag-aaron-neville","tag-april-30th-1975","tag-aretha-franklin","tag-cbs","tag-cbs-news","tag-ed-bradley","tag-fall-of-saigon","tag-saigon","tag-saigon-anniversary"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4gBq8-16P","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4267","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=4267"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4323,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4267\/revisions\/4323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}