Bob Simon Dies In NYC Car Crash; Longtime ‘60 Minutes’ & CBS News Reporter
UPDATED at 8 PM with more information: CBS News said tonight that the longtime news correspondent was killed in a car accident in NYC. Bob Simon was 73. The crash occurred on the West Side Highway in Manhattan when the Lincoln Town Car in which Simon was traveling hit another vehicle and went off the road. He had been preparing a 60 Minutes report on the ebola virus and the quest for a cure for this Sunday’s broadcast. He was working with his daughter, Tanya, a producer for the newsmagazine with whom he collaborated on several stories for the program.
In a five-decade career, much of its as foreign correspondent, Simon won 27 Emmys, four Peabodys and numerous other awards. He joined 60 Minutes in 1996 and also did more than 200 pieces for its spinoff 60 Minutes II.
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“We’re obviously all in shock,” 60 Minutes executive editor Bill Owens told Deadline on Wedneday night. “It’s a tremendous loss. Bob Simon covered some of the most difficult stories that any reporter has covered over the last 50 years. He was one of the last American reporters on the choppers out of Vietnam. During the first Iraq War, he was held hostage. Bob was always considered the Dean of the Middle East correspondents for the CBS Evening News.”
Simon also was one of the first CBS News veterans invited by the show’s late creator, Don Hewitt, to join the 60 Minutes team. “Don was selfish that way,” Owens said. “He was interested in talent and insisted on having only only the best people working at 60 Minutes. And Bob Simon was one of the great writers in any medium in journalism. I can’t tell you how many times [60 Minutes executive editor] Jeff Fager and I looked at one another and said, ‘Only Bob Simon can cover this story.'”
CBS interrupted its programming tonight just minutes after the CBS Evening News had wrapped on the East Coast. “We have some sad news tonight from within our CBS News Family,” a very red-eyed Scott Pelley said. “Our 60 Minutes colleague Bob Simon was killed this evening. It was a car accident in New York City.” The special report lasted about two minutes, noting Simon’s achievements and offering condolences to his family.
“Bob was a reporter’s reporter,” 60 Minutes executive producer Jeff Fager said in a statement. “He was driven by a natural curiosity that took him all over the world covering every kind of story imaginable. There is no one else like Bob Simon. All of us at CBS News and particularly at 60 Minutes will miss him very much.”
Said CBS News President David Rhodes: “Bob Simon was a giant of broadcast journalism and a dear friend to everyone in the CBS News family. We are all shocked by this tragic, sudden loss. Our thoughts and prayers are with Bob’s extended family and especially with our colleague Tanya Simon.”
Born on May 29, 1941, in the Bronx, Simon joined CBS News in 1967 as a reporter and assignment editor based in New York. He covered campus unrest and inner-city riots, as well as the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. During the late ’60s he reported extensively on the Troubles in Northern Ireland. He later reported on the Vietnam War while based in London and Saigon bureaus.
“It was television coverage that made it impossible for the Americans to stay in Vietnam,” he said in a 2013 interview with the Archive of American Television. “I mean, the fact that the people in Tahrir Square could be watching the revolution in Indonesia, and then their own revolution on Al-Jazeera … this has become a crucial part of world politics. It is determining fates as much as anything else. Important things that happen like the Arab Spring wouldn’t have happened without television.”
Simon covered 35 overseas conflicts and he nearly paid the ultimate price many times. In addition to several short detentions, wounds and other close calls, he was imprisoned by Iraqi forces for nearly seven weeks during the opening days of the Gulf War in 1991. Simon also reported from war zones in Portugal, Cyprus, the Falklands, Yugoslavia and from the American interventions in Grenada, Somalia and Haiti. He was in Poland during martial law, with Israeli troops during the Yom Kippur War, with PLO fighters during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and in Gaza the day the First Palestinian Intifada began.
Reporting from Israel in 1978, Simon learned of Golda Meir’s death before even Prime Minister Menachem Begin had been told. He reported the news on CBS Radio immediately and asked Begin, who had just finished a speech, what he thought of her passing. The PM was unaware.
Simon served as an NYC-based national correspondent for CBS News from 1982-87 and was its State Department reporter from 1981-82, based in D.C.. Before that, he was assigned for the first time to CBS News’ Tel Aviv bureau (1977-81). He was named CBS News’ chief Middle Eastern correspondent in 1987 and reported from the Tel Aviv bureau for more than 20 years. He received a Peabody and two Emmys for his coverage of the 1996 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Simon also contributed to CBS’ Olympics coverage. For the 1994 Winter Games in Lillehammer, Norway, he chronicled the botched attempt of the Mossad, Israel’s secret intelligence agency, to avenge the deaths of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. The coverage earned him an Emmy Award. For the broadcast of the 1998 Olympic Winter Games in Nagano, Japan, he delivered a 30-minute piece on Louis Zamperini, the subject of Angelina Jolie’s biopic Unbroken, who went from Olympic runner to World War II airman. After his plane went down over the Pacific, Zamperini survived for weeks on a raft before being taken prisoner by the Japanese and surviving a terrible POW camp. The story won a Sports Emmy for Simon.
In 1999, he was singled out by TV’s oldest and most prestigious awards to receive a rare personal honor for his body of international reporting. The citation from the Peabody Awards Committee read, in part: “In an age when neophytes with cell phones, websites and mini-cams claim to be journalists and when the debate on critical global issues often takes on a shrill tone amplified by thousands of extremist voices, Bob Simon’s reports for 60 Minutes II and 60 Minutes ring with reason, truth and informed insight.” His other accolades include electronic journalism’s highest honor, the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, considered a broadcast equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, and his final honor, the Special President’s Lifetime Achievement Award from the Overseas Press Club. He received that group’s highest honor last year.
In addition to his daughter, Simon is survived by his wife, Fran?oise; son-in-law Evan Garfein; and grandson Jack.
Jeremy Gerard contributed to this report.
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