Legendary CBS News correspondent Bob Simon’s family and coworkers are remembering him 10 years after his death.
The award-winning newsman, who died suddenly in a Feb. 11, 2015 car accident in New York, earned more than 40 major awards over a 47-year career at CBS News.
Simon’s decades covering news around the world
He reported from around the world and the U.S., including a stint as the network’s State Department correspondent. Simon also worked as a war reporter, covering the Vietnam War and violence in Northern Ireland. He reported from war zones in Portugal, Cyprus, the Falkland Islands, the Persian Gulf and Yugoslavia.
Simon was named CBS News’ chief Middle East correspondent in 1987. He worked in Tel Aviv for more than 20 years, becoming the leading broadcast journalist in the region.
The correspondent was imprisoned and tortured by the Iraqi army for 40 days, along with three CBS News colleagues, at the beginning of the Persian Gulf War in 1991.
Simon landed major interviews for 60 Minutes, including the first Western interview with extremist Iraqi cleric Muqtada al Sadr, and another with his Shiite Muslim rival, the Ayatollah al-Hakim, who was killed shortly after the interview.
The weekend before his death, Simon’s interview with filmmaker Ava DuVernay aired on 60 Minutes. At the time, he was working on a story about Ebola with his daughter Tanya, who is now executive editor at 60 Minutes.
Bob Simon reported over 200 stories for 60 Minutes during his time with the broadcast. Below, watch some of his memorable work.
In 2011, Bob Simon stepped back in time when he got rare access to monks in ancient monasteries on a remote Greek peninsula who had lived a spartan life of prayer in a tradition virtually unchanged for a thousand years. Upon his return, Simon told 60 Minutes Overtime: “I’ve been around the world many times but I’ve never, ever seen a place like Mount Athos.”
In 2006, he traveled to Bangladesh, where giant ships were being torn apart for salvage by men and boys earning a dollar a day. Simon discovered appalling working conditions and toxic waste polluting the beaches.
Simon became affectionately known to some of his colleagues as the de facto 60 Minutes wildlife correspondent. In 2011, when asked by 60 Minutes Overtime about reporting animal stories, he embraced the honorary title. “An animal is never duplicitous. An animal will never get involved in gratuitous cruelty. It’s very refreshing to go see them after you’ve spent a lot of time interviewing politicians.”
One animal story he shared with 60 Minutes viewers several times over the years is that of the elephant orphanage. He first met Dame Daphne Sheldrick and visited the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, the Kenya-based orphanage for elephants, in 2006, describing it this way: “It’s actually a pretty lush life for these elephants here at the orphanage … like any good school, this place prepares its students to leave, to get ready for life in the real world, to go back to the wild from whence they came.” Sheldrick, who passed away in 2018, worked with elephants for over 50 years.
In 2008, Simon reported on how the growing demand for bluefin tuna, highly coveted in Japan and the rest of the world as the ultimate taste experience in sushi, was pushing fishermen worldwide to find new and more efficient ways to land this prized catch. Simon reported from the Tokyo fish market, explaining “the price of a single bluefin tuna is anywhere between $2,000 and $20,000. It all depends on the size, the season and the fat content. The fattier, the better.”
“The Lost Boys” documented the epic survival of thousands of Sudanese boys who had escaped war and walked a thousand miles across East Africa to a refugee camp in Kenya. After meeting the boys in 2001 in Kenya, some of the young men were relocated to the U.S. and Simon followed their journey over a 12-year period, airing an update in 2013. Producer Draggan Mihailovich, who worked with Simon on the story, said: “Bob loved underdogs, and The Lost Boys of Sudan were the ultimate underdogs.”
In 2011, Simon interviewed the Iraqi defector code-named “Curve Ball,” whose false tale of a mobile, biological weapons program was the chief justification for invading Iraq. Curve Ball abruptly ended the interview and walked out after Simon pressed him for “the whole story.”
Simon traveled to Oslo to meet then 21-year-old chess grandmaster and number one player in the world Magnus Carlsen in 2012. He also spent time in London, following him at the London Chess Classic. A few years later, producer Michael Gavshon shared some insight into Simon’s chess skills: “There were a number of stories that he knew nothing about, but that really did not prevent him from being extremely enthusiastic about them … Bob didn’t know the moves of each piece on the board. And yet, he found a way of telling the story coherently and brilliantly.”
The same year Simon also traveled to Serbia with tennis star Novak Djokovic, meeting the legendary athlete’s first coach, and visiting his grandfather’s apartment building, where his family sought refuge during the war.
In 2011, he reported from Tunisia, where protests against the repressive government not only toppled its autocratic ruler, but sparked the uprising in Egypt that forced President Hosni Mubarak to resign. Simon’s studio introduction ended with this line: “If the Middle East is being transformed before our eyes today, it all began when a poor fruit vendor decided he just wasn’t going to take it anymore.”
In 2014, Simon met Nicholas Winton, a British stockbroker who in 1939 traveled to Czechoslovakia and saved 669 children from the Holocaust. That same year, Simon also traveled to the Chernobyl exclusion zone to report on the cleanup there decades after the nuclear power plant disaster.
At the time of his death in 2015, correspondent Scott Pelley said: “Bob Simon was always ready for an adventure, a chance to travel somewhere he’d never seen and tell us all about it. He had a gift for finding the surprising, even the magical, in the most unexpected places.” One of the places Pelley might have been referring to was Simon’s 2007 trip to Indonesia’s Foja Mountains, for the story “Garden of Eden.”
