Bob Simon

Bob Simon was an award-winning journalist for CBS News. His career with the network spanned nearly 50 years, almost 20 of them as a correspondent for 60 Minutes.

Over the course of his career, Simon covered many major world events, including the war in Vietnam and the violence in Northern Ireland from 1969-71. He also reported from war zones in Portugal, Cyprus, the Falkland Islands, the Persian Gulf and Yugoslavia, as well as on American military actions in Grenada, Somalia and Haiti.

In January of 1991 Simon was captured as a reporter by Iraqi forces during the beginning of the Persian Gulf War. The capture was the subject of his memoir published the following year, titled 40 Days, in reference to the length of his captivity.

Born in the Bronx, Simon graduated from Brandeis University in 1962 with a degree in history; he was also a Fulbright scholar in France and a Woodrow Wilson scholar. He joined CBS News in 1967 as a reporter covering protests and inner-city riots. In 1972 he was assigned to the Tel Aviv bureau. Then, in 1981, he moved to Washington as CBS’s State Department correspondent; in 1982 he returned to New York as a national correspondent.

Simon was named CBS News' chief Middle East correspondent in 1987, and became the leading broadcast journalist in the region, working in Tel Aviv for more than 20 years.

Simon won dozens of awards for his work, including 27 Emmy Awards — one them a lifetime achievement honor in 2003 — and four Peabody Awards. The last story he worked on was with his daughter, Tanya, a 60 Minutes producer, about the Ebola virus and the search for a cure.

Simon died in New York City, on February 11, 2015. He was 73.