Remembering Bob Simon

One afternoon, Bob Simon appeared in the door of my office at “60 Minutes II,” a sheaf of papers in his hand.  He was working on a script.

“Greg, just the person I’m looking for,” he said. And glancing at the script, he read me a phrase that didn’t sound right to him. Looking up, he asked me an obscure question about grammar.

I offered my educated guess about what sounded correct and explained why.

“That’s what I thought!,” he said, nodding. And before he left, he offered this: “Richard Salant [legendary CBS News president] used to say, ‘There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who are there when I need them and those who aren’t.'” Bob smiled. “Thank you for being the former.” And then he disappeared.

That was Bob.

As news spread last night about his death, memories like that kept floating to the surface. I first knew him over 30 years ago, when he was the State Department correspondent in the CBS News Washington bureau, and I was the 22-year-old production assistant answering the phone at the CBS Evening News. He was remarkably kind and patient toward me, even friendly—which was surprising because I was so naive and, frankly, dim. After all, he’d traveled the world and been shot at in foxholes; I’d spent the previous four years in College Park, Maryland drinking too much coffee and writing movie reviews. What did I know?

Bob, though, seemed to know everything.

For a boy from the Bronx, Bob had an elegant worldliness to him. Across a half century, he’d seen and done it all and probably wore out more passports than he could count. He was that rare creature: he could cover any story, from world affairs to religion to politics to endangered animals, and do it with precision, wonder and an eloquence bordering on grace. He was a reporter’s reporter and a writer’s writer. He was tireless and he was fearless and he made it all look so easy. It wasn’t. He spent 40 days in an Iraqi prison in the early 1990s, and emerged to write a book about the experience—and then go back into hotspots again and again to continue to tell stories demanding to be told.

He had an endlessly curious mind, and was fascinated by almost everything—especially religion. His story about the Copts a couple years ago remains definitive—along with his profile of Patriarch Bartholomew from 2010 and his report on the monks of Mt. Athos.

He won an Emmy last year for the remarkable piece below, about an orchestra creating music from recycled trash.  That was quintessential Bob Simon—going into unlikely places and finding, to his astonishment, music.

I’m privileged to have known him. Television was privileged to have his gifts.

Thank you, Bob, for being one of those who was there when we needed you. Requiescat in pace.

Finally, CBS News broadcast this tribute to him this morning, which summarizes well his remarkable life and career.

Photo: John Paul Filo / CBS