by Michael Serrill
Bob Simon, longtime correspondent for CBS News and for the past decade a prolific producer of fascinating stories for that network’s 60 Minutes, is the 2014 recipient of the OPC’s highest honor. In his 47 years as a reporter, Bob has covered more than 30 overseas conflicts. He has won 25 Emmys, four Peabody awards and five Overseas Press Club awards.
Bob, a native of the Bronx, started his peripatetic overseas career in 1969, when he was assigned to CBS’s London bureau. He covered Biafra’s war for independence and the Troubles in Northern Ireland, where he was beaten by a Protestant mob in Belfast. In 1971 he was dispatched to Vietnam, where he won one of his OPC awards for his coverage of a North Vietnamese offensive. He was on one of the last helicopters out of Saigon in 1975, and won another OPC award for his radio dispatches in the final days of the war.
A CAREER STARTED IN LONDON
Bob’s next assignment was to the Middle East, and that region has been a focus of his career ever since. He covered the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s historic visit to Israel in 1977. Later he would be on the front lines for the first Palestinian intifadah, and he was there when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995. In between, he did some national reporting and election coverage in the U.S. But when a foreign crisis hit—in the Falklands, in Lebanon, in Guatemala and El Salvador—it was often Bob who got tapped to wade into the fray.
No surprise then that when the first Persian Gulf War broke out in 1991, Bob was there with his CBS crew. Like many journalists who covered the conflict, he was frustrated at the severe restrictions imposed on the media by the U.S. military. So on his own Bob crossed into Iraqi-occupied Kuwait from Saudi Arabia He was doing a stand-up report when the Iraqi military captured him and three crew members. They were tortured and starved for more than a month before being released, and nearly died when the prison where they were held was bombed. Simon described the incident as “the most searing experience of my life,” and, after his release, wrote a book about the experience called Forty Days.
Since 1996, Bob has done most of his reporting for 60 Minutes, with a focus on southern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. One of his more memorable pieces concerned the so-called Lost Boys, Somali youths who fled the civil war in their country, ending up in camps in northern Kenya. A lucky few hundred were sent to the United States, and Simon has reported on their sometimes difficult new lives in two 60 Minutes segments. So, congratulations to Bob Simon on his President’s Award. No one ever deserved it more.