Bob Simon

Born in The Bronx, reporter Bob Simon was an American news correspondent for 46 years. Among the many events he reported on, often for CBS News, were The Troubles in Ireland in the late '60s and early '70s, the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square and the Yom Kippur War. Perhaps most notably, Simon covered the Persian Gulf War of 1991, during which he and four members of his television crew were captured and held as prisoners in Iraq for 40 days. This happened in the early days of the war, and Simon was forced to spend the majority of his time as a captive in solitary confinement. Later in his book Forty Days, he attributed the capture to carelessness on the part of himself and his crew, who had chosen to cross the border. In 1996 Simon was made a correspondent for venerable television newsmagazine "60 Minutes" (CBS 1968-). His primary contribution to the show was the coverage of foreign events, for which he often traveled into dangerous territories around the world. Simon was killed on February 11, 2015 when his limousine driver lost control of his vehicle on Manhattan's West Side Highway. CBS News President David Rhodes praised Simon as "a lion of the medium," and after his death CBS anchor Dan Rather called him one of the few remaining "scholar correspondents" in the business.