‘60 Minutes’ correspondent Bob Simon killed in New York City car crash

ABOVE: Kris Van Cleave has more on the life of longtime CBS News and 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon.

NEW YORK – Longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon, who covered riots, Academy Award-nominated movies and wars and was held captive for more than a month in Iraq two decades ago, was killed in a car crash on Wednesday. He was 73.

A town car in which Simon was a passenger hit another car in Manhattan, police said. Simon and the town car’s driver were taken to a hospital, where Simon was pronounced dead.

Simon was among a handful of elite journalists to cover most major overseas conflicts and news stories since the late 1960s, CBS said. He covered stories including the Vietnam War and the Oscar-nominated movie Selma in a career spanning five decades.

He had been contributing to 60 Minutes on a regular basis since 1996. He also was a correspondent for 60 Minutes II.

BELOW: Watch raw video from the scene of the crash that killed Bob Simon.

Anderson Cooper, who does occasional stories for 60 Minutes, was near tears talking about Simon’s death. He said that when Simon presented a 60 Minutes story “you knew it was going to be something special.”

“I dreamed of being, and still hope to be, a quarter of the writer that Bob Simon is and has been,” the CNN anchor said. “… Bob Simon was a legend, in my opinion. He was someone I was intimidated by.”

READ MORE: Tributes pour in for Bob Simon

Simon won numerous awards, including his fourth Peabody and an Emmy for his story from Central Africa on the world’s only all-black symphony 2012. Another story about an orchestra in Paraguay, one whose poor members constructed their instruments from trash, won him his 27th Emmy, perhaps the most held by a journalist for field reporting, CBS said.

He also captured electronic journalism’s highest honour, the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, for “Shame of Srebrenica,” a 60 Minutes II report on genocide during the Bosnian War.

Simon joined CBS News in 1967 as a reporter and assignment editor, covering campus unrest and inner-city riots, CBS said. He also worked in CBS’ Tel Aviv bureau from 1977 to 1981 and in Washington, D.C., as its U.S. Department of State correspondent.

Simon’s career in war reporting began in Vietnam, and he was on one of the last helicopters out of Saigon when the U.S. withdrew in 1975. At the outset of the Gulf War in January 1991, Simon was captured by Iraqi forces near the Saudi-Kuwaiti border. CBS said he and the other three members of CBS News’ coverage team spent 40 days in Iraqi prisons, an experience Simon wrote about in his book Forty Days. Simon returned to Baghdad in January 1993 to cover the American bombing of Iraq.

Simon was born May 29, 1941, in the Bronx. He graduated from Brandeis University in 1962 with a degree in history. He and his wife have a daughter, who is a producer for 60 Minutes in New York.