“My mind was stronger than their sticks were.”
– Bob Simon
That’s how Simon described surviving 40 days as a prisoner during the Gulf War in 1991.
Asked how the ordeal had changed him, Simon paused, “Too early to tell.”
Excerpted from the Charlie Rose show on PBS, those two comments seem to have summed up 60 Minutes’ longtime correspondent – a mind to survive an ordeal and a perspective to wait and see how that ordeal would affect him.
Of course, that’s just my take. I didn’t know Simon, didn’t interview him and have not read his book Forty Days about his imprisonment. I simply watched him, most Sunday nights, while washing lettuce and setting the table.
Simon died last week. A far cry from how he lived, dying from injuries suffered in a car crash on the West Side Highway in Manhattan. A car crash – the blind, random and cruelty of a car crash. The driver is being investigated for erratic driving, license suspensions, a dead arm, it just makes it worse. The intrepid journalist died in the back of a Lincoln Town Car that bounced off a Mercedes and into the metal bollards separating south-bound traffic from north-bound traffic. Simon had lived on the go, traveling around the world, relaying the essence of the story. He died randomly, like a number plucked out of the air.
For 47 years, Simon went out on assignment for CBS and came home with the story, a bloodhound on the trail. And now he’s gone – wrong place, wrong time – when a driver hits the gas instead of the brake in an intersection of hell. Always on the edge of the firing line, Simon spent his life getting as close to the bullets as he could, smelling them, seeing them, hearing them, feeling them. He was on one of the last helicopters out of Saigon when the Americans fled Vietnam in 1975. It’s like he studied the trajectory of the bullets, then danced as they ricocheted off the ground at his feet.
We write about horses. Simon wrote about heroes.
CBS aired his final segment on 60 Minutes Sunday night, a segment on Ebola and the inadequacies of the medicine to stop it. As always, there was Simon, his voice delivering strength and producing faith. He could have told me the moon was made of green cheese, I would have taken it to my grave.
Peabodys, Emmys and every other award worth winning, a wife and a daughter (who worked with him at 60 Minutes), an unquenchable thirst to succeed in a challenging and stimulating career, Simon had reached the pinnacle.
A life well lived. A death hard to comprehend.
