Bradley died Thursday at New York's Mount Sinai Hospital.

The 2005-06 season of "60 Minutes" marked Bradley's 25th year with the groundbreaking, critically hailed CBS news magazine.

His "60 Minutes" colleague, Mike Wallace, said on CBS News Radio that Bradley was "a reporter's reporter."

The creator and former producer of "60 Minutes," Don Hewitt, said Bradley was a reporter who got along with "people of every stripe."

And, Hewitt said, he doubts that there will be another reporter like him for quite a while. He said Bradley was "sort of every man."

Bradley's long career was marked with an assortment of honors: He won a Peabody award for a June 2000 report on Africans dying of AIDS, the Paul White Award the same year for his contribution to electronic journalism and a Damon Runyon Award in 2003 for career journalistic excellence.

He also won a lifetime achievement award from the National Association of Black Journalists.

Bradley was born June 22, 1941, in Philadelphia. He grew up in a tough section of the city, where he once recalled that his parents worked 20-hour days at two jobs apiece.

"I was told, 'You can be anything you want, kid,"' Bradley once told an interviewer. "When you hear that often enough, you believe it."

According to CBS, Bradley joined the network's news division as a stringer in its Paris bureau in September 1971 and transferred a year later to the Saigon bureau during the Vietnam War.

He was wounded while on assignment in Cambodia, and moved to the Washington bureau in June 1974 -- 14 months after he was named a CBS News correspondent.

Bradley joined "60 Minutes" in 1981 when Dan Rather left to replace Walter Cronkite as anchor of "The CBS Evening News."

Bradley collected 19 Emmys, the most recent for a segment on the reopening of the racially motivated murder case of Emmett Till.

In March of 2000, Bradley interviewed condemned Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh -- the only television interview ever given by McVeigh. It also earned Bradley an Emmy.

Bradley retained a lifelong interest in jazz and art, and recently served as a radio host for "Jazz at Lincoln Center."

Wynton Marsalis, who is the Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, called Bradley "one of our definitive cultural figures, a man of unsurpassed curiosity, intelligence, dignity and heart."

Bradley is survived by his wife, Patricia Blanchet.

Distributed by Internet Broadcasting Systems, Inc. The Associated Press contributed to this report. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.