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Rightly hailed on the CBS News website as "the most honored journalist in international reporting," Bob Simon weathered decades of global correspondence, on innumerable subjects, to achieve that honor. A Bronx native, Simon attended Brandeis University as a young man, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1962 equipped with a history degree. He enlisted in the American Foreign Service from 1964 through 1967, and joined CBS News upon release, as a Manhattan-based reporter and assignment editor. From that spot, Simon extensively covered both the domestic unrest of the late '60s and Vietnam (in the early '70s), as well as the bloody strife in Ireland and many other ongoing international conflicts. Simon's assignments from the late '60s onward include correspondent posts for CBS News' bureaus in Saigon (from 1971 to 1972), London (from 1972 to 1977), and Tel Aviv (from 1977 to 1981). He then served as CBS News State Department correspondent (from 1981 to 1982), as national correspondent for CBS News New York from 1982 to 1987, and as CBS News' premier Middle Eastern correspondent from 1987 onward.

Simon made international headlines in 1991 when he and several other members of the CBS News team were captured by terrorists and held in an Iraqi prison for 40 days. Incredibly, he agreed to return to Iraq twice after that experience, wrote a book about his travails, and participated in a documentary on that country. Simon signed on as a correspondent for the Sunday-night news magazine 60 Minutes in 1996. He was instrumental in launching that series' sister program, 60 Minutes II, in 1999.

Simon continued to work with CBS News and 60 Minutes for the rest of his career, and eventually brought his daughter, Tanya, into the fold as a 60 Minutes producer. He died as a passenger in a car accident in 2015, at age 73.