Bob Simon

NEW YORK — Bob Simon was kidnapped in Iraq, beaten in Belfast and held at gunpoint in Romania during a nearly 50-year career at CBS News. His bravery made the mundane way he died — in the back seat of a car on Manhattan’s West Side Highway Wednesday night — seem all the more tragic.

Simon’s work outlives him, and not just on reputation. A story he was working on with his producer, daughter Tanya Simon, about searching for an Ebola cure, is scheduled to air on “60 Minutes” this weekend. The newsmagazine will have a full tribute to Simon on Feb. 22.

He died at age 73.

Simon was a foreign correspondent in the heyday of CBS News and broadcast news in general. He was one of the last to leave Vietnam following the fall of Saigon in 1973, and reported on conflicts in Northern Ireland, Nigeria, Portugal, Cyprus, Argentina, India, Romania, Bosnia and the Middle East.

He often said he was better known in Israel when he was stationed there than he was in the U.S., something he may have wished was untrue. A story in the late 1980s that showed Israeli soldiers beating Palestinian boys during the Intifada earned him so many threats that he needed to hire security for his home.

During the first Gulf War in 1991, he was taken by Iraqi forces near the Kuwait-Saudi border. He and three colleagues were held and beaten severely for six weeks, after which he said he hoped his interrogators “die soon and painfully.”

While he was held, one of his New York colleagues prepared an obituary reel — kind of a reverse psychology, hoping it would never be used. Following his release and return to New York, it was handed to him. It took Simon months to watch.

“When you look at your obit, it sort of reminds you how close you came to being dead,” he said.

Jeffrey Fager, then a young producer at CBS News and now executive producer of “60 Minutes,” said he was always eager to hear Simon’s take on a story, even if many others covered it. Simon would usually notice something others hadn’t, he said.

Simon had the hardware, including some 27 Emmy Awards. His impact may be better felt in the words of younger correspondents who followed his path. Anderson Cooper nearly broke down speaking about his death on CNN Wednesday night, saying he felt intimidated walking the same hallways with Simon.

“When I try to write really well, I listen for Bob’s voice,” said NBC News correspondent Richard Engel, in an e-mail. “Sometimes I can just hear it — the ups and downs, the simple phrase to button up a complex thought — but then when I think I’ve got it, it’s gone too quickly, just like Bob.”