'60 Minutes' correspondent Bob Simon killed in crash

Longtime "60 Minutes" correspondent Bob Simon 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.

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

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.

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.

In 1991, Simon and three CBS colleagues were captured by Iraqi forces and were held for 40 days during the Gulf War. They were beaten and interrogated and were released only after prodding from then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Simon wrote about his ordeal in his book, "Forty Days."