Ed Bradley, the 60 Minutes reporter who beguiled television viewers with richly detailed stories while confounding his CBS colleagues with meticulously planned pranks, died of leukemia Thursday. He was 65.

Bradley died at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. He is survived by his wife, Patricia Blanchet.

In his 35-year career at CBS, Bradley reported memorable stories on everything from the singer Lena Horne to the harrowing plight of Vietnamese boat people and in the process won shelves full of broadcasting honors, including 19 Emmys and a prestigious Peabody award.

His final scoop, a 60 Minutes story that poked numerous holes in the rape charges against Duke University lacrosse players, aired just Oct. 15. Neither viewers nor most of Bradley’s colleagues had any idea that he was gravely ill as they watched him.

“He was a really good reporter and a helluva guy,” said Sam Roberts, chairman of the University of Miami’s broadcast journalism department and a former CBS producer who worked with Bradley.

Bradley was not the network’s first black reporter when he began working at the CBS Paris bureau in 1971, but he quickly became the news division’s first real African-American star, covering the fall of Saigon (“He was one of the guys climbing onto helicopters from the roof of the American embassy at the very end,” recalls Roberts), taking over the White House beat, anchoring the CBS Sunday Night News and finally joining the 60 Minutes staff.

Nonetheless, he resisted being typecast as “the CBS black guy,” recalls Bill McLaughlin, who worked with Bradley in Paris and now teaches journalism at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut. In fact, Bradley resigned from a lucrative job at CBS Radio for that very reason.

“When he showed up in Paris, he was just going to work as a stringer,” McLaughlin said. “I said, man, why would you quit a staff job in New York to work part-time here? He said, “I got sick of being sent to Harlem all the time.’ He could have had a very successful career in New York, being the black man at CBS Radio, but he said the hell with that – he wanted to go to Paris and cover the world.”

None of that stopped a younger generation of black journalists from admiring Bradley as a racial trailblazer. “His position at CBS News was historical,” said Bryan Monroe, vice president and editorial director of Ebony and Jet magazines. “And his presence on 60 Minutes was a great moment showing his value and importance as a journalist but also as a black journalist.”

And give him style points, added anchor Barbara Ciara of WTKR-CBS 3 in Hampton Roads, Va., for being one of the first network correspondents to grow a beard and the first to wear an earring unaccompanied by a skirt or high heels: “He defined cool when he decided to sport an earring on the hallowed airwaves of 60 Minutes.”

Bradley was willing to go anywhere and do most anything for a story; he was wounded while covering the war in Cambodia and plunged into the ocean to help rescue refugees whose vessel foundered as he was shooting a CBS Reports special on Vietnamese boat people.

But it was his interviewing skills, colleagues said Thursday, that made him really stand out as a reporter, enabling him to pry startlingly personal stories out of subjects as varied as singer Michael Jackson and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

“When you studied his interviews, you were watching something special,” said Soledad O’Brien, co-anchor of CNN’s American Morning newscast. “He had this disarming manner. He was very gentle, but absolutely direct and to the point. He was great at the follow-up. He would smile and ask and ask and ask until the person crumbled and finally answered. He was an amazing listener and an amazing story teller. And that voice, it was so deep and rich; it conveyed what words couldn’t.”

He was also a dedicated prankster who once sent 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt a memo saying he was changing his name to Shaheeb Shahab and wanted to reshoot the program’s opening sequence to include the new name. “My secretary, who happened to be black, saw the memo and said, wide-eyed, “Oh my gosh, what are you going to do?”‘ Hewitt recalled Thursday. “I said, what can I do? If that’s his name, that’s what we have to call him.’

“I went over to his desk and said, “Shaheeb, I certainly admire you for sticking to what you believe. I guess we’d better call the papers and get this into the press.’ I dialed the TV writer at the New York Daily News, but when I said hello, he reached over and hung up the phone and started laughing like crazy. Until that moment, I believed it totally.”

Years later, Hewitt would turn the tables. Invited to give a speech at a banquet where Bradley was being presented an award by the Radio/Television News Directors Association, he told the dumbfounded audience: “I’m the guy who hired Ed Bradley and I only did it because he’s a member of a minority group.”

“You should have heard the gasps,” Hewitt said Thursday. “Then I said, “He’s a great gentleman and a great reporter, and if that ain’t a minority group, I’ve never heard of one.’ You should have heard Ed laugh.”