Ed Bradley, a veteran CBS News broadcast journalist and "60 Minutes" correspondent for the past quarter-century, has died of leukemia.

Bradley, 65, died at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, a network spokesperson has said.

Among his many career highlights was the only television interview with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, responsible for the worst act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history.

Former CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite said Bradley could be tough to his subjects during an interview.

"And at the same time when the interview was over, when the subject had taken a pretty heavy lashing by him -- they left as friends. He was that kind of guy," Cronkite told The Associated Press.

Bradley was also able to get interviewees to reveal highly personal details about their life, according to former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw.

"Ed could get people to say the damndest thing because he put them at ease," Brokaw told AP. "It was like talking not to a reporter, but talking to an interested counselor of some kind. ... He had this wonderful way of stroking his beard and saying, `Well, what do you mean by that?"

The veteran reporter received numerous awards for journalistic excellence, including 19 Emmys -- the most recent one for a story on the reopening of the 50-year-old murder case of Emmett Till.

Other honours included the Lifetime Achievement award from the National Association of Black Journalists.

He also received a Peabody award for a report on Africans dying of AIDS, and the prestigious Paul White Award for contributing to electronic journalism.

The 2005-06 season of the show marked Bradley's 25th year with "60 Minutes." He joined the show in 1981.

Larry King, of Larry King Live, told CNN he was stunned by the news that Bradley had died.

"I was really shocked," he said. "I was with Ed a couple of months ago and he wasn't looking good. He told me he had pretty much licked it and recovered, but if you saw him you had grave doubts. He looked like someone close to buying it and it felt terrible to be around him because he was such a vibrant guy. Ed Bradley sums up in a couple of words: He was a good guy. He was just a good guy."

Bradley once told an interviewed he grew up in a rough Philadelphia neighbourhood, where his parents worked 20-hour days at two jobs each.

"I was told `You can be anything you want, kid,'" he told the interviewer. "When you hear that often enough, you believe it."

With files from The Associated Press