Ed Bradley, the award-winning television journalist who broke racial barriers at CBS News and created a distinctive, powerful body of work during his 26 years on “60 Minutes,” died of leukemia yesterday. He was 65.

He landed many memorable interviews, including the Duke lacrosse players accused of rape, Michael Jackson, and the only TV interview with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

Bradley “was tough in an interview, he was insistent on getting an interview,” a former CBS News anchor, Walter Cronkite, said, “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.”

Bradley joined “60 Minutes” in 1981 when Dan Rather left to replace Cronkite as anchor of “The CBS Evening News.”

Bradley’s consummate skills were recognized with numerous awards, including four George Foster Peabody awards and 19 Emmys, the latest for a segment on the reopening of the 50-year-old racial murder case of Emmett Till.

His reporting ability was matched by his interviewing finesse. When he spoke with McVeigh in February 2000 at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind., the convicted bomber told Bradley that he was angry and bitter after fighting in the Gulf War. In December 2003, Mr. Jackson said he had been “manhandled” when arrested on child molestation charges a few weeks earlier.

“Ed could get people to say the damndest thing because he put them at ease,” a former NBC News anchor, Tom Brokaw, said yesterday.

Though he had been ill and had undergone heart bypass surgery about a year ago, he remained active on “60 Minutes.” One of his last reports was an investigation of the Duke case that aired last month with the first interviews with the accused.

Born June 22, 1941, Bradley grew up in a tough section of Philadelphia. He launched his career as a jazz DJ and news reporter for a Philadelphia radio station in 1963. He moved to New York’s WCBS radio four years later.

In 1971, he moved to Paris and worked as a stringer for CBS News, then transferred a year later to the Saigon bureau.

After Southeast Asia, Bradley returned to the United States and covered Jimmy Carter’s successful campaign for the White House. He followed Mr. Carter to Washington, in 1976 becoming CBS’s White House correspondent.

He jumped from Washington to doing pieces for “CBS Reports,” traveling to Cambodia, China, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia. It was his Emmy-winning 1979 piece on Vietnamese boat refugees that eventually landed him on “60 Minutes.”

Bradley recently served as a radio host for “Jazz at Lincoln Center,” where he won one of his four Peabody awards.