David Strathairn
Actor

David Strathairn won the Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival and earned nominations from the Academy, Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild, BAFTA, and Independent Spirit awards for his compelling portrait of legendary CBS news broadcaster Edward R. Murrow in George Clooney’s Oscar-nominated drama Good Night, and Good Luck and won an Emmy for Best Supporting Actor in the HBO project Temple Grandin.

His 2005 Independent Spirit nomination was the fourth in a stellar career that dates back to his 1980 motion picture debut in John Sayles’s first film, The Return of the Secaucus Seven. Strathairn subsequently collaborated with Sayles on seven titles, winning the IFP honor for his supporting performance in City of Hope, while collecting two additional nominations for Passion Fish and Limbo.
Confidential, in which Strathairn shared a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination with the all-star ensemble cast.

He has also maintained a high profile in the theatrical world, with roles at such venues as the Manhattan Theatre Club, the New York Shakespeare Festival, SoHo Rep, the Hartford Stage Company, Ensemble Studio Theatre, and Seattle Repertory. His involvement since its inception with Bryan Doerries’ “Theater of War”— the innovative public-health project seeking to help military veterans cope with combat stress and PTSD — continues to be among the most vital and rewarding experiences of his acting.

Sam Roberts
Journalist

Sam Roberts has been the New York Times’s urban affairs correspondent since 2005. Before that, he was Deputy Editor of the New York Times Week In Review section and urban affairs columnist, writing the column Metro Matters, which appeared on the front page of the Times’s metropolitan section. Previously, he served as deputy metropolitan editor in 1986 and 1987 and as a metropolitan reporter from 1983 (when he joined the newspaper) until 1986.

In his years as a journalist, Roberts has won awards from the Society of the Silurians and the Newspaper Guild of New York, and he has received the Peter Kihss Award from the Fund for the City of New York. His magazine articles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, and New York magazine. He is the co-author of a biography of Nelson Rockefeller, published by Basic Books in 1977, the author of Who We Are—a Portrait of America published in 1994 by Times Books and Who We Are Nowpublished in 2004, and The Brother, The Untold Story of the Rosenberg Atom Spy Case, published in 2001, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

He is the host of The New York Times Close Up, an hour-long weekly news and interview program on New York 1, the all-news cable channel, produced in association with the New York Times and which he inaugurated in 1992. He also has hosted weekly podcasts for the Times called “The Caucus” and “Only in New York.

Bob Simon
TV Correspondent

Bob Simon, the most honored journalist in international reporting, has been contributing regularly to 60 Minutes since 1996. He was also a correspondent for all seven seasons of 60 Minutes II, from January 1999 to June 2005, after which he became a full-time 60 Minutes correspondent. The 2009–10 season is his 14th on the broadcast.

He has covered virtually every major foreign story in the last three decades and has accumulated scores of major awards along the way. His remarkable career was recognized with a Lifetime Achievement Emmy in September 2003. In 2005, Simon was the first journalist to interview Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy at the center of the international incident between his country and the U.S. government, five years after his ordeal.

Simon’s news magazine work has won him nine of his 23 Emmy awards. His work has also appeared on nearly every CBS News broadcast. He landed many exclusive interviews for 60 Minutes, including one from the jail cell of the Hamas terrorist responsible for the 1996 Jerusalem bus bombings; Winnie Mandela; Dirk Coetze, the South African secret security captain who tortured and murdered countless blacks during apartheid; and Pete Peterson, a former prisoner of war who became America’s first ambassador to Hanoi, as he prepared to return to Vietnam.

He has covered the activities of countless major international figures, both revered and infamous, including Pope John Paul II’s historic visits to Poland and Cuba, the release of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Ferdinand Marcos’ abrupt departure from the Philippines, Nicolae Ceausescu’s execution in Romania, and Francisco Franco’s death in Spain. Simon has chronicled dozens of the most important events of the past 30 years for CBS News, including the devastating earthquake in Kobe, Japan, the birth of Solidarity in Poland, and the horrific famine in Biafra.

In addition to his distinguished work overseas, Simon has served as a national correspondent in New York for CBS News (1982–1987). He also spent time in Washington, D.C., as the CBS News State Department correspondent (1981–1982). Before that, he was assigned for the first time to CBS News’ Tel Aviv bureau (1977–1981).

Simon joined CBS News in 1967 as a reporter and assignment editor based in New York. He covered campus unrest and inner-city riots, as well as the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. He served as an American Foreign Service officer (1964–1967), and was a Fulbright scholar in France and a Woodrow Wilson scholar.