NEW YORK – CBS
newsman Mike Wallace, the dogged, merciless reporter and interviewer
who took on politicians, celebrities and other public figures in a
60-year career highlighted by the on-air confrontations that helped make
"60 Minutes" the most successful primetime television news program
ever, has died. He was 93.
Wallace died Saturday night, CBS spokesman
Kevin Tedesco said. On CBS' "Face the Nation," host Bob Schieffer said
Wallace died at a care facility in New Haven, Connecticut, where he had
lived in recent years.
Until he was slowed by heart surgery as he
neared his 90th birthday in 2008, Wallace continued making news, doing
"60 Minutes" interviews with such subjects as Jack Kevorkian and Roger
Clemens. He had promised to still do occasional reports when he
announced his retirement as a regular correspondent in March 2006.
Wallace said then that he had long vowed to
retire "when my toes turn up" and "they're just beginning to curl a
trifle. ... It's become apparent to me that my eyes and ears, among
other appurtenances, aren't quite what they used to be."
Among his later contributions, after bowing
out as a regular on "60 Minutes," was a May 2007 profile of Republican
presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, and an interview with Kevorkian, the
assisted suicide doctor released from prison in June 2007 who died June
3, 2011, at age 83.
In December 2007, Wallace landed the first
interview with Clemens after the star pitcher was implicated in the
report by former Sen. George Mitchell on performance enhancing drugs in
baseball. The interview, in which Clemens maintained his innocence, was
broadcast in early January 2008.
Wallace was the first man hired when late
CBS news producer Don Hewitt put together the staff of "60 Minutes" at
the TV news magazine's inception in 1968. The show wasn't a hit at
first, but it worked its way up to the top 10 in the 1977-78 season and
remained there, season after season, with Wallace as one of its
mainstays. Among other things, it proved there could be big profits in
TV journalism.
The top 10 streak was broken in 2001, in
part due to the onset of huge-drawing rated reality shows. But "60
Minutes" remained in the top 25 in recent years, ranking 15th in viewers
in the 2010-11 season.
The show pioneered the use of "ambush
interviews," with reporter and camera crew corralling alleged wrongdoers
in parking lots, hallways, wherever a comment -- or at least a stricken
expression -- might be harvested from someone dodging the reporters'
phone calls.
Such tactics were phased out over time -- Wallace said they provided drama but not much good information.
And his style never was all about surprise,
anyway. Wallace was a master of the skeptical follow-up question,
coaxing his prey with a "forgive me, but ..." or a simple, "come on." He
was known as one who did his homework, spending hours preparing for
interviews, and alongside the exposes, "60 Minutes" featured insightful
talks with celebrities and world leaders.
He was equally tough on public and private
behavior. In 1973, with the Watergate scandal growing, he sat with top
Nixon aide John Ehrlichman and read a long list of alleged crimes, from
money laundering to obstructing justice. "All of this, Wallace noted,
"by the law and order administration of Richard Nixon."
The surly Ehrlichman could only respond: "Is there a question in there somewhere?"
In the early 1990s, Wallace reduced Barbra
Streisand to tears as he scolded her for being "totally self-absorbed"
when she was young and mocked her decades of psychoanalysis. "What is it
she is trying to find out that takes 20 years?" Wallace said he
wondered.
"I'm a slow learner," Streisand told him.
His late colleague Harry Reasoner once said,
"There is one thing that Mike can do better than anybody else: With an
angelic smile, he can ask a question that would get anyone else smashed
in the face."
Wallace said he didn't think he had an
unfair advantage over his interview subjects: "The person I'm
interviewing has not been subpoenaed. He's in charge of himself, and he
lives with his subject matter every day. All I'm armed with is
research."
Wallace himself became a dramatic character
in several projects, from the stage version of "Frost/Nixon," when he
was played by Stephen Rowe, to the 1999 film "The Insider," based in
part on a 1995 "60 Minutes" story about tobacco industry whistle-blower
Jeffrey Wigand, who accused Brown & Williamson of intentionally
adding nicotine to cigarettes. Christopher Plummer starred as Wallace
and Russell Crowe as Wigand. Wallace was unhappy with the film, in which
he was portrayed as caving to pressure to kill a story about Wigand.
Operating on a tip, The New York Times
reported that "60 Minutes" planned to excise Wigand's interview from its
tobacco expose. CBS said Wigand had signed a nondisclosure agreement
with his former company, and the network feared that by airing what he
had to say, "60 Minutes" could be sued along with him.
The day the Times story appeared, Wallace
downplayed the gutted story as "a momentary setback." He soon sharpened
his tone. Leading into the revised report when it aired, he made no
bones that "we cannot broadcast what critical information about tobacco,
addiction and public health (Wigand) might be able to offer." Then, in a
"personal note," he told viewers that he and his "60 Minutes"
colleagues were "dismayed that the management at CBS had seen fit to
give in to perceived threats of legal action."
The full report eventually was broadcast.
Wallace maintained a hectic pace after CBS
waived its long-standing rule requiring broadcasters to retire at 65. In
early 1999, at age 80, he added another line to his resume by appearing
on the network's spinoff, "60 Minutes II." (A similar concession was
granted Wallace's longtime colleague, Don Hewitt, who in 2004, at age
81, relinquished his reins as executive producer; he died in 2009.)
Wallace amassed 21 Emmy awards during his career, as well as five DuPont-Columbia journalism and five Peabody awards. In all, his television career spanned six
decades, much of it spent at CBS. In 1949, he appeared as Myron Wallace
in a show called "Majority Rules." In the early 1950s, he was an
announcer and game show host for programs such as "What's in a Word?" He
also found time to act in a 1954 Broadway play, "Reclining Figure,"
directed by Abe Burrows.
In the mid-1950s came his smoke-wreathed
"Night Beat," a series of one-on-one interviews with everyone from an
elderly Frank Lloyd Wright to a young Henry Kissinger that began on
local TV in New York and then appeared on the ABC network. It was the
show that first brought Wallace fame as a hard-boiled interviewer, a
"Mike Malice" who rarely gave his subjects any slack.
Wrote Coronet magazine in 1957: "Wallace's
interrogation had the intensity of a third degree, often the candor of a
psychoanalytic session. Nothing like it had ever been known on TV. ...
To Wallace, no guest is sacred, and he frankly dotes on controversy."
Sample "Night Beat" exchange, with colorful
restaurateur Toots Shor. Wallace: "Toots, why do people call you a
slob?" Shor: "Me? Jiminy crickets, they `musta' been talking about
Jackie Gleason."
In those days, Wallace said, "interviews by
and large were virtual minuets. ... Nobody dogged, nobody pushed." He
said that was why "Night Beat" `'got attention that hadn't been given to
interview broadcasts before."
It was also around then that Wallace did a
bit as a TV newsman in the 1957 Hollywood drama "A Face in the Crowd,"
which starred Andy Griffith as a small-town Southerner who becomes a
political phenomenon through his folksy television appearances. Two
years later, Wallace helped create "The Hate That Hate Produced," a
highly charged program about the Nation of Islam -- a black Muslim
organization -- that helped make a national celebrity out of Malcolm X
and was later criticized as biased and inflammatory.
After holding a variety of other news and
entertainment jobs, including serving as advertising pitchman for a
cigarette brand, Wallace became a full-time newsman for CBS in 1963.
He said it was the death of his 19-year-old
son, Peter, in an accident in 1962 that made him decide to stick to
serious journalism from then on. (Another son, Chris, followed his
father and became a broadcast journalist, most recently as a Fox News
Channel anchor.)
Wallace had a short stint reporting from
Vietnam, and took a sock in the jaw while covering the tumultuous 1968
Democratic Party convention in Chicago. But he didn't fit the stereotype
of the Eastern liberal journalist. He was a close friend of the Reagans
and was once offered the job of Richard Nixon's press secretary. He
called his politics moderate.
One "Night Beat" interview resulted in a
libel suit, filed by a police official angry over remarks about him by
mobster Mickey Cohen. Wallace said ABC settled the lawsuit for $44,000,
and called it the only time money had been paid to a plaintiff in a suit
in which he was involved.
The most publicized lawsuit against him was
by retired Gen. William C. Westmoreland, who sought $120 million for a
1982 "CBS Reports" documentary, "The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam
Deception." Westmoreland dropped the libel suit in February 1985 after a
long trial. Lawyers for each side later said legal costs of the suit
totaled $12 million, of which $9 million was paid by CBS.
Wallace once said the case brought on
depression that put him in the hospital for more than a week. "Imagine
sitting day after day in the courtroom hearing yourself called every
vile name imaginable," he said.
In 1996, he appeared before the Senate's
Special Committee on Aging to urge more federal funds for depression
research, saying that he had felt "lower, lower, lower than a snake's
belly" but had recovered through psychiatry and antidepressant drugs. He
later disclosed that he once tried to commit suicide during that dark
period. Wallace, columnist Art Buchwald and author William Styron were
friends who commiserated often enough about depression to call
themselves "The Blues Brothers," according to a 2011 memoir by Styron's
daughter, Alexandra.
Wallace called his 1984 book, written with
Gary Paul Gates, "Close Encounters." He described it as "one mostly
lucky man's encounters with growing up professionally."
In 2005, he brought out his memoir, "Between You and Me."
Among those interviewing him about the book
was son Chris, for "Fox News Sunday." His son asked: Does he understand
why people feel a disaffection from the mainstream media?
"They think they're wide-eyed commies. Liberals," the elder Wallace replied, a notion he dismissed as "damned foolishness." Wallace was born Myron Wallace on May 9,
1918, in Brookline, Massachusetts. He began his news career in Chicago
in the 1940s, first as radio news writer for the Chicago Sun and then as
reporter for WMAQ. He started at CBS in 1951.
He was married four times. In 1986, he wed
Mary Yates Wallace, the widow of his close friend and colleague, Ted
Yates, who had died in 1967. Besides his wife, Wallace is survived by
his son, Chris, a stepdaughter, Pauline Dora, and stepson Eames Yates. His wife declined to comment Sunday.
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