60 Minutes icon Mike Wallace dies at 93
CBS News legend Mike Wallace, the 60 Minutes' pit-bull reporter whose
probing, brazen style made his name synonymous with the tough interview
-- a style he practically invented for television more than half a
century ago -- died last night. He was 93 and passed peacefully
surrounded by family members at Waveny Care Center in New Canaan, Conn.,
where he spent the past few years. He also had a home in Manhattan.
"It
is with tremendous sadness that we mark the passing of Mike Wallace.
His extraordinary contribution as a broadcaster is immeasurable and he
has been a force within the television industry throughout its
existence. His loss will be felt by all of us at CBS," said Leslie
Moonves, president and CEO, CBS Corporation.
"All of us
at CBS News and particularly at 60 Minutes owe so much to Mike. Without
him and his iconic style, there probably wouldn't be a 60 Minutes. There
simply hasn't been another broadcast journalist with that much talent.
It almost didn't matter what stories he was covering, you just wanted to
hear what he would ask next. Around CBS he was the same infectious,
funny and ferocious person as he was on TV. We loved him and we will
miss him very much," said Jeff Fager, chairman CBSNews and executive
producer of 60 Minutes.
A special program dedicated to Wallace will be broadcast on 60 Minutes next Sunday, April 15.
Wallace
was as famous as the leaders, newsmakers and celebrities who suffered
his blistering interrogations, winning awards and a reputation for
digging out the hidden truth on Sunday nights in front of an audience
that approached 40 million at broadcast television's peak.
Wallace played a huge role in 60 Minutes' rise to the top of the
ratings to become the number-one program of all time, with an
unprecedented 23 seasons on the Nielsen annual top 10 list -- five as
the number-one program.
He announced he would step down
to become a "correspondent emeritus" in the spring of 2006, but Wallace
continued to land big interviews for 60 Minutes. His last appearance on
television, on January 6, 2008, was a sit-down on 60 Minutes with
accused steroid user Roger Clemens that
made front-page news. His August 2006 interview of Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won him his 21st Emmy at the age of 89. He was also
granted the first post-prison interview with assisted suicide
advocate-and
convicted killer Dr. Jack Kevorkian
for a June 2007 60 Minutes broadcast. After a successful triple bypass
operation in late January 2008, he retired from public life.
Decades
before his 60 Minutes success, Wallace was already known to millions.
In the early days of broadcasting, with no line between news and
entertainment, Wallace did both in the 1940s and '50s. He appeared on a
variety of radio and television programs, first as narrator/announcer,
then as a reporter, actor and program host. On his first network
television news program, ABC's "The Mike Wallace Interview," he
perfected his interviewing style that he first tried on a local New York
television guest show called "Night Beat." Created with producer Ted
Yates, "Night Beat" became an instant hit that New Yorkers began
referring to as "brow beat." Wallace's relentless questioning of his
subjects proved to be a compelling alternative to the polite chit-chat
practiced by early television hosts.
Years later, CBS
News producer Don Hewitt remembered that hard-charging style when
creating his pioneering news magazine, 60 Minutes; he picked Wallace to
be a counterweight to the avuncular Harry Reasoner. On September 24,
1968,
Wallace and Reasoner introduced 60 Minutes
to the 10:00 PM timeslot, where it ran every other Tuesday but failed
to draw large audiences. But critics praised it, awards followed, and
after seven years on various nights, 60 Minutes went to 7:00 PM Sunday
and began its rise. It made the top 20 in 1977 and the top 10 in 1978,
then became the number-one program in 1980 -- all with a tough-talking
Wallace center stage.
Each week, "60 Minutes" viewers could expect the master interviewer
to ask the questions they wanted answered by the world's leaders and
headliners. Wallace did not disappoint them, often revealing more than
the public ever hoped to see. He got the stoic
Ayatollah Khomeini to smile
during the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979 when he asked him what he
thought about being called "a lunatic" by Egyptian President Anwar
Sadat. The Ayatollah answered by correctly predicting that Sadat would
be assassinated.
The same year, Johnny Carson called Wallace "cruel" during an
interview after Wallace asked, "It takes one to know one?" when the
late-night star took pity on an alcoholic newsmaker. Her fans protested
when Wallace brought Barbra Streisand to the emotional edge in 1991 by
revealing that her own mother had told him that Barbara "was too busy to
get close to anyone."
He never softened, even in his 80s. In a 2001 interview about his
Broadway mega hit "The Producers," Mel Brooks began an angry rant
against anti-Semitism prompted by Wallace's suggestion that his claims
of bias were exaggerated. In 2003, he wrung tears out of one of the most
feared defensive players in NFL history when he read lines to Lawrence
Taylor spoken by Taylor's son.
Wallace was also known for pioneering the "ambush" interview,
presenting his unsuspecting interviewee with evidence of malfeasance -
often obtained by hidden camera - then capturing the stunned reaction.
Two of the more famous exposes in this genre that used hidden cameras
were investigations of a phony cancer clinic and a laboratory offering
Medicaid kickbacks to doctors. Presenting interviewees with their own
misdeeds became a "60 Minutes" staple, but the hidden camera and ambush
were later shunned as they were widely imitated, and even Wallace
admitted their use was to "create heat, rather than light."
Sometimes the feisty reporter was the story, getting arrested in
Chicago in 1968 on the floor of the Democratic Convention, and making
headlines 36 years later, at the age of 86, when words with a New York
City Taxi and Limousine Commission officer resulted in an arrest for
disorderly conduct.
Wallace drew attention also for taking on controversial subjects.
From legal prostitution at Las Vegas' Mustang Ranch, to child
pornography to gay police officers - a 1992 report that won him an Emmy -
no subject was taboo.
No story generated more controversy than Wallace's 1998 interview
with euthanasia practitioner Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Wallace and "60
Minutes" took heat for broadcasting Kevorkian's own tape showing him
lethally injecting a man suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
The death of Thomas Youk broadcast on "60 Minutes" made headlines and
the editorial pages, generating discussion about euthanasia for weeks.
The tape also served as evidence to convict Kevorkian of murder.
In another controversy, Wallace's
1995 interview of Jeffrey Wigand,
the highest-ranking tobacco executive to turn whistle-blower, was held
back for fear of a multi-billion dollar lawsuit that could have
bankrupted CBS. The interview, in which Wigand revealed tobacco
executives knew and covered up the fact that tobacco caused disease, was
eventually broadcast on "60 Minutes" in February 1996. The incident
became the subject of the film, "The Insider" (in which Wallace was
played by Christopher Plummer).
Wallace was also at the center of one of the biggest libel suits
ever, threatening his journalistic integrity and ultimately plunging him
into a clinical depression. Gen. William Westmoreland, who commanded
the U.S. military in Vietnam, sued CBS and Wallace for a 1982 "CBS
Reports" documentary alleging the general had deceived the American
people by undercounting the enemy in Vietnam. The $120 million suit
against "The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception," went to trial in
1984 and lasted months before Westmoreland withdrew it just before
Wallace was to testify in early 1985. ,/P>
The grueling test became a defining moment in Wallace's life.
Medication and therapy helped him overcome his initial depression and a
later relapse, and he became a heroic example to fellow sufferers,
speaking publicly for the rest of his life to de-stigmatize the
disorder. He revealed years later to colleague Morley Safer in a "60
Minutes" special on his life that he had attempted suicide during the
lawsuit crisis.
In another celebrated case that took 12 years to play out, Wallace's
producer Barry Lando was sued for $44 million by Lt. Col. Anthony
Herbert. The libel suit against Wallace's 1973 60 Minutes report, "The
Selling of Colonel Herbert," caused a precedent-setting Supreme Court
ruling allowing lawyers to question the thoughts and opinions of
reporters. Initially, CBS lawyers argued successfully in a New York
federal appeals court that Lando could not be questioned that way as it
would infringe on the editorial process protected under the First
Amendment. But the Supreme Court in 1979 reversed it, ruling that
Herbert was entitled to know the producer's mindset, as it was crucial
to proving malice. Nevertheless, the report was accurate in its main
elements, and, in 1986, Herbert v. Lando was thrown out.
The
road to 60 Minutes began for Wallace when his son, Peter, died in a
hiking accident in Greece in 1962. Wallace's jobs in broadcasting then
included entertainment programs and commercials in addition to
reporting, but he decided then that he would devote his career to
journalism alone to honor Peter, a Yale student who aspired to a writing
career. Wallace's other son, Chris, became a journalist and is
currently host of "Fox News Sunday."
Wallace went to
Vietnam, India and Africa to report for Westinghouse Radio's "Around the
World in 40 Days," but really wanted to be hired by CBS News, the
"mother church," as he often referred to it. He was turned down at
first, despite some remarkable documentary work, including a
breakthrough piece on black Muslims, "The Hate that Hate Produced." In
fact, CBS News wouldn't broadcast a documentary on nuclear proliferation
that he reported because he appeared in cigarette ads. Promising to
drop commercial work, he was made a correspondent at CBS News in 1963.
Starting
first on "CBS Morning News With Mike Wallace," he went on to contribute
to most of the Network's other news programs, including the "CBS
Evening News With Walter Cronkite," reporting from Vietnam, Washington
and the campaign trail in 1968 with Richard Nixon - who offered Wallace
the White House press secretary job. He made news at the Democratic
National Convention in Chicago that year by getting ejected from the
proceedings for an altercation with police on the convention floor.
It
wasn't the first time Wallace had worked for CBS. He began at the
Network in 1951, when he and his wife, Buff Cobb, with whom he hosted
"The Chez Show" on local Chicago television, were invited to New York.
He did several CBS programs, two with Cobb: "Mike and Buff," an
afternoon talk show that was television's first color telecast, and an
on-location interview program called "All Around the Town." As was the
norm then, he also reported for the news division, covering political
conventions and other events.
Leaving CBS in 1955, his
career through the early 1960s became a hodgepodge of appearances for
the tireless broadcaster, who was seen on all three networks and several
independent stations. He even starred briefly in a Broadway production
of "Reclining Figure" and played himself in Elia Kazan's celebrated film
about the media, "A Face in the Crowd." He did the TV quiz show "The
Big Surprise" and the radio show "Weekday," but he never lost sight of
his true calling. It was also during this time that he began "Night
Beat," anchored the original Peabody-Award winning series "Biography,"
anchored and reported several documentaries, including "The Race for
Space," and headed up the news department of local New York station
WNTA. Then on channel 13, WNTA was the first television station in the
U.S. to broadcast a half-hour news program; it was called "News Beat"
and Wallace anchored it. He also continued "The Mike Wallace Interview"
on WNTA in 1959, as the ABC Network, its previous home, dropped the
program because it became too controversial.
Myron Leon
Wallace was born in Brookline, Mass., on May 9, 1918. He attended
Brookline High School and was graduated from the University of Michigan
in 1939 with a B.A. degree in liberal arts. He became acquainted with
radio at the college station and, after graduation, a professor helped
him land his first job as an announcer and "rip-and-read" reporter for
WOOD-WASH, a Grand Rapids, Mich. radio station.
He made his network radio debut in 1940 at WXYZ in Detroit, where he
was the narrator for "The Green Hornet" and a "Cunningham News Ace,"
reading the news sponsored by the Cunningham Drug store chain. He soon
moved to Chicago and by 1941, Wallace was beginning to make a name for
himself as a news writer and broadcaster on "The Air Edition of the
Chicago Sun." He joined the U.S. Navy in 1943 and served aboard a
submarine tender in the Pacific as a communications officer. In 1946, he
returned to Chicago to resume his broadcasting career. There, on WMAQ
radio, he hosted his first interview program, "Famous Names," which led
to a raft of broadcasting appearances, including his first network
television appearance as the lead in a police drama, "Stand By For
Crime." The 1949 show was the first to be transmitted from Chicago to
the East Coast. Two years later, Wallace joined CBS in New York, where
he lived ever since.
Wallace authored several books, including: "Mike Wallace Asks," a
compilation of interviews from "Night Beat" and "The Mike Wallace
Interview" published in 1958; his memoir, "Close Encounter," co-authored
with Gary Paul Gates, in 1984; and "Between You and Me," also with
Gates, in 2005.
Part of his rich legacy includes the Knight-Wallace Fellowship and
Mike and Mary Wallace House at his alma mater, the University of
Michigan. Wallace's donations support this in-residence study program
begun in 1994 for professional journalists seeking to improve their
knowledge in a desired field or issue.
Wallace is survived by his wife, the former Mary Yates; his son,
Chris; a stepdaughter, Pauline Dora; two stepsons, Eames and Angus
Yates; seven grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. At the
family's request, donations can be made in Wallace's name to Waveny Care
Center, 3 Farm Rd., New Canaan, Conn.
Posts
-------------------------------------------------------
