American journalism has lost one of its most iconic, journalistically reliable, often controversial and enduring figures: CBS News’ Mike Wallace is dead at 93:
Broadcasting legend Mike Wallace has died, CBS News announced on Sunday.
He was 93. Host Charles Osgood broke the news on “CBS News Sunday Morning.” The network did not announce when or where he died.
CBS News has a long tribute on its website. Here is just a small chunk of it:
(CBS News) For half a century, he took on corrupt politicians, scam artists and bureaucratic bumblers. His visits were preceded by the four dreaded words: Mike Wallace is here.
Wallace took to heart the old reporter’s pledge to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. He characterized himself as “nosy and insistent.”
So insistent, there were very few 20th century icons who didn’t submit to a Mike Wallace interview. He lectured Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, on corruption. He lectured Yassir Arafat on violence.
He asked the Ayatollah Khoumeini if he were crazy.
He traveled with Martin Luther King (whom Wallace called his hero). He grappled with Louis Farrakhan.
And he interviewed Malcolm X shortly before his assassination.
He was no stranger to the White House, interviewing his friends the Reagans . . . John F. Kennedy . . . Lyndon Johnson . . . Jimmy Carter. Even Eleanor Roosevelt.
Plus all those remarkable characters: Leonard Bernstein, Johnny Carson, Luciano Pavarotti, Janis Joplin, Tina Turner, Salvador Dali, Barbra Streisand. His take-no-prisoners style became so famous he even spoofed it with comedian Jack Benny.
It’s hard to believe, but when Wallace was born in 1918 there wasn’t even a radio in most American homes, much less a TV.
As a youth, Wallace said, he was “an overachiever. I worked pretty hard. Played a hell of a fiddle.”
At the University of Michigan, where his parents hoped he’d become a doctor or lawyer, he got hooked instead on radio. And by 1941, Mike was the announcer on “The Green Hornet.”
“My family didn’t know what to make of it – an announcer?” he recalled.
He was soon the hardest-working announcer in broadcasting.
When television arrived in the 1950s, Wallace was everywhere . . . variety shows, game shows, dramas, commercials.
But it was an interview show called “Nightbeat,” first broadcast in 1956, that Wallace remembered fit him like custom-made brass knuckles. “We decided to ask the irreverent question, the abrasive question, the who-gives-a-damn question.”
Go to the link to read it all.
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, Conn., 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, was a May 2007 profile of GOP 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 Mitchell report 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 its inception in 1968.
Read it in its entirety.
In an essay for CBS News, Morley Safer, a “60 Minutes” correspondent, recounted his colleague’s career thusly:
Wallace took to heart the old reporter’s pledge to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. He characterized himself as “nosy and insistent.”
So insistent, there were very few 20th century icons who didn’t submit to a Mike Wallace interview. He lectured Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, on corruption. He lectured Yassir Arafat on violence.
He asked the Ayatollah Khoumeini if he were crazy.
He traveled with Martin Luther King (whom Wallace called his hero). He grappled with Louis Farrakhan.
And he interviewed Malcolm X shortly before his assassination.
Mr. Wallace entered semi-retirement in 2006, but returned to “60 Minutes” for interviews with Mitt Romney, Jack Kevorkian and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He last appeared on “60 Minutes” in January 2008, when he had an exclusive interview with Roger Clemens, a baseball legend who had been accused of steroid use.
Weeks after the interview was shown, Mr. Wallace underwent a triple bypass surgery.
Wallace’s death means yet another of The Greatest Generation journalism giants has left the scene. They grew up in the days when radio started to grow and boom and in one incarnation die — but they were influenced by radio journalism greats. They flourished in the Golden Age of Television which flowered into the golden age of television journalism. Some of them came from strong newspaper or wire service backgrounds. Wallace was something of a hybrid who always adapted — and excelled. And he pioneered a kind of hard hitting journalism and no-nonsense interviewing that influenced young journalists in later years.
Wallace was a staple on CBS for a half century, and was most well-known for is reports on the newsmagazine “60 Minutes,” for which he served as a correspondent. Wallace was one of the original correspondents on that program when it debuted in 1968, and remained a regular contributor up until 2008.
Wallace took to heart the old reporter’s pledge to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. He characterized himself as “nosy and insistent.”
So insistent, there were very few 20th century icons who didn’t submit to a Mike Wallace interview. He lectured Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, on corruption. He lectured Yassir Arafat on violence.
He asked the Ayatollah Khoumeini if he were crazy.
He traveled with Martin Luther King (whom Wallace called his hero). He grappled with Louis Farrakhan.
And he interviewed Malcolm X shortly before his assassination.
He was no stranger to the White House, interviewing his friends the Reagans . . . John F. Kennedy . . . Lyndon Johnson . . . Jimmy Carter. Even Eleanor Roosevelt.
Plus all those remarkable characters: Leonard Bernstein, Johnny Carson, Luciano Pavarotti, Janis Joplin, Tina Turner, Salvador Dali, Barbra Streisand. His take-no-prisoners style became so famous he even spoofed it with comedian Jack Benny.
It’s hard to believe, but when Wallace was born in 1918 there wasn’t even a radio in most American homes, much less a TV.
Here’s Wallace explaining how he chose his stories:
Some of his interview with Clemens:
“Mike Wallace is a legend in the news business,” CNN’s Anderson Cooper, a contributor to “60 Minutes,” has said.
Tough, hardworking, he’d go anywhere to get the story,” Cooper said. “If I could have half the career Mike Wallace had, I would consider myself a very lucky man.”
The late Harry Reasoner on Wallace: “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.”
For more media and blog commentary GO HERE.
Read Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ thoughts on Wallace and his life HERE.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.