Mr. Wallace, who was fitted with a pacemaker some 20 years ago, had a long history of cardiac care. He underwent triple-bypass surgery in January of 2008.
Mike was one of the original hosts of 60 Minutes (along with the late Harry Reasoner).
Some highlights:
Mr. Wallace created enough such moments to become a paragon of television journalism in the heyday of network news. As he grilled his subjects, he said, he walked “a fine line between sadism and intellectual curiosity.”
His success often lay in the questions he hurled, not the answers he received.
“Perjury,” he said, in his staccato style, to President Richard M. Nixon’s right-hand man, John D. Ehrlichman, while interviewing him during the Watergate affair. “Plans to audit tax returns for political retaliation. Theft of psychiatric records. Spying by undercover agents. Conspiracy to obstruct justice. All of this by the law-and-order administration of Richard Nixon.”
Mr. Ehrlichman paused and said, “Is there a question in there somewhere?”
No, Mr. Wallace later conceded. But it was riveting television.
Both the style and the substance of his work drew criticism. CBS paid Nixon’s chief of staff H. R. Haldeman $100,000 for an exclusive (if inconclusive) pair of interviews with Mr. Wallace in 1975. Critics called it checkbook journalism, and even Mr. Wallace conceded later that it had been “a bad idea.”
For a 1976 report on Medicaid fraud, the show’s producers set up a phony health clinic in Chicago. Was the use of deceit to expose deceit justified? Hidden cameras and ambush interviews were all part of the game, Mr. Wallace said, though he abandoned those techniques in later years, when they became a cliché and no longer good television.
Some subjects were unfazed by Mr. Wallace’s unblinking stare. When he sat down with the Ayatollah Khomeini, the Iranian leader, in 1979, he said that President Anwar Sadat of Egypt “calls you, Imam — forgive me, his words, not mine — a lunatic.” The translator blanched, but the Ayatollah responded, calmly calling Sadat a heretic.
Mike invented his hard-boiled persona when he hosted a local New York interview show entitled Night Beat which aired over DuMont's old New York TV station.
When the show went network over ABC one year later (1957), it was renamed The Mike Wallace Interview. The show came under attack after syndicated columnist Drew Pearson, who had appeared as a guest on the Wallace show, called then-Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy "the only man in history I know who won a Pulitzer Prize for a book that was ghostwritten."
Attorney's for JFK's family forced ABC to retract, though in fact the book was anonymously co-written by Ted Sorensen, who happened to be the senator's speechwriter.
After ABC cancelled his show in 1958, Mr. Wallace's career meandered. He had done entertainment shows, hosted quiz shows, did cigarette commercials.
Mike became determined to become a full-fledged journalist following a harrowing trip to Greece to recover the body of his first-born son, Peter, who had lost his life there in a mountain-climbing accident at age 19 in 1962.
He soon joined CBS News, became a special correspondent, then in 1963, became anchorman of The CBS Morning News with Mike Wallace for the next three years.
Mike Wallace was a co-host on 60 Minutes from the beginning in 1968. By the mid-1970s, the show began a 23-year run in the Neilsen Top Ten.
Then came the 1982 CBS Reports documentary The Uncounted Enemy which led to a $120 million lawsuit filed against the network by General William C. Westmoreland, who was the commander of American troops in Vietnam (1964-68).
Here's a snippet:
That year he anchored a “CBS Reports” documentary called “The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception.” It led to a $120 million libel suit filed by Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the commander of American troops in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968. At issue was the show’s assertion that General Westmoreland had deliberately falsified the “order of battle,” the estimate of the strength of the enemy.
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Related
Media Decoder Blog: Reactions to the Death of Mike Wallace, '60 Minutes' Pioneer (April 8, 2012)
Times Topic: Mike Wallace
The question turned on a decision that American military commanders made in 1967. The uniformed military said the enemy was no more than 300,000 strong, but intelligence analysts said the number could be half a million or more. If the analysts were correct, then there was no “light at the end of the tunnel,” the optimistic phrase General Westmoreland had used.
Documents declassified after the cold war showed that the general’s top aide had cited reasons of politics and public relations for insisting on the lower figure. The military was “stonewalling, obviously under orders” from General Westmoreland, a senior Central Intelligence Agency analyst cabled his headquarters; the “predetermined total” was “fixed on public-relations grounds.” The C.I.A. officially accepted the military’s invented figure of 299,000 enemy forces or fewer.
The documentary asserted that rather than a politically expedient lie, the struggle revealed a vast conspiracy to suppress the truth. The key theorist for that case, Sam Adams, a former C.I.A. analyst, was not only interviewed for the documentary but also received a consultant’s fee of $25,000. The show had arrived at something close to the truth, but it had used questionable means to that end.
After more than two years General Westmoreland abandoned his suit midtrial, CBS lost some of its reputation, and Mr. Wallace had a nervous breakdown.
He said at the time that he feared “the lawyers for the other side would employ the same techniques against me that I had employed on television.” Already on antidepressants, which gave him tremors, he had a waking nightmare while sitting through the trial.
“I could see myself up there on the stand, six feet away from the jury, with my hands shaking, and dying to drink water,” he said in the interview with The Times. He imagined the jury thinking, “Well, that son of a bitch is obviously guilty as hell.”
He attempted suicide. “I was so low that I wanted to exit,” Mr. Wallace said. “And I took a bunch of pills, and they were sleeping pills. And at least they would put me to sleep, and maybe I wouldn’t wake up, and that was fine.”
Mike finally officially retired from 60 Minutes in 2006 at age 88. His interview that year with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad netted him his 21st Emmy Award.
In the many years before joining CBS News, a son of a Russian immigrant wholesale grocer-turned-insurance broker, Mike worked at WXYZ radio in Detroit and was narrator and actor for The Lone Ranger and The Green Hornet.
Rest in peace, Mike
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