The taming of the shrewd? Not likely
Mike Wallace sure doesn’t act like someone on the cusp of retirement.
The veteran CBS broadcaster, who turns 88 on Tuesday, officially becomes “correspondent emeritus” at the end of this month, but when a visitor stopped by on a recent afternoon, he said he has no plans to pack up the memorabilia and Emmy Awards that line the walls of his “60 Minutes” office.
Instead, Wallace rummaged through the papers on his desk and pulled out a draft of a letter he had composed that morning, scribbled in felt-tip pen across the front page of the New York Times. It was a missive to incoming White House press secretary Tony Snow requesting time with President Bush, who has until now declined all of Wallace’s interview requests.
“I’ve talked to every president since Abe Lincoln,” Wallace said with mock indignation. (In truth, his record stretches back to John F. Kennedy.)
Bush is just one of the subjects the newsman -- a legend for his pugnacious and penetrating interview style -- hopes to corner in the coming year. After reporting stories for “60 Minutes” for 38 years, Wallace recently signed another multiyear contract to contribute several pieces a year to the program, a deal that also allows him to do separate cable channel specials. CBS wasn’t the only network that wanted his services; NBC recently approached him with an offer to do “anything I wanted,” Wallace said, but loyalty to “the mother church” prevailed.
“I’m going to stay here,” he said firmly. “There’s an understanding that I’m not going to be getting on airplanes and flying all over the world, but there are going to be certain important interviews I will do for ’60 Minutes.’ ”
Indeed, the thought of quitting work altogether isn’t wired into Wallace’s DNA.
“My sense is that six months from now, the story is not going to be how little he’s working, but how much,” said his son, Chris Wallace, host of “Fox News Sunday.” “He’s incapable of just stopping. It’s just who he is.”
“He’s not going to retire,” added fellow “60 Minutes” correspondent Morley Safer. “That’s like asking a tiger or a cobra to retire.”
Still, after nearly six decades in television, Wallace said he has come to accept that he can’t keep up the pace that he used to. This spring, he decided to scale back his workload, which he had already cut in half a few years ago. On May 21, in his last regularly scheduled appearance on “60 Minutes,” the show will feature a retrospective of his career.
“When you’re about to be 88, some of those things that are absolutely vital to get around begin to fail a trifle,” he said. “You begin to say, ‘Is it sensible to try to keep the same type of work schedule?’ There used to be a time when I would say, ‘I’m going to Omaha, Neb., or Beirut.’ Now I say, ‘My Lord, I have to fly to Washington.’ ”
Friends say he seems content with his decision. But the longtime broadcaster shrugged off a reporter’s effort to get him to define this next phase, or even when it begins, noting that he plans to come back to work this fall after his annual summer vacation at Martha’s Vineyard.
“I will continue to do what I have been doing,” he said a bit testily after being pressed on the subject.
Wallace’s semi-retirement, such as it is, comes at a time of substantial transition for CBS News, whose anchor Bob Schieffer is set to hand off the evening newscast this fall to Katie Couric, who will also do pieces for “60 Minutes.”
“I suppose it has to happen,” said “60 Minutes” commentator Andy Rooney of Wallace cutting back. “I have an old fogy view; I don’t like changes. I don’t think it will be as good without him. It’s like a football team that loses its star quarterback -- it’s not the same team.”
But News President Sean McManus said Wallace will remain a full-time CBS employee, one who he hopes will still play a significant role at the network.
“There’s never been a more distinctive voice in the business, and my only hope is that we can continue to get as much of his contributions as he’s able to give us,” he said.
In person, Wallace appears remarkably youthful, dapper in a crisp navy-blue suit and sharply knotted red tie, his skin tanned, his thick hair still neatly combed back. Signs of his age surface only occasionally, when he fiddles with his hearing aids.
The job, he said, has kept him vital.
“This is not work,” Wallace said. “You can go any place in the world, with CBS picking up the tab, and talk to just about anybody. You have enough time to do it justice on the air. Can you think of a better reportorial job?”
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Media minded
It wasn’t a career Myron Leon Wallace could have envisioned growing up in Brookline, Mass., the youngest of four children born to Jewish immigrants from Russia. After graduating from the University of Michigan in 1939 with a liberal arts degree, he was uncertain about his career path but landed a job as a radio news reader in Grand Rapids.
“That was the first time I began to understand, you know, this could be fun,” he recalled with a gravelly chuckle. “I must have liked the sound of my own voice.”
Other radio gigs followed. After serving as a Navy communications officer during World War II, Wallace returned to his job as a news reporter in Chicago. But he quickly grasped that broadcasting was changing.
“I suddenly realized, ‘Hey, you need to be on television. Television is going to happen, and you don’t want to get left behind, do you?’ ”
Wallace started out at a Chicago station, where he did everything from read commercials to act in a police drama, and then did a stint at CBS, where he hosted an interview show with his then-wife, Buff Cobb.
It wasn’t until 1956 that Wallace first hit on his unique talent for quizzing newsmakers. At the time, he was working as an anchor for a local New York station and his producer, Ted Yates, suggested they develop a late-night interview program that forced celebrities and politicians to answer tough questions. “Night Beat” was an immediate success, and Wallace found himself getting cheered on by cab drivers as he walked through Manhattan.
He took the program to ABC for a year, where it was called “The Mike Wallace Interview,” and then sampled a variety of broadcasting jobs until 1962, when his older son Peter, just 19, died in a hiking accident in Greece. In his grief, Wallace vowed to devote himself solely to journalism.
“I thought to myself, ‘Hey, do something that would make Peter proud of you,’ ” he recalled. “ ‘C’mon, you can do something more interesting than reading other people’s words about peanut butter.’ ”
In 1963, he returned to CBS as a special correspondent, reporting from Vietnam and then covering the 1968 presidential campaign of Richard Nixon, who asked him to be his White House press secretary.
Wallace declined and instead decided to help launch a new prime-time magazine show being developed by a producer named Don Hewitt. “60 Minutes” premiered in 1968, co-hosted by Harry Reasoner and Wallace.
Hewitt described the pair as “the perfect fit -- the guy you love and the guy you love to hate.”
The show took a while to gain a following, but by 1978, “60 Minutes” ranked among the top 10 programs in the country, a position it held for 23 seasons.
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A bruising style
Wallace’s unapologetic interviewing technique emerged as the program’s trademark. He asked Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini about the fact that Egyptian President Anwar Sadat regarded him as “a lunatic” and quizzed Ronald Reagan about the dearth of African Americans on his campaign staff, angering Nancy Reagan, a longtime friend.
“I don’t think there would a ’60 Minutes’ if Don hadn’t found Mike,” said Jeff Fager, the show’s current executive producer. “Mike was never afraid to ask a question, to ask anybody whatever he felt like and say what he thought.”
Some of Wallace’s stories did more than rankle guests. His 1982 documentary about the efforts of U.S. military leaders to undercount the number of enemy troops in Vietnam led to a libel lawsuit (later withdrawn) and eventually pushed him into such a deep depression that he was hospitalized. A decade later, he sparred with CBS executives over the network’s refusal to air an interview with a tobacco whistle-blower.
He’s still not shy about voicing his opinions about the goings-on at CBS News. Wallace made headlines in November when he said Dan Rather should have resigned after four newsroom employees were forced out in the wake of CBS’ broadcast of a controversial report about President Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard.
Although he says he has “great respect” for Couric and is curious to see how the news will fare with her at the helm, he’s fairly glum about the state of television news as a whole.
“There is so much that is tabloid, so much infotainment,” Wallace said. “It’s the race to the bottom instead of the race to the top in order to get ratings and make a living.”
His colleagues said they’re counting on hearing such sharp opinions from Wallace for some time to come.
“He’s still going to be around, letting me and everyone else know what he thought of last night’s broadcast, and I welcome that -- to a degree,” Fager said with a chuckle. “Part of what he’s done is to show the way to the other correspondents. We all try to make sure that we don’t get too soft, that there’s always a little edge, a little skepticism -- that’s what he teaches us.”