Mike Wallace Dead At 93...

[Selene]

April 8, 2012, 10:29 am

Mike Wallace, ’60 Minutes’ Pioneer, Dies

By BRIAN STELTER

Bebeto Matthews/Associated PressMike Wallace in his CBS office in 2006.

11:20 a.m. | Updated Mike Wallace, a pioneer of American broadcasting who confronted leaders and liars for the newsmagazine “60 Minutes” for four decades, has died, CBS News said Sunday morning. He was 93.

CBS said in a statement that he died on Saturday night at Waveny Care Center in New Canaan, Conn. The cause of death was not released. “His family was with him,” the CBS anchor Bob Schieffer said on “Face the Nation” shortly after Mr. Wallace’s death was announced on television.

“It is with tremendous sadness that we mark the passing of Mike Wallace,” Leslie Moonves, the chief executive of CBS Corporation, said in a statement. “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.”

As one of the original correspondents and hosts of “60 Minutes,” which was started in 1968, Mr. Wallace helped to establish the television newsmagazine format. “Without him and his iconic style, there probably wouldn’t be a ’60 Minutes,’” said Jeff Fager, the executive producer of the program.

A staple of Sunday nights for many families, the newsmagazine is now the most popular such program on American television. CBS said that it would dedicate a special edition of “60 Minutes” to Mr. Wallace on April 15.

Mr. Wallace was perhaps best known for ambush interviews of crooks and cheats. Mr. Wallace “invented a new paradigm for television news, creating a signature technique that would become a standard in the industry,” the biographer Peter Rader writes in a new book, “Mike Wallace: A Life.”

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.

Mr. Wallace was noticeably absent in January when CBS held a memorial service for another legendary “60 Minutes” figure, Andy Rooney, who died in November at age 92.

In a recent interview, Mr. Wallace’s son Chris, who is the anchor of “Fox News Sunday” on Fox, said that his father “is 93 and showing it for the first time.”

“He’s in a facility in Connecticut. Physically, he’s okay. Mentally, he’s not,” Chris Wallace said. “He still recognizes me and knows who I am, but he’s uneven. The interesting thing is, he never mentions ’60 Minutes.’ It’s as if it didn’t exist. It’s as if that part of his memory is completely gone. The only thing he really talks about is family — me, my kids, my grandkids, his great-grandchildren. There’s a lesson there. This is a man who had a fabulous career and for whom work always came first. Now he can’t even remember it.”

By way of explaining his work, Mike Wallace once told an interviewer, “In the best of all possible worlds, everybody would be honorable, but that’s not the way the world works. Reputations for reporters are made by discovering things underneath that rock.”

In interviews after he retired, he said he would want his epitaph to read, “Tough But Fair.”

[Brant Gaede]

For some reason I had it in my head that he had died several years ago.

There was a fabulous two-man comedy sketch done decades ago in black and white tv of a typical Mike Wallace interview with the guy being interviewed becoming drenched with more and more sweat. One of them was the father of the maker of the movie Stand By Me. Can't remember his name.

--Brant

edit: it was Carl Reiner--I can't find the spoof--too much material

Edited April 8, 2012 by Brant Gaede