Mike Wallace, man of the hour

Couric: Do you think Peter would have become a TV journalist?

Wallace: Oh yeah, I do. He was a good writer, he was a good guy.

In August 1962, Peter Wallace, an adventurous Yale student, was exploring Greece.

Wallace: He saw a mountain outside Kamari looking down into the Gulf of Corinth. And he was told that a couple of nuns were living up there in the monastery. So…

Couric: He went up.

Wallace: Nosy reporter-type, he went up.

When several weeks passed with no word from his reliable son, Wallace instinctively flew to Greece. With the help of the American embassy and leads from villagers, he zeroed in on a steep mountain path...

Wallace: And so, I went up and found him.

Couric: He had fallen.

Wallace: He had fallen and, you know, you’ve lost. Anybody who knows and loves and all of a sudden it’s snatched away...

Couric: How do you recover from something like that, Mike? The loss of a child, especially.

Wallace: I know. It’s now 43 years. You do, you do. I was astonished at the number of people who would send me letters because it had happened to them and they tried to help me understand it. When you think you have it made, so often life turns around and bites you in the back.

He buried his son a week after what should have been Peter’s 20^th birthday.

Then, Wallace who was 44, recalibrated his life. The cigarette commercials were no longer worth the money. He quit making them.

Wallace: After Peter passed, I said, “Look let’s make a virtue out of necessity, I’m going to go straight. I’m going to give up everything that I’ve been doing that is not just news.”

But, believe it or not, in the early '60s, almost nobody in the news business wanted to hire Mike Wallace. He dedicates his book to the guy who did.

Wallace: I finally persuaded Dick Salant, who was the president of CBS News at the time, to give me a chance.

In his early years at CBS, Wallace did anything and everything to prove himself— from reporting in Vietnam to anchoring the morning news.

But, in 1968, he nearly quit CBS News for a job that would have landed him in the White House. He was covering the presidential election when Richard Nixon asked him to be his press secretary.  Wallace was tempted. Instead, he listened to a veteran correspondent who said:

Wallace: “Mike, Don’t do it because you have finally made yourself what you hoped to be.”

Couric: Credible?

Wallace: Exactly right. “You’ve done that, so don’t give yourself the opportunity to backslide.”

Soon after, Wallace half-heartedly agreed to co-anchor the first-ever television news magazine.

"60 Minutes" premiered in the fall of 1968, with Harry Reasoner and, at the tender age of 50, Mike Wallace. To his surprise, it wasn’t long before America was faithfully tuning in to watch him stalk the bad guys.  

Wallace: We did do what was called the ambush interview. And for some reason, this was extraordinary. And the audience just loved to watch it when we would come upon somebody unaware. And they weren’t prepared to answer questions. And they got embarrassed and they tried to evade the camera or whatever.

Some people he ambush interviewed were actually delighted when he showed up.

Of course, the lion also prowled for newsmakers. In 1979, during the Iranian hostage crisis, he snared the exclusive interview with the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Wallace: Everybody wanted it. It was a great pleasure to be able to walk into the place that I was going to interview the Ayatollah Khomeini. And standing outside were John Hart of NBC, Peter Jennings of ABC, and to be able to say “Hey fellas, great pleasure to see you, and I’m going in there.”

If the highs were stratospheric, the lows were ocean deep. In 1982, Wallace’s reputation was challenged as never before.

U.S. Army General William Westmoreland lodged a $120 million dollar libel suit against CBS News. He was furious about a report that questioned his conduct during the Vietnam War. 

After a vicious three-year battle, the general dropped the claims just days before Wallace was set to testify. But the intrepid reporter had been seriously wounded.

Wallace: To sit there and hear yourself in a courtroom called “thief,” “cheat,” “liar.” Little by little, I began to find that I couldn’t get to sleep. And I was suddenly in a real serious clinical depression.

It was so serious, he was hospitalized in 1984. After a couple of relapses, he found an anti-depressant that has kept him balanced. And he doesn’t give a hoot what anyone has to say about it.

Couric: How do you feel about Tom Cruise’s assertion that...

Wallace: Scientology and so forth is going to help you and the e-meter and all that?

Couric: Well, that anti-depressants aren’t good, that there’s no use for them.

Wallace: I think he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

A decade after the Westmoreland siege, Wallace locked horns with his own commanders. In 1995, a whistle-blower gave “60 Minutes” explosive information about top executives in the tobacco industry.

For months, CBS refused to broadcast the Jeffrey Wigand interview, concerned it would ignite a multi-billion dollar lawsuit. The producer of the report eventually left “60 Minutes” and sold his story to Hollywood.

Wallace has his own version of what happened.

Couric: In the book, you say you felt outraged and betrayed when the corporate management of CBS emasculated a “60 Minutes” story. Why didn’t you resign in protest?

Wallace: What good would it have done? I believed that eventually we were going to get that piece on the air, which of course we did. Everything came around in the right way, finally.

It has been 37 years since Wallace first took the chair at “60 Minutes,” and as long as his health obliges, he sees no reason to stop the clock.

Wallace: I feel damn good.

Couric: Damn good. Anything bother you? Do you have any kind of medical stuff you have to deal with?

Wallace: I have a pacemaker here. I’ve had a couple of operations for circulation in the legs. I had a fall a couple years ago and lost my memory and busted a couple of eardrums and so forth, but after a while, you simply—

Couric: It’s part of getting older, right?

Wallace: Yes. It’s part of getting older.

Looking back on what he calls his “unlikely” career, Mike Wallace says it’s impossible to choose a proudest moment or a favorite interview:There are simply too many. And yet, ever concise, he is able to sum up his extraordinary life in just three words.

Couric: "Between you and me," do you ever think of an epitaph?

Wallace: I’ve written about it. “Tough, but fair,” and that's really for a reporter… “tough but fair.” You don’t think about your epitaph, really. Do you?

Couric: Sometimes.

Wallace: Do you really?

Couric: Mine would be “Perky no more.”

Wallace: (Laughs.) Perfect. Good.

And the next big interview Mike Wallace is working to get? President George W. Bush. Wallace jokes that he's spoken with every sitting president since Abraham Lincoln, except for the one now sitting in the White House.

MORE FROM DATELINE

Dateline Section Front

The Trouble At Twin Wrecks Read diving logs Shelley Tyre wrote The Secret Life of Tiger Woods The Trial of Amanda Knox NBC's People of the Year: Read the interviews The Night Mary Jane Disappeared The Friday the 13th Mystery Mystery at Lost Dog Road Slideshow: Photos in the Bob Duke case When The Smoke Clears Dateline Section Front   Add Dateline headlines to your news reader: