Mike Wallace looks back at his long career

I was incensed that my employers had caved in to the Kennedys. The way I saw it, the ABC apology was a humiliating insult to Pearson, who, for all his reputation as a loose cannon, was a seasoned journalist and no stranger to litigation; through the years he had weathered more than a few libel suits with no serious damage to his career. As for the Kennedys, I believed they were bluffing.

There is a postscript to this episode. In the spring of 1991, I interviewed Clark Clifford on 60 Minutes. He was eighty-four years old and in the deep twilight of his long and extraordinary career. In his prime, Clifford had been one of the most influential advisers ever to move through the corridors of power in Washington, and when I talked to him that spring, he’d just written his autobiography, “Counsel to the President.” Most of the interview focused on his very close relationship with three of our most dynamic Democratic presidents: Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson. But what the viewers of 60 Minutes did not see that evening was the part of our conversation dealing with the 1957 Drew Pearson controversy. Thirty-four years later, Clifford revealed to me just how angry the Kennedys had been:

“My phone rang, and it was Senator Kennedy. He said, ‘I must see you at once.’ He then came to my office and said, ‘I’ve written a book, as you know, “Profiles in Courage.” Drew Pearson said I didn’t write the book, and it’s terribly upsetting to me.’ About that time, the phone rang for Senator Kennedy. It was his father. He listened to him awhile and then said, ‘Father, I’ll put Clark on.’ I get on the phone. He said, ‘This is Ambassador Kennedy.’ I said, ‘Yes, Mr. Ambassador.’ He said, ‘Sue the bastards for fifty million dollars.’ ”

As he recalled that brusque order, Clifford let out a hearty laugh. He then said he assured the former ambassador that “we are going to look into it,” but the senior Kennedy’s only response to that was to repeat his previous command: “Sue the bastards for fifty million dollars.”

Even after I heard that story, I was not convinced that if push had come to shove, the Kennedys would have sued us. In the context of the elaborate preparations he was making to run for president, the last thing the senator and those close to him would have wanted was a highly publicized court fight over the question of who had written “Profiles in Courage.”

Whatever the case, the Kennedy camp stuck to its guns. A few weeks after my interview with Pearson, the senator invited me to his office on Capitol Hill, where he showed me his notes for the book and insisted that Pearson had it all wrong. Over the years, Sorensen has been steadfast in his assertion that he was not the author of “Profiles in Courage.” But his disavowal has not gone unchallenged. In a 1980 book called “Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy,” the historian Herbert Parmet detailed his thorough investigation of the creative process that produced “Profiles in Courage” and came to the conclusion that it was essentially ghostwritten. “The research, tentative drafts and organization were left to the collective labors of others,” Parmet wrote, “and the literary craftsmanship was clearly the work of Ted Sorensen.”

Excerpted from "Between You and Me: A Memoir," by Mike Wallace and Gary Paul Gates. Copyright © 2005 by Mike Wallace. Published by Hyperion Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt can be used without permission of the publisher.

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