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A tribute to Mike Wallace
In a week frantic with fall schedule announcements and season finales, let’s take a moment to pay tribute to Mike Wallace, the 88-year-old “60 Minutes” reporter who became famous for ambushing corrupt corporate and government executives.
After 38 years and more than 800 stories, Wallace steps down Sunday night as a regular contributor to the broadcast. A fascinating retrospective, “I’m Mike Wallace: A ‘60 Minutes’ Tribute,” airs 6 p.m. Sunday on CBS, KEYE Channel 42.
Whether you’re old or young, like or don’t like Wallace, this is don’t-miss-TV. The history of his broadcast career, which spans six decades, is pretty much the history of broadcast journalism.
Wallace is not, however, leaving the venerable CBS newsmagazine altogether. He recently signed a new four-year contract that dubs him “correspondent emeritus” and allows him to scale back to only a few reports a year.
If the end of the new contract is actually the end of Wallace’s career, he’ll be 92 years old when he finally leaves Black Rock.
Wallace is legendary for leaping out from behind potted plants, a cameraman in tow, and demanding answers from people who previously insisted they had “no comment.” He makes people squirm and spill the beans, and he does it with a combination of tough talk (“Oh, come on!”) and seductive pleading (“Forgive me, but I have to ask … “).
In the retrospective, Wallace wanders through the many aspects of his career, guided by “60 Minutes” colleagues Ed Bradley, Morley Safer, Steve Kroft and Lesley Stahl at his elbow. There are clips from Wallace’s hundreds of interviews, including the Ayatollah Khomeini, Johnny Carson, Ronald Reagan, Yasir Arafat, Jack Kevorkian, Vladimir Putin, Janis Joplin, Manuel Noriega and Vladimir Horowitz. To name a few.
In one memorable clip, the essence of Wallace’s acerbic wit and dogged determination are evident in the opening segment of a classic sit-down with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan:
“You don’t trust the media; you’ve said so,” Wallace says, about six inches from Farrakhan’s face. “You don’t trust whites; you’ve said so. You don’t trust Jews; you’ve said so. Well, here I am!’’
Wallace has talked about battling depression for years, but in Sunday’s retrospective, he admits for the first time, to a question from Safer, that he tried to commit suicide 20 years ago.
Like others who participated in the birth of TV news, Wallace started out in entertainment, hosting a late-night talk in New York in the ’50s. A few years later, he got serious about news, and in 1968 he and co-host Harry Reasoner launched “60 Minutes.”
The show wasn’t popular in its original Tuesday time slot, but after it moved to Sunday nights in ‘72, it became an institution.
“60 Minutes” will go on without Wallace’s tough questions and dulcet baritone, but it won’t be the same.
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