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Mike Wallace: A Lion In Winter

Mike Wallace has been at 60 Minutes since the very start. He was 50 years old when the show was first broadcast — and now, at age 88, is ready to retire, sort of.

To mark the occasion, Ed Bradley takes a look back at some of the extraordinary highlights from Wallace's career: a career based on a deceptively simple idea.

"Let's ask the questions that might be on the minds of the people looking in," Wallace said. "They would love to feel that, hey. If I were there in that chair where Wallace is, here's what I would want to know."

Over the decades, Mike Wallace has gone after politicians, murderers, dictators such as Panama's Manuel Noriega — and even Hollywood legends, like Bette Davis.

"It may just have been that you were difficult, Bette," Wallace told the actress.

"No, no, no, no," she insisted.

"Not just difficult, impossible," Wallace replied during the interview.

He's been the heart and soul of 60 Minutes, showing his colleagues, time and again, how it's done.

His encounter with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan was classic Wallace.

"You don't trust the media, you've said so. You don't trust whites, you've said so. You don't trust Jews, you've said so. Well, here I am," Wallace said to Minister Farrakhan.

"So what?" Farrakhan responded,

There was straight talk and no nonsense, but fireworks erupted when the subject turned to corruption in Nigeria.

"No, I will not allow America or you, Mr. Wallace, to condemn them as the most corrupt nation on earth," Farrakhan said to Wallace in a fired-up voice. "How dare you put yourself in that position as a moral judge. I think you should keep quiet."

Farrakhan later told Wallace, "I didn't mean to be so fired up."


By a rough count, since the birth of 60 Minutes, Wallace has done more than 800 reports involving thousands of interviews, from the hilarious to the heartbreaking.

In terms of power and poignancy, his interview with former Secret Service agent Clint Hill has no equal.

Hill was the agent who climbed aboard John Kennedy's car in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, risking his own life seconds after the president was shot. For years, Hill blamed himself for Kennedy's death. He talked about it publicly for the first time with Wallace.

"It was my fault," Hill told Wallace.

"Ohh. No one has ever suggested that for an instant. What you did was show great bravery and great presence of mind. What was on the citation that was given you for your work on November 22nd, 1963?" Wallace said.

"I don't care about that, Mike," Hill replied.

"Extraordinary courage and heroic effort in the face of maximum danger …" Wallace remarked.

"Mike, I don't care about that," Hill said. "If I had reacted just a little bit quicker. And I could have, I guess. And I'll live with that to my grave."

Over the years, Wallace interviewed his friends the Reagans many times.

"Why hasn't this job weighed as heavily on you as it has on some other occupants of this Oval Office?" Wallace asked the president.

"Well, Mike, I don't know what the answer to that would be," President Reagan replied. "Well. Maybe none of them had a Nancy."

Wallace reported on them from the sunny days at the California ranch, to the White House and to the long goodbye — after the Reagans announced he had Alzheimer's.

"Do you think he knows you still?" Wallace asked Nancy Reagan.

"I don't know," the former first lady replied.

Asked if she had said her goodbyes, she said, "No. He's there. He's there."

Wallace has been around so long that he's interviewed presidents and first ladies going all the way back to Eleanor Roosevelt in the 1950s.

"A good many people hated your husband. They even hated you," Wallace told Mrs. Roosevelt.

"Oh yes," she replied with a laugh. "A great many do still."

Matter of fact, you can take any historic moment in recent decades and there, somewhere in the frame, like Forrest Gump or Woody Allen's character Zelig, you'd usually find Mike.

In the 1960s alone, he interviewed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., President John F. Kennedy and Malcolm X, who, months before his death, confessed to Mike his fear that his enemies in the black Muslim movement were plotting his assassination.

"Are you not perhaps afraid of what might happen to you as a result of making these revelations?" Wallace asked Malcolm X.

"Oh yes. I am probably a dead man already," he replied.


Wallace roamed the world in search of provocative interviews. In the Mideast alone he spoke to Golda Meir, Menachem Begin, the Shah of Iran, and — seven times over the years — Yasser Arafat.

He also interviewed sports figures such as Jose Canseco, who in 2005 openly talked on the broadcast about steroid use, saying that baseball, the national pastime, "is juiced."

The Canseco interview led Congress to investigate steroid use in major league baseball.

For years, Mike's unerring instinct for the hot button topic Sunday night has had America buzzing on Monday morning.

His style has been parodied and imitated for years — on Saturday Night Live, for example. It's a mark of just how effective he's been asking the pointed questions on Sunday night that everybody talks about on Monday morning.

He also interviewed controversial newsmaker "Dr. Death" — Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who went to prison after giving Wallace a videotape of Kevorkian administering a lethal injection to a gravely ill patient who wanted to die.

"There is something almost ghoulish in your desire to see the deed done," Wallace remarked.

"It appears that way to you. I can't criticize you for that," Kevorkian replied. "But the main point is the last part of your statement: that the deed be done."

But the most shocking interview Wallace ever did is surely the one with Vietnam veteran Paul Meadlo on 60 Minutes in 1969. In that interview, Meadlo confessed his role in the My Lai massacre, the Vietnam atrocity by American troops that appalled the nation.

"How do you shoot babies?" Wallace asked Meadlo.

"I don't know; just one of them things," Meadlo replied.

Thirty years later, Wallace went back to My Lai with Hugh Thompson and Larry Colburn, the two soldiers who put a stop to the massacre.

During the report, people came to meet and greet the men who had saved some of the lives of the villagers.

Mike Wallace is a lion in winter now. This man has seen and reported so much, an icon for a generation of younger broadcasters whose parents weren't even born when Wallace first took to air.

"I mean, this is a remarkable life you've had," Bradley remarked.

"And I'm not through," Wallace replied, laughing.
Produced By David Browning/Warren Lustig

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