Mike Wallace Retires From '60 Minutes'

Will Remain At CBS News As Correspondent Emeritus

(CBS)  His numerous television credits include "Night Beat" (1956-57) and "The Mike Wallace Interview" (1957-60). From 1959 to 1961, he anchored the Peabody Award-winning public affairs series "Biography," which focused on a wide range of historical figures including Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Helen Keller, Mark Twain, Babe Ruth and Clarence Darrow.

Wallace's no-holds-barred interviewing technique and enterprising reportage are well known, and his numerous and timely interviews read like a who's who of newsmakers: George Bush, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Lyndon B. Johnson, John F. Kennedy, Deng Xiaoping, Manuel Noriega, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Menachem Begin, Anwar el-Sadat, Yasir Arafat, the Shah of Iran, King Hussein, Hafez Assad, Muammar Qaddafi, Kurt Waldheim, H. R. Haldeman, Vladimir Horowitz, Itzhak Perlman, Johnny Carson, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Leonard Bernstein, among many others.

Wallace has written several books, including "Mike Wallace Asks," a compilation of interviews from "Night Beat" and "The Mike Wallace Interview," published in 1958, and more recently, "Between You And Me," a look back at some of the more memorable interviews he has conducted over the course of his illustrious career. He also wrote a memoir, "Close Encounter," with Gary Paul Gates, which was published in 1984.

Wallace reported from Vietnam in 1962 and, after returning to CBS, covered the war several times between 1967 and 1971. In September 1990, CBS News presented a one-hour special, "Mike Wallace Then and Now," which recalled Wallace's 40 years of reporting and interviewing.

In September 2003, he received a Lifetime Achievement Emmy, marking his 20th Emmy. In May 2002, he won the Fred Friendly First Amendment Award given by Quinnipiac College for his journalistic contributions to free speech. Wallace won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award grand prize and television first prize in 1996 for the "CBS Reports" broadcast "In the Killing Fields of America" (January 1995), a three-hour report he co-anchored on violence in America.

His other professional honors include 19 Emmy Awards, three Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards, three George Foster Peabody Awards, a Robert E. Sherwood Award, a Distinguished Achievement Award from the University of Southern California School of Journalism and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in the international broadcast category.

In June 1991, he was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame, and in September 1991, he was honored by the Radio/Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) with the Paul White Award. In 1993, he was named Broadcaster of the Year by the International Radio and Television Society.

Wallace graduated from the University of Michigan in 1939 with a B.A. degree. He has a son, Chris, and a daughter, Pauline, and lives in New York with his wife, Mary Yates.