Mike Wallace: A Lion In Winter
A Look At The Extraordinary Highlights Of His Career
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Play CBS Video Video End Of Mike Wallace Era "The end of an era" may be a cliché, but there's no other way to describe Mike Wallace's decision to retire from "60 Minutes." Harry Smith spoke with Wallace, who has been with CBS News for 43 years.
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Video Mike Wallace's Career In Full Ed Bradley reports on the many heart-wrenching stories and exclusive interviews that "60 Minutes'" correspondent Mike Wallace has covered over the years.
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Video Wallace Bids Adieu To '60' Before saying goodbye, Mike Wallace visited his alma mater in Ann Arbor, Mich., where his journalism career began.
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Mike Wallace (CBS)
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Mike Wallace, interviewing Eleanor Roosevelt. (CBS)
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Interviewing Nancy Reagan. (CBS)
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Mike Wallace, during his controversial interview with Jose Conseco. (CBS)
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Photo Essay '60 Minutes' Man CBS newsman Mike Wallace announces his retirement... sort of.
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Interactive This Is CBS Photos, a timeline and some information about the people who make it the Tiffany Network.
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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