The Last Word Mike Wallace CHAPTER ONE Becoming Mike Wallace MIKE WALLACE: Every once in a while what happens is when you suddenly realize that you’ve reached each other as interviewer and interviewee....and you’re, all of a sudden you’re, forget the lights, the cameras, everything else, and you’re really talking to each other, with each other...but it doesn’t come easy and it doesn’t come often. MIKE WALLACE. THE TOUGH-GUY INTERROGATOR OF “60 MINUTES” WAS THE PERSONIFICATION OF 20TH CENTURY TELEVISION NEWS. HE MADE HIS NAME CONFRONTING THE FAMOUS AND THE INFAMOUS. GOING HEAD-TO-HEAD WITH CHIEFS OF STATE, CELEBRITIES, AND CON ARTISTS. OVER THE COURSE OF A CAREER THAT COVERED OVER 60 YEARS, HE BECAME THE BEST-KNOWN INTERVIEWER OF HIS TIME. THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERVIEWED MR. WALLACE AT HIS SUMMER HOME ON MARTHA’S VINYARD IN JULY 2006. AT AGE 88, HE WAS PREPARING TO INTERVIEW THE PRESIDENT OF IRAN. MIKE WALLACE:...I’ve been talking about retiring for a long time but I’m not the retiring type. I have said before that I will retire when my toes turn up. WALLACE WAS BORN MYRON WALLACE ON MAY NINTH, 1918, THE SON OF RUSSIAN IMMIGRANTS. WALLACE: When I was a child growing up in Brookline, Massachusetts, I thought I would be a radio announcer. WALLACE: ...Television didn’t exist, the mind’s eye was as good a picture or maybe as...as vivid a picture as the camera picture was and so I figured this would be a hell of an adventure. I started at twenty bucks a week at Grand Rapids, Michigan after having been turned down for a job at the Muskegon radio station. This was in 1939. I just wanted to be in radio. As simple as that. WEINER: People who are really good at this business see it as a vocation. A calling. WALLACE: Mmhmm. I felt that way. TIM WEINER: What was calling you? WALLACE: I suppose recognition. Who is this guy, Myron Wallace? And it wasn’t until some place along the line in radio they decided they wanted to do a show called “For the Love of Mike.” And that’s when Myron became Mike. This was, I believe this was when it was an ABC radio show in the afternoon. And little by little by little all of this began to work itself out. WEINER: The first still image in the first kinescope that I can remember seeing, and remembering and saying, ‘now that’s Mike Wallace,’ was Night Beat. WALLACE: what happened was, my best friend, his name was Ted Yates. What Ted Yates did was say, ‘let’s ask questions that have never been asked before. Let’s do research. Let’s find out. Let’s confront. We did the 11 o’clock news on channel five, Dumont, and then Ted’s notion was hey, why don’t we...we have an audience, let’s do an interview following the news. All of a sudden I was no longer anonymous. I was asking tough questions. It was satisfying in every way. And I used to smoke. “My name is Mike Wallace. The cigarette is Phillip Morris.” WALLACE: and the smoke from my cigarette on the air would come up in between me and the interviewee and it lent a certain drama. “Now, Mickey Cohen, ten second opinions on some controversial topics. Dave Beck, what’s your opinion?” Cohen: “I wouldn’t care to ah...” WALLACE: And I had found my bliss. WEINER: You’d become Mike Wallace. WALLACE: Yeah, exactly. CHAPTER TWO ‘The Mother Church’ Working at CBS News MIKE WALLACE BECAME A CBS NEWS CORRESPONDANT IN 1963, AND LATER WENT TO VIETNAM TO COVER THE WAR. WEINER: When you joined CBS, what was the state of CBS News? WALLACE: CBS was the mother church. Everybody wanted to go to work at CBS. When I say everybody- everybody who had a yearning to do news and to work in a useful, socially useful way, wanted to go to CBS News because it was Cronkite. It was Murrow. It was Severide. There was such pride. There was such a sense, as I say, of vocation. There was such- you were working for the mother church when you worked for CBS News. AFTER YEARS DABBLING IN GAMESHOWS AND T