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They say Mike Wallace
is dead, but I don’t believe it! This is the man whose
journalistic jousting took CBS’s “60 Minutes”
to the top of the TV ratings and helped keep it there for a generation.
Wallace being gone is a concept almost impossible to accept.
It seems more likely that CBS has just
sent him off on another assignment. Or maybe somebody slipped
up at the wire services and got the facts wrong.
They say Mike Wallace is dead and yet there’s lots of evidence
to the contrary. A good investigative reporter should look into
this. Mike Wallace kept massive audiences watching TV sets every
Sunday night for nearly half a century. All of us, myself included,
were still waiting for him to “break” another big story
any day now in the pursuit of truth. That's what he has always
done, when we least expected it.
I learned of Wallace's "death" on Sunday, the day of
his regular broadcasts for years and years. Ever since CBS news
producer Don Hewitt first hired him to co-host “60 Minutes”
with Harry Reasoner in l968, Sunday was the day when we expected
Mike Wallace to carry out his assignments. It seems impossible
that there isn't a Mike Wallace around to cover this big story
for us.
According to the news reports, Mike Wallace
died in a rest home in New Canaan, Conn., Saturday night, surrounded
by his family members. He was 93, just a month shy of his 94th
birthday.
Here was a journalist who was never content
with slipshod news reporting. He had no qualms going after the
world’s highest and the mightiest with the most daring and
embarrassing of questions. He was fearless in firing hardballs
at the most powerful and influential people in the world -- no
matter how great they were supposed to be. Richard Nixon, Ayatollah
Khomeini, Lyndon Johnson, Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, Muammar
Quaddafi, Ronald Reagan, Gen. Manuel Noriega--they all felt the
sting of his questions.
Thanks to Mike Wallace, CBS News had to keep in its employ the
best lawyers in
the country. Take the case, for example, of General Westmoreland,
to whom the
network chose to apologize after Mike Wallace accused the U.S.
military of
falsifying the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War.
For this Wallace
openly criticized the network for its timidity and kept his own
job. Wallace
knew he had the truth on his side.
Whether young or old, everyone needs mentors, people showing
us how to do the
right thing, particularly in our own profession. Most of those
I admired were at CBS, where I worked in my younger days. Ed
Murrow, Charles Collingwood, Eric Sevareid, Walter Cronkite,
Dan Rather, Andy Rooney, Howard K. Smith-- the list goes on and
on.
Of course, Mike Wallace became one of my mentors from the moment
I first heard him in l948 on a Chicago radio station when I was
at the University of Minnesota. He had the most electrifying
voice I’d ever heard on radio and soon taught me how to
use a microphone with that sharp and clear enunciated delivery
of his. By the time he was doing his “Night Beat” TV
program out of New York, I was ready to imitate the Mike Wallace
interviewing style on a San Jose TV station in 1960.
Invited to interview State Assembly candidate Alfred Alquist
over Channel 11 (KNTV), I arranged for the crew to create a studio
set up that matched that of Mike Wallace, putting a spotlight
on me and my guest against a pitch black background. This was
so successful that News Director Roger Orr immediately hired
me to co-anchor the 6 o’clock news. It was so much fun I
nearly quit my teaching job at San Jose State College to make
commercial television my regular career.
No, Mike Wallace is not gone. His style is now part of broadcast
history and I know we're going to experience it again whenever
some newly inflated egos need
flattening and America needs someone to pick up where he left
off in the pursuit of truth. |
