mike wallace : good night

Mike Wallace, ’60 Minutes’ Pioneer, Dies

By BRIAN STELTER

Mike Wallace, a pioneer of American broadcasting who confronted leaders and liars for the newsmagazine “60 Minutes” for four decades, has died, CBS News said Sunday morning. He was 93.

His death was announced on CBS. Bob Scheiffer, the host of “Face the Nation,” said that Mr. Wallace died on Saturday night in New Haven, Connecticut. “His family was with him,” Mr. Scheiffer said.

Mr. Wallace had been ill for several years.

As one of the original correspondents and hosts of “60 Minutes,” which was started in 1968, Mr. Wallace helped to establish the television newsmagazine format. “60 Minutes” is now the most popular such program on American television.

Mr. Wallace was perhaps best known for ambush interviews of crooks and cheats. Mr. Wallace “invented a new paradigm for television news, creating a signature technique that would become a standard in the industry,” the biographer Peter Rader writes in a new book, “Mike Wallace: A Life.”

In an essay for CBS News, Morley Safer, a “60 Minutes” correspondent, recounted his colleague’s career thusly:

Wallace took to heart the old reporter’s pledge to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. He characterized himself as “nosy and insistent.”

So insistent, there were very few 20th century icons who didn’t submit to a Mike Wallace interview. He lectured Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia, on corruption. He lectured Yassir Arafat on violence.

He asked the Ayatollah Khoumeini if he were crazy.

He traveled with Martin Luther King (whom Wallace called his hero). He grappled with Louis Farrakhan.

And he interviewed Malcolm X shortly before his assassination.

Mr. Wallace entered semi-retirement in 2006, but returned to “60 Minutes” for interviews with Mitt Romney, Jack Kevorkian and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He last appeared on “60 Minutes” in January 2008, when he had an exclusive interview with Roger Clemens, a baseball legend who had been accused of steroid use.

In interviews after he retired, Mr. Wallace said he would want his epigraph to read, “Tough But Fair.”