Mike Wallace: Reporter First and Last
Jules Witcover

Mike Wallace: Reporter First and Last

In this era of celebrity journalism, when television news stars often out-glitter the politicians and other public figures they cover, Mike Wallace won his niche not on the strength of his opinions nor any aura of erudition. He was a tough reporter of the old school, with a particularly sharp nose for news and an almost ruthless persistence in rooting it out.

At the same time, Wallace, who passed away the other day at the age of 93, was a beguiling charmer who could, as the Irish say in Boston, talk a dog off a meat wagon. He could somehow get more tight-lipped and hostile people to open up about their behavior, often convicting themselves in the process, than a fictional, soft-spoken counterpart, Joe Friday, working over a suspect down at the precinct station.

Wallace managed to draw out kings and crooks alike with a combination of deference and determination. It enabled him most times to retreat with his subject's head on a platter while cordially shaking hands goodbye. In the process, he made many lasting friends of those to whom he had applied the Wallace treatment.

He was, as he liked to say, a reporter -- not a commentator, nor a prognosticator, nor a talking head, of which today's television network and cable community has such an overabundance. In his earlier days, Wallace took his turn in some of these manifestations of journalistic show business, even as part of one of those bright boy-and-girl breakfast chats that amused sleepy-eyed housewives and other early risers long ago.

But he eventually settled into the milieu of hard-nosed investigative journalism that came to be the trademark of the Sunday CBS News show, "60 Minutes," in the late 1960s. It was, and continues to be, a clever mixture of hard and soft news delving into the lives and adventures of a variety of admirable and despicable characters, with Wallace its foremost inquisitor.

It was a tribute to his mailed fist in a velvet glove that it was written that the most intimidating four words in the English language were "Mike Wallace is here." The footage of Wallace knocking on a door with a colleague toting a large television camera close behind was an acknowledgment that for all his reportorial self-identity there was also some show business involved.

But television after all is first and foremost a visual medium. Wallace and his prime producer on "60 Minutes," Don Hewitt, knew how to make the most of his bird-dog method, particularly when going after the fraudulent scams the exposure of which were a specialty of the weekly program.

More often than not, however, Wallace excelled in probing the essentials of what made his subjects tick, applying what could be called a polite but edgy insistence toward them that often was revealing whether or not he elicited straight answers.

He was in a sense the airwave antithesis of Rush Limbaugh, the super-opinionated, insulting apostle of hate mongering who spews slander over a microphone rather than engaging in the sort of face-to-face personal confrontation that marked Wallace as foremost a seeker of information and motivation.

My own limited encounters with Mike Wallace were usually in the back of a press bus on a presidential campaign trail, exchanging impressions of the candidate we were covering as reporters. Although by this time he had acquired celebrity status, not only among television viewers but among younger bus-riding reporters as well, he never conveyed any sense that he was other than one of the pack of tag-a-long newshounds. You never knew from his work whether he was a Democrat or a Republican, a liberal, a conservative or a libertarian. He was just another guy there for the story, and the camaraderie.

There has always been a certain rivalry between television and print reporters, and in the writing press a modicum of jealousy about our television brethren's notoriety and fatter salaries. But none of it applied very much toward Mike Wallace, who remained anchored always to the standards of fair and honest reporting intended to govern all aspects of the journalistic fraternity.