Mike Wallace | 1918-2012: Newsman a tough interviewer

Advertisements for the CBS newsmagazine show 60 Minutes once boasted that for anyone hiding a secret, four of the most-dreaded words in the English language were: “Mike Wallace is here.”

As the biggest star of the longest-running, highest-rated, most influential news show since its 1968 debut, Wallace helped define TV journalism with an adversarial interviewing style that was as admired as it was feared.

From an early career as an actor, cigarette pitchman and game-show host, he transitioned to a career in hard news. 60 Minutes made him rich, famous and one of the most commanding and imitated fixtures of TV journalism for more than two generations.

Wallace, 93, died on Saturday at an assisted-living facility in New Canaan, Conn., CBS News said. He had a history of heart ailments, including a triple bypass operation in 2008.

Wallace developed a compelling persona that seamlessly blended country club locker-room bonhomie with the prosecutorial zeal of Torquemada. He pitched softball questions that could take a sudden detour into an uncomfortable line of questioning meant to sniff out misdeeds or fun gossip.

He became known as one of the most-skilled interviewers of the powerful, famous and elusive — world leaders, Hollywood celebrities, controversial newsmakers, notorious criminals and the hinkiest scam artists. He was a pioneer of the surprise or “ambush” interview, a technique intended to shock its targets into spilling information.

In short, he helped invent magazine-style television, which merged elements of news and entertainment in a way that kept CBS the most formidable of network-news providers for years and 60 Minutes one of the most trusted of news programs.

Its weekly viewership reached 40?million at its peak.

“He paved the way for how investigative journalism is done on television,” said historian Ron Simon, a curator at the Paley Center for Media, a New York-based museum of radio and television.

Among Wallace’s memorable exchanges was a 1979 interview with Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini shortly after his followers seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took

52 Americans hostage.

“Imam,” Wallace began, “President Sadat of Egypt says what you are doing is, quote, ‘a disgrace to Islam.’ And he calls you, imam, forgive me, his words, not mine, ‘a lunatic.’??”

The interpreter initially refused to translate what Wallace had said. But Khomeini eventually called for Sadat’s “overthrow”; Sadat was killed by gunmen in 1981.

Wallace once got a Chicago business executive keeping two sets of tax records to admit to fraud on camera. As Wallace described the story to USA Today: “I said, ‘Look, between you and me, Chicagoans do this all the time, right?’ And he says, ‘Between you and me, you’re right.’

“Between you and me and the whole middle of America! What a moment!” Wallace said.

Despite his success, Wallace battled clinical depression, so much so that, he said, he tried to kill himself with an overdose of sleeping pills in the 1990s.

Myron Leon Wallace was born on May 9, 1918, in the Boston suburb of Brookline. His parents were Russian Jews whose last name, Wallik, was changed after they arrived in the United States.

Wallace attended the University of Michigan, where he became an announcer on the college radio station. His early broadcast experience served him well during World War II. The Navy placed him in charge of radio entertainment at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station in North Chicago.

One of Wallace’s pre- 60 Minutes highlights was his show Night Beat, which first aired in 1956 on a DuMont Network station in New York. It was an interview show featuring a Spartan setting that resembled a police interrogation room.

Wallace asked blunt, often uncomfortable personal questions about sex, religion, voting habits and murder. He once prodded racketeer Mickey Cohen into saying: “I have killed no men that, in the first place, didn’t deserve killing.”

Wallace’s survivors include his fourth wife, Mary Olberg Yates, whom he married in 1986; his son Chris Wallace, a broadcast journalist who is now an anchor with Fox News; two stepsons; a stepdaughter; 11 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Wallace officially retired in 2006.