  
| 
| ||||||||||||
Wallace to have reduced role on '60 Minutes'
YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS(CNN) -- Mike Wallace, whose tough interviews defined "60 Minutes" investigative reporting, will retire as a regular correspondent in the spring after the newsmagazine wraps up its current season. Wallace has been a correspondent with the iconic CBS newsmagazine since it premiered in 1968 and has been a newsman for more than six decades. Kevin Tedesco, a spokesman for "60 Minutes," said Wallace, 87, will become a correspondent emeritus. The CBS Web site says Wallace will retire as a regular correspondent in the spring after the newsmagazine wraps up its current season. "He'll still be in the building, will still do an occasional piece," Tedesco said Thursday. "It's not a retirement. It's a new status. "It's effective now," Tedesco added. (Watch Jeanne Moos bid farewell to Wallace -- 1:49) Wallace, who will turn 88 in May, released a written statement saying age was a primary factor in his decision, which he insists was solely his and not CBS's. He joked in the statement that he's always said he wouldn't retire until his "toes turn up." "Well, they're just beginning to curl a trifle, which means that as I approach my 88th birthday, it's become apparent to me that my eyes and ears, among other appurtenances, aren't quite what they used to be," Wallace wrote. "And the prospect of long flights to wherever in search of whatever are not quite as appealing. "But CBS is not pushing me. I'll be in a comfortable office on the same floor -- just around the corner from where I've holed up for the past 43 years -- available, when asked, for whatever chore CBS News, '60 Minutes,' the 'CBS Evening News' have in mind for me." Myron Leon Wallace graduated in 1939 from the University of Michigan, where he studied broadcasting, according to the Museum of Broadcast Communications. However, unlike many of the prominent newsmen of his era, Wallace was not tossed into the fray of World War II correspondence. Instead, Wallace first tried his hand as a newscaster, narrator and announcer in Grand Rapids, Michigan, before moving to a station in Detroit, where he appeared on such radio shows as "The Lone Ranger" and "The Green Hornet," according to the museum. In 1941 he moved to Chicago, Illinois, and briefly worked as a freelancer before becoming a news radio announcer for the Chicago Sun's "Air Edition," a job he held until joining the Navy in 1943. He went back to the program in 1946 and worked there until 1948, according to the museum. In 1950 Wallace began donning myriad hats, hosting and making appearances on various radio shows, including "Mike and Buff," which CBS adapted from a successful Chicago radio program. In it, Wallace and his second wife, Buff Cobb, would amble around New York City, interviewing celebrities and passers-by, according to the museum. Wallace and Cobb enjoyed three successful seasons on CBS before Wallace tried acting, appearing on Broadway in 1954 in the comedy "Reclining Figure." He promptly returned to journalism, but not with CBS. In 1956, after organizing the news department for the DuMont Television Network's New York affiliate, he first showed he was adept at conducting interviews on "Night Beat." "Armed with solid research and provocative questions, the seasoned announcer with a flair for the dramatic turned into a hard-hitting investigative journalist or probing personality reporter," the Museum of Broadcast Communications states. The show moved to ABC in 1957 and was renamed "The Mike Wallace Interview." In 1963, when networks began expanding their news divisions, Wallace rejoined CBS as anchor of the "CBS Morning News with Mike Wallace," where he covered, among other news, the Middle East, the campaign of Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War. After solidifying his reputation as a hard-hitting journalist, he and the mild-mannered Harry Reasoner did a pilot episode for a prime time newsmagazine called "60 Minutes." The rest is broadcast journalism history. For the past 38 years, Wallace has racked up a wall full of awards, including 19 Emmys and three Peabodys. More notably, however, are the figures who have sat across from Wallace in the interviewee's chair -- often uneasily: Artist Salvador Dali, writer Norman Mailer, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, intellectual Aldous Huxley, former Panamian leader Manuel Noriega, former Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat, Ayatollah Khomeini, Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi, and U.S. Presidents George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy. CBS executives said they are eager to keep Wallace on board. "He's had such a powerful impact on all of us who work here, on how we conduct interviews and how we report stories, that there will always be a piece of Mike in everything we do," said Jeff Fager, executive producer of "60 Minutes." Added CBS News President Sean McManus, "I'm very pleased that he'll remain at CBS News as correspondent emeritus ... There is no finer journalist from whom everyone in the news business can learn." 
|
| ||||||||||||
| © 2007 Cable News Network. A Time Warner Company. All Rights Reserved. Terms under which this service is provided to you. Read our privacy guidelines. Contact us. Site Map. |
 |
|
External sites open in new window; not endorsed by CNN.com
Pay service with live and archived video. 
