Mike Wallace was a great friend and supporter of the Overseas Press Club, although next to his CBS colleagues Walter Cronkite and Andy Rooney, he was a relative newcomer. Wallace, already at the peak of his game when he joined the club in 1979, served as the awards presenter at the OPC dinners in 1984, 1992 and 2000. In 1998, Don Hewitt, Wallace and the rest of the “60 Minutes” team jointly received the President’s Award from OPC President John Corporon.
As an aspiring print and broadcast reporter, I studied Wallace’s every nuance, every inflection, every trick, every tick, every technique. Every story he did was a seminar in real time. While I loved the “60 Minutes” tribute to him, his single most instructive story did not make the cut, almost certainly because the highlight would have been too long. The story was his 1969 interview of Clement Haynsworth, a federal appeals court judge in South Carolina nominated to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon.
Haynsworth had been accused of being a segregationist and had not reacted to the accusation in public before sitting down with Wallace. Wallace asked whether the accusation was true and Haynsworth did not answer.
Instead of moving on to another question, Wallace just sat there. Squirming and sweating, Haynsworth tortured himself with silence until he could not stand it anymore and blurted out an answer that proved to be disastrous. That moment taught me that skillful listening is a reporter’s tool, important for content and a critical inducement to get a reluctant, nervous interviewee to talk.
Finally, a story I told in 2000 when as OPC Awards chairman I introduced Wallace. I met him in April 1989 at a black tie reception at Sardi’s honoring the first 30 women, including Helen Hayes, admitted to the Players Club, a club focused on the theater and arts, which also had a category for journalists. I was newly married and the brand new business investigative correspondent at ABC News, which was at its peak under Roone Arledge.
Of more than 100 correspondents, only Wallace’s son Chris was newer to the ABC payroll than I was. So I introduced myself to the great Mike Wallace, as the son of a fellow University of Michigan graduate, then mentioning that his son Chris and I had known each other in Washington.
Wallace asked me who hired me. Now, an old network vet had advised me, without exception, to answer that question by saying “Roone,” but to Wallace I did not. In fact, I had never gotten to Roone. My hiring had been approved by his right hand man, a skilled political operative and Kennedy family confidante named David Burke, the executive vice president of ABC News. A month after hiring me in June of 1988, Burke became the new President of CBS News, and, at least nominally, Mike Wallace’s new boss.
In his inimitable fashion, Wallace hit me with a question I had never been asked: “What did Burke tell you he wants you to do?” I could not help myself: “He told me he wants me to beat the Supp-Hose (support stockings for old men with varicose veins) off Mike Wallace.”
In a flash, Wallace grabbed me by the tuxedo lapels and yanked my face close to his. All the celebrities in the room went silent. Then he gave me a big fat wet kiss on the lips and laughed.