‘Best TV interviewer ever’ Mike Wallace dies aged 93

Within five months of each other, two of the men who helped make 60 Minutes the most distinctive news show on US television have died.

First it was Andy Rooney, the cantankerous commentator who died in November, a month after delivering the last of his show-closing essays. Now 93-year-old Mike Wallace, the hard-charging interviewer who frequently led 60 Minutes and gave it journalistic heft with a showman’s flair, has died.

“More than anyone else he was responsible for the continuing success of 60 Minutes,” said veteran correspondent Morley Safer. “We are all in his debt.”

Wallace had such a fearsome reputation as an interviewer that “Mike Wallace is here to see you” were among the most dreaded words a newsmaker could hear.

He was well aware that his reputation arrived at an interview before he did, said Jeff Fager, CBS News chairman and Wallace’s long-time producer at 60 Minutes.

“He loved it,” Fager said. “He loved that part of Mike Wallace. He loved being Mike Wallace. He loved the fact that if he showed up for an interview, it made people nervous... He knew, and he knew that everybody else knew, that he was going to get to the truth. And that’s what motivated him.”

Wallace made 60 Minutes compulsively watchable, television’s first news magazine that became appointment viewing in the US. His last interview was in Jan 2008. Slowed by a triple bypass later that month and the ravages of time on a once-sharp mind, Wallace retired from public life.

During the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979, Wallace asked Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini what he thought about being called “a lunatic” by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. Khomeini answered by predicting Sadat’s assassination.

Late in his career, Wallace interviewed Russian president Vladimir Putin, and challenged him: “This isn’t a real democracy, come on!” Putin’s aides tried fruitlessly to halt the interview.

In 1973, with the Watergate scandal growing, he sat with top Nixon aide John Ehrlichman and read a long list of alleged crimes, from money laundering to obstructing justice. “All of this,” Wallace noted, “by the law-and-order administration of Richard Nixon.”

Ehrlichman could only respond: “Is there a question in there somewhere?”

“He was hands down the best television interviewer ever,” said Steve Kroft, his former 60 Minutes colleague. “I can’t think of anyone, besides [CBS legend Edward R] Murrow, who had a greater influence in shaping television journalism.”