Mike Wallace Dies

Mike Wallace Dies, CBS newsman Mike Wallace, the dogged, merciless reporter and interviewer who took on politicians, celebrities and other public figures in a 60-year career highlighted by the on-air confrontations that helped make “60 Minutes” the most successful primetime television news program ever, has died. He was 93.

Wallace died Saturday night, CBS spokesman Kevin Tedesco said. On CBS’ “Face the Nation,” host Bob Schieffer said Wallace died at a care facility in New Haven, Connecticut, where he had lived in recent years.

Until he was slowed by heart surgery as he neared his 90th birthday in 2008, Wallace continued making news, doing “60 Minutes” interviews with such subjects as Jack Kevorkian and Roger Clemens. He had promised to still do occasional reports when he announced his retirement as a regular correspondent in March 2006.

Wallace said then that he had long vowed to retire “when my toes turn up” and “they’re just beginning to curl a trifle. … It’s become apparent to me that my eyes and ears, among other appurtenances, aren’t quite what they used to be.”

Among his later contributions, after bowing out as a regular on “60 Minutes,” was a May 2007 profile of Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, and an interview with Kevorkian, the assisted suicide doctor released from prison in June 2007 who died June 3, 2011, at age 83.

In December 2007, Wallace landed the first interview with Clemens after the star pitcher was implicated in the report by former Sen. George Mitchell on performance enhancing drugs in baseball. The interview, in which Clemens maintained his innocence, was broadcast in early January 2008.

Wallace was the first man hired when late CBS news producer Don Hewitt put together the staff of “60 Minutes” at the TV news magazine’s inception in 1968. The show wasn’t a hit at first, but it worked its way up to the top 10 in the 1977-78 season and remained there, season after season, with Wallace as one of its mainstays. Among other things, it proved there could be big profits in TV journalism.

The top 10 streak was broken in 2001, in part due to the onset of huge-drawing rated reality shows. But “60 Minutes” remained in the top 25 in recent years, ranking 15th in viewers in the 2010-11 season.

Mike Wallace

Mike Wallace, Pittsburgh Steelers general manager Kevin Colbert sounds determined to keep big-play wide receiver Mike Wallace, one of the top restricted free agents in the NFL.
“We want Mike to finish his career with the Steelers,” Colbert told reporters Thursday at the NFL combine in Indianapolis. “We think he’s only scratched the surface of what he can do.”

But Colbert wouldn’t reveal how the salary cap-strapped Steelers plan on keeping him. If the Steelers place a first-round tender on the 25-year-old Wallace, another team can pry him away by extending an offer that the Steelers can’t match. The New England Patriots, San Francisco 49ers, Baltimore Ravens and Cincinnati Bengals have been mentioned as teams that would be interested in Wallace.

Pittsburgh would be less vulnerable if it uses the franchise tag on Wallace, but that would cost the Steelers $9.6 million for this season. The Steelers saved $8 million in cap space Thursday by restructuring quarterback Ben Roethlisberger’s contract, a league source told ESPN NFL Insider Adam Schefter. Pittsburgh was an estimated $8 million over the cap before reworking Roethlisberger’s contract and will have to trim even more space in order to use the franchise tag on Wallace.

Colbert said the Steelers would use the first-round tender at the very least and mentioned that the franchise tag remains a possibility.