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Mike Wallace, ’60 Minutes’ interrogator, dies

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Mike Wallace, ’60 Minutes’ interrogator, dies – Yahoo! News.

The “60 Minutes” newsman had such a fearsome reputation that it was often said that those were the most dreaded words in the English language, capable of reducing an interview subject to a shaking, sweating mess.

Wallace, who won his 21st and final Emmy Award at 89, died Saturday in the New Canaan, Conn., care facility where he had lived the last few years of his life. He was 93.

Wallace didn’t just interview people. He interrogated them. He cross-examined them. Sometimes he eviscerated them pitilessly. His weapons were many: thorough research, a cocked eyebrow, a skeptical “Come on” and a question so direct it took your breath away.

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 Sunday. “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 newsmagazine that became appointment viewing on Sunday nights. His last interview, in January 2008, was with Roger Clemens on his alleged steroid use. Slowed by a triple bypass later that month and the ravages of time on a once-sharp mind, he retired from public life.

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

Late in his career, he interviewed Russian President Vladimir Putin, and challenged him: “This isn’t a real democracy, come on!” Putin’s aides tried to halt the interview; Putin said he was the president, he’ll decide what to do.

“Many people who weathered a Mike Wallace interview grew to respect him greatly and, you know, have great regard for him because I don’t recall anybody ever saying to me, ‘He took a cheap shot’ or ‘He did the obvious,’ or that he was, you know, playing some kind of game,” Fox News Channel Chairman Roger Ailes said on Sunday. “He actually was trying to serve the audience, and that’s what made him great.”

When a Wallace story found little to back up rumors that Coors beer executives were racist, the relieved company took out newspaper ads trumpeting that it had survived. The ad’s top: “The four most dreaded words in the English language: Mike Wallace is here.”

He was equally tough on public and private behavior. 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.”

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

In the early 1990s, Wallace reduced Barbra Streisand to tears as he scolded her for being “totally self-absorbed” when she was young and mocked her decades of psychoanalysis. “What is it she is trying to find out that takes 20 years?” Wallace wondered.

“I’m a slow learner,” Streisand told him.

“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.”

“60 Minutes” pioneered the use of “ambush interviews,” with reporter and camera crew corralling alleged wrongdoers in parking lots, hallways, wherever a comment — or at least a stricken expression — might be harvested from someone dodging reporters’ phone calls. Wallace once went after a medical laboratory offering Medicaid kickbacks to doctors in this fashion.

They were phased out after founding executive producer Don Hewitt termed them “showbiz baloney.” ”Finally I said, ‘Hey, kid, maybe it’s time to retire that trenchcoat,’” Hewitt recalled.

Wallace’s late colleague Harry Reasoner once said, “There is one thing that Mike can do better than anybody else: With an angelic smile, he can ask a question that would get anyone else smashed in the face.”

As a young producer at the CBS’ New York affiliate, Fager first dealt with Wallace when he had to cut down one of the reporter’s story to 90 seconds for a broadcast.

“I was scared of him and intimidated by him,” he said. “He knew it and he would just make you more miserable. That was Mike. He always had a twinkle in his eye, and even if you were intimidated by him, it was hard not to love him.”

His prosecutorial style was admired, imitated, condemned and lampooned. In a 1984 skit on “Saturday Night Live,” Harry Shearer impersonated Wallace, and Martin Short played weaselly, chain-smoking attorney Nathan Thurm, who becomes comically evasive, shifty-eyed and nervous under questioning.

Wallace was the first man hired when Hewitt put together the staff of “60 Minutes” at its inception in 1968. The show wasn’t a hit at first, but worked its way up to the top 10 in the 1977-78 season and remained there year after year. Among other things, it proved there could be big profits in TV journalism. It remains the most popular newsmagazine on TV.

Wallace said he didn’t think he had an unfair advantage over his interview subjects: “The person I’m interviewing has not been subpoenaed. He’s in charge of himself, and he lives with his subject matter every day. All I’m armed with is research.”

Wallace himself became a dramatic character in several projects, from the stage version of “Frost/Nixon,” when he was played by Stephen Rowe, to the 1999 film “The Insider,” based in part on a 1995 “60 Minutes” story about tobacco industry whistle-blowerJeffrey Wigand, who accused Brown & Williamson of intentionally adding nicotine to cigarettes. Christopher Plummer starred as Wallace and Russell Crowe as Wigand. Wallace was unhappy with the film, in which he was portrayed as caving to pressure to kill a story about Wigand.

Operating on a tip, The New York Times reported that “60 Minutes” planned to excise Wigand’s interview from its tobacco expose. Wigand had signed a nondisclosure agreement with his former company, and the network feared that by airing what he had to say, “60 Minutes” could be sued along with him.

The day the Times article appeared, Wallace downplayed the gutted “60 Minutes” story as “a momentary setback.” He soon sharpened his tone. When the revised report finally aired, he told viewers that he was “dismayed that the management at CBS had seen fit to give in to perceived threats of legal action.” The full report eventually was broadcast.

In addition to his Emmys, Wallace won five DuPont-Columbia journalism and five Peabody awards.

In all, his television career spanned six decades, much of it at CBS. In 1949, he appeared as Myron Wallace in a show called “Majority Rules.” In the early 1950s, he was an announcer and game show host for programs such as “What’s in a Word?” He also found time to act in a 1954 Broadway play, “Reclining Figure,” directed by Abe Burrows.

In the mid-1950s came his smoke-wreathed “Night Beat,” a series of one-on-one interviews with everyone from an elderly Frank Lloyd Wright to a young Henry Kissinger that began on local TV in New York and then appeared on the ABC network. It was the show that first brought Wallace fame as a hard-boiled interviewer, a “Mike Malice” who rarely cut his subjects any slack.

Wrote Coronet magazine in 1957: “Wallace’s interrogation had the intensity of a third degree, often the candor of a psychoanalytic session. Nothing like it had ever been known on TV. … To Wallace, no guest is sacred, and he frankly dotes on controversy.”

Consider this “Night Beat” exchange, with colorful restaurateur Toots Shor. Wallace: “Toots, why do people call you a slob?” Shor: “Me? Jiminy crickets, they musta’ been talking about Jackie Gleason.”

In those days, Wallace said, “interviews by and large were virtual minuets. … Nobody dogged, nobody pushed.” He said that was why “Night Beat” ”got attention that hadn’t been given to interview broadcasts before.”

It was also around then that Wallace did a bit as a TV newsman in the 1957 Hollywood drama “A Face in the Crowd,” which starred Andy Griffith as a small-town Southerner who becomes a political phenomenon through his folksy television appearances. Two years later, Wallace helped create “The Hate That Hate Produced,” a highly charged program about the Nation of Islam that helped make a national celebrity out of Malcolm X and was later criticized as biased and inflammatory.

After holding a variety of other news and entertainment jobs, including serving as advertising pitchman for a cigarette brand, Wallace became a full-time newsman for CBS in 1963.

He said it was the death of his 19-year-old son Peter in an accident in 1962 that made him decide to stick to serious journalism from then on. (Another son, Chris, followed his father and became a broadcast journalist. He anchors “Fox News Sunday” on Fox broadcast.)

Wallace had a short stint reporting from Vietnam and took a sock in the jaw while covering the tumultuous 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. But he didn’t fit the stereotype of the Eastern liberal journalist. He was a close friend of the Reagans and was once offered the job of Richard Nixon’s press secretary. He called his politics moderate.

One “Night Beat” interview resulted in a libel suit, filed by a police official angry over remarks about him by mobster Mickey Cohen. Wallace said ABC settled for $44,000, and he called it the only time money had been paid to a plaintiff in a suit in which he was involved.

The most publicized lawsuit against him was by retired Gen. William C. Westmoreland, who sought $120 million for a 1982 “CBS Reports” documentary, “The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception,” that accused Westmoreland and others of deliberately underestimating enemy troop strength during the Vietnam War.

Westmoreland dropped the libel suit in 1985 after a long trial. Lawyers for each side later said legal costs of the suit totaled $12 million, of which $9 million was paid by CBS.

Wallace said the case brought on depression that put him in the hospital for more than a week. “Imagine sitting day after day in the courtroom, hearing yourself called every vile name imaginable,” he said.

In 1996, he appeared before the Senate’s Special Committee on Aging to urge more federal funds for depression research, saying that he had felt “lower, lower, lower than a snake’s belly” but had recovered through psychiatry and antidepressants. He later disclosed that he once tried to commit suicide during that dark period. Wallace, columnist Art Buchwald and author William Styron were friends who commiserated often enough about depression to call themselves “The Blues Brothers,” according to a 2011 memoir by Styron’s daughter, Alexandra.

Wallace called his 1984 book, written with Gary Paul Gates, “Close Encounters.” He described it as “one mostly lucky man’s encounters with growing up professionally.” In 2005, he brought out his memoir, “Between You and Me.”

Wallace was born Myron Wallace on May 9, 1918, in Brookline, Mass. He began his news career in Chicago in the 1940s, first as a radio news writer for the Chicago Sun and then as a reporter for WMAQ. He started at CBS in 1951.

He was married four times. In 1986, he wed Mary Yates Wallace, the widow of his close friend and colleague Ted Yates, who had died in 1967. Besides his wife, Wallace is survived by his son, a stepdaughter, Pauline Dora, and stepson Eames Yates.

Rest in Peace, Mr. Wallace!

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60 Minutes Asks: ‘Why Aren’t We Prosecuting Wall Street?’ | Occupy America

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60 Minutes Asks: ‘Why Aren’t We Prosecuting Wall Street?’ | Occupy America.

Click link above to watch video.

Big banks, bailouts, and secret bailouts, the defective and even fraudulent mortgages that have already led to foreclosure on millions of American’s homes; finally, a mainstream media news source is asking why none of the companies involved – or their executives – have been prosecuted.

Steve Kroft and 60 Minutes talks with two whistleblowers, Eileen Foster, a former senior executive at Countrywide Financial, and Richard Bowen, a former vice president at Citigroup.

In a script note from “60 Minutes” producer, James Jacoby, begins with “It’s been three years since the financial crisis crippled the American economy, and much to the consternation of the general public and the demonstrators on Wall Street,(Emphasis mine) there has not been a single prosecution of a high-ranking Wall Street executive or major financial firm even though fraud and financial misrepresentations played a significant role in the meltdown.”

A significant “win” for the Occupy Wall Street movement to be mentioned in such a groundbreaking investigative report? If nothing else, perhaps the Wall Street titans will cringe a little more with each spotting of a protest sign or “mic check.”

Part one of the program begins, with the second part of the video at the bottom of the page, and a link to the final portion that’s contained in the 60 Minutes Overtime report:

Steve Kroft: Do you believe that there are people at Countrywide who belong behind bars?

Eileen Foster: Yes.

Kroft: Do you want to give me their names?

Foster: No.

Kroft: Would you give their names to a grand jury if you were asked?

Foster: Yes.

But Eileen Foster has never been asked – and never spoken to the Justice Department – even though she was Countrywide’s executive vice president in charge of fraud investigations. At the height of the housing bubble, Countrywide Financial was the largest mortgage lender in the country and the loans it made were among the worst, a third ending up in foreclosure or default, many because of mortgage fraud.

It was Foster’s job to monitor and investigate allegations of fraud against Countrywide employees and make sure they were reported to the Board of Directors and the Treasury Department.

Kroft: How much fraud was there at Countrywide?

Foster: From what I saw, the types of things I saw, it was– it appeared systemic. It, it wasn’t just one individual or two or three individuals, it was branches of individuals, it was regions of individuals.

Kroft: What you seem to be saying was it was just a way of doing business?

Foster: Yes.

In 2007, Foster sent a team to the Boston area to search several branch offices of Countrywide’s subprime division – the division that lent to borrowers with poor credit. The investigators rummaged through the office’s recycling bins and found evidence that Countrywide loan officers were forging and manipulating borrowers’ income and asset statements to help them get loans they weren’t qualified for and couldn’t afford.

Foster: All of the– the recycle bins, whenever we looked through those they were full of, you know, signatures that had been cut off of one document and put onto another and then photocopied, you know, or faxed and then the– you know, the creation thrown– thrown in the recycle bin.

Full transcript available here.

What ‘Occupy Our Homes’ Could Change | Crooks and Liars

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What ‘Occupy Our Homes’ Could Change | Crooks and Liars.

This week 60 Minutes gave viewers a good look at some of the widespread criminality that created the Wall Street mortgage boom and led to our ongoing financial crisis. They also saw some of the overwhelming evidence of illegal activity on the part of big banks, and were reminded that none of those banks’ executives have been prosecuted.

As ugly as the situation is, there is some logic behind the government’s actions – and its inactions. They’re acting on a tragically incorrect (but internally coherent) set of assumptions that can be summed up in one sentence. It goes something like this:

“To preserve the health of the American economy, banks must be allowed to keep preying on their consumers.”

That’s it. That’s the logic.

But there are two exciting “Occupy” developments this week that could change the equation – “Take Back the Capitol” in the District of Columbia, and Tuesday’s “Occupy Our Homes” events around the country. Think of them as complementary actions: One is taking place at the site of our greatest government power. The other is bringing the action to homes where people have been victimized by bankers.

People may not realize it, but there’s power in those homes, too.

The Logic of Injustice

Despite their destructive behavior, the people who bailed bankers out and are giving them a free pass for their crimes aren’t necessarily evil or corrupt. Well, okay, people like this guy are. But others have merely been so infected by misguided economic thinking that they really believe that the only way to save the economy is to keep shafting consumers and pampering mega-bankers.

The thinking goes something like this: Our largest banks are too big to fail, and since we lack the will or the motivation to break them up or regulate them we must protect them at all costs. We’ve propped them up with TARP, quantitative easing, and $7.7 trillion in secret Federal Reserve loans, but they’re still shaky as hell. If we prosecute any of their executives, their stock prices will fall and they’ll collapse again. And they’ll take the entire economic system with them.

That leads to some grotesque miscarriages of justice. Nobody at Wells Fargo has been indicted for money laundering, for example, despite the fact that the bank has paid millions to settle charges of laundering cash for the Mexican drug cartels that have murdered more than 35,000 people. As an experienced bank investigator working for the Senate observed, “There’s no capacity to regulate or punish them because they’re too big to be threatened with failure.”

The Bailout Nobody Knows

And banks don’t just need protection from their own criminality. They also need protection from their own lousy management. Their balance sheets are filled with toxic risks from their long run of incompetence, negligence, and greed. That’s where you and I come in. Some powerful folks are afraid the banks will fail if they’re forced to write off the bad loans on their books, or to stop profiting from loans sold deceptively or irresponsibly.

TARP may be over, but there’s another massive bank rescue going on. Who’s funding it? We are. Every time we pay a usurious interest fee on a credit card, we’re propping up the banks. Every time we make another month’s payment on an underwater mortgage, we’re propping them up too. Every time we pay an overpriced consumer loan of any kind, we’re making another payment into the consumer-funded bailout that’s keeping the big banks afloat.

It would be great if politicians in Washington stopped using American consumers to subsidize banks that shouldn’t even exist. But they haven’t. That’s where “Occupy Our Homes” comes in.

Occupy Our Homes

Tuesday, December 6, has been declared a National Day of Action to Occupy Our Homes. Its goal is to focus attention on the corrupt banking practices that led to the mortgage boom and today’s ongoing economic misery for most of the 99 percent.

It’s also a day for helping people in our communities who have been victimized by predatory lending, criminal bank forgery, unfair or illegal foreclosure practices, and other bank abuses that victimize the public. Occupy Minnesota has already occupied an illegally-foreclosed home, and plans to do the same thing with another home tomorrow. Here in Los Angeles, where an inspiring victory has already taken place, OccupyLA will help two brave families re-occupy their illegally foreclosed homes.

One of those homes belongs to a three-earner family that includes a gainfully employed woman with cerebral palsy named Ana Wison. Ana’s household clearly seems capable of making its mortgage payments, but her bank’s foreclosing anyway. And in one of ironies that have become all too common, the bank in quesion is none other than that Mexican drug cartel money-laundering outfit, Wells Fargo.

The Occupy movement hopes to focus the public’s attention on people like Ana Wison. In the words of the Dylan song: “Things should start to get interesting right around now.”

Demonizing the Victim

Resisting illegal foreclosures is a good first step. It brings attention to Wall Street’s criminality, venality, and plain old inhumanity toward the people they call their”customers” – but treat like serfs.

It does something else important: It counteracts the brainwashing, driven by Wall Street and dutifully echoed by the media, which has demonized the victims of bank misbehavior. (We were trying to fight that brainwashing back in 2008, without much luck.) The Occupy movement has already won several battles in that war. If the public’s attention can now be focused on people like Ana Wison, that can be a powerful blow against the Wall Street/corporate media “they deserve it” hype.

What about the millions of people who have suffered because of the banks’ predatory mortgage lending but aren’t behind in payments or in the foreclosure process? We need to re-open the debate about the fairness of forcing any underwater homeowners to pay underwater principal on homes that their banks knew, or should have known, were going to decrease in value. After all, the same conglomeration of banks and corporate media that demonize homeowners as “greedy” and “irresponsible” spent most of the last twenty years convincing people that real estate was a sure-fire investment.

Banks made an extraordinary amount of money off the bubble they created. The total mortgage amount outstanding in this country went from $6.2 trillion in 2002 to $11.9 trillion in 2009, a meteoric rise. And while banks feed off the Federal Reserve’s unusually low rates, they’ve renegotiating very few home loans.

Consumers also owe nearly three quarter of a trillion dollars in credit card debt, much of it being paid at unconscionable rates of 12 percent to 29 percent – while their banks enjoy rates from 0 percent to 3 percent, thanks to the government institutions created by those same consumers.

Occupy Our Homes. Occupy Our Credit Cards. Occupy Our Payday Lending …

What will happen if consumers stopped blaming themselves? What if they demanded that the banks take responsibility for their irresponsible and/or predatory lending? What if they refused to stop this country’s perverse economic role reversal, where customers have become the ATMs while banks keep making the withdrawals?

If 10% of America’s homeowners declared a mortgage strike it would rock the banking world. If everybody paying exorbitant credit card interest declared a moratorium on payments all at once, Wall Street would change forever.

Think about it: “Occupy ALL Our Homes.” “Occupy Our Credit Cards … Our Payday Loans … Our Buy-and-Drive Loans …” I’m not saying these are necessarily the right tactics, although they very well may be. But what’s most important is that we understand that consumers have far more power than we usually realize – provided we act together.

Many of Washington’s leaders will cringe at the thought, of course. “That could hurt our biggest banks,” they say. It would be tempting to reply, You say that like it’s a bad thing. Here’s a better response: Then start planning to break them up in an orderly fashion. We’re done living a life of indentured servitude just so we can subsidize their greed.

Those are the discussions that we should be having. If powerful people on Wall Street and in Washington aren’t worried about Occupy Our Homes , they’re not paying attention. But with any luck, they soon will.

______________________

(If you’ve been a victim of mortgage abuse you can tell your story here. If you want to find an Occupy Our Homes event near you, you can look for one here.)