Mike Wallace Interview (page: 4 / 7) CBS News Correspondent	Print Interview

It's an interesting paradox. 60 Minutes has been the number one program on television for many years. It has depth and intelligence and it is full of challenging information, yet TV has this image of being Pabulum. You showed otherwise.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Mike Wallace: Well, we were fortunate, because when 60 Minutes started in 1968, CBS was way ahead of the game in entertainment and everything else. They had money. They had ratings. They had a good audience. They had a remarkable news division. They had Murrow, et al., Walter Cronkite by that time. So, we were a loss leader, so to speak. "We'll put them on the air." It started out Tuesday nights at 10 o'clock against the NBC Tuesday night movie and I believe it was Marcus Welby on ABC. So, everybody figured we would get killed. And we did, for about the first three, four or five years, until we found our character. Then there was the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Revolution, and then finally the 1973 Yom Kippur War when suddenly there was no gasoline to drive to Grandma's house. By this time we had moved to Sunday, on a Sunday afternoon or a Sunday evening. People began to tune in, and by that time we had our act together. There was nothing like us. Nothing had ever been seen on American television like our broadcast. It developed a huge following. As I said, we went on the air in 1968, and the first five years we found out who we were, and the next five years we simply built an audience, and we were -- unbelievably -- first of all broadcasts on one or two occasions in the '70s, the '80s and the '90s because we were "appointment television." People wanted on a Sunday night at 7 o'clock to watch 60 Minutes.

[ Key to Success ] Perseverance

You fomented a lot of controversy with your piece on Syria in 1975. Talk a little bit about the reaction that you got from the Jewish community, particularly.

Mike Wallace: Well, I'm Jewish myself, you know.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I'm Jewish by heritage and in a certain way by feeling, but not a particularly religious or pious Jew. My religion is Golden Rule. That's what I try to live by. But, having said that, I met a Palestinian by the name of Fayez Said who was, I guess, born and brought up in Lebanon, who let the scales fall from my eyes about the state of the Palestinians. I began to -- I talked with him, and as a result of that I wanted to move around. By this time I was doing a lot of foreign work. I wanted to move around in that community and the Arab -- Palestinian and so forth -- community. Finally, we were going to do a story about the Syrian Jewish community, which had been substantial, and then had narrowed considerably. What we did was tell the truth about the real state of the Syrian Jewish community, which was not as bad as we had been led to believe. I was promptly labeled a self-hating Jew because we began to tell the truth about what was going on there.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

Because you said things were not as bad as they had been?

Mike Wallace: You got the impression that this was an enslaved minority from certain propagandists on the Israeli side. One got the feeling that the Jews were in a ghetto, and indeed they were, but they could get out of the ghetto and go to the university and they did, and not all of them had to have identity cards saying they were Jewish. They could drive cars. A person with whom I spoke on this broadcast said, "Life in Syria is no paradise, and it is even worse for Jews. Having said that, let's be honest about it. Yes, you can learn about your heritage in a Syrian school. There are schools in Syria in which Hebrew is taught. You can move around." This was broadcast in a year when the United Jewish Appeal was using the plight of the Syrian Jews to raise money. In any case, that gave people trouble with me, and I'm sure that my father and mother are still rolling in their graves about their son being labeled a self-hating Jew.

You went back later and checked it all out again, didn't you?

Mike Wallace: We went back and checked it out again about six or eight months later, and found the first broadcast had been accurate. Only this time, some of the sober people in the Jewish community finally acknowledged that the first report had been accurate.

Tell us a little bit about the H.R. Haldeman interview. You have written that it was a frustrating experience in some ways.

Mike Wallace: One doesn't like to pay for interviews. Strangely enough, in England, in Israel, in Russia, when an interview like this takes place the interviewee gets paid. In the United States that is beyond the pale; you don't do it. There are ways to get around it, but you don't. All of a sudden, at the height of the Watergate business, it became apparent that H.R. Haldeman was going to be available for an interview for the sum of $100,000. They chose me to do the interview. All I can tell you is that we did not get our money's worth. He was not forthcoming.

There was a great to-do about what is called "checkbook journalism." "Checkbook journalism" is when you pay someone to answer your questions. "Checkbook journalism" also, I suppose, is when somebody writes his memoirs or her memoirs. If you are going to do an interview with somebody, at least if the interviewer is on his game, he is going to ask skeptical questions, whereas if you are just doing an essay or your memoirs, you are going to write your own memoirs. The New York Times Magazine had the daughter of Joseph Stalin, Svetlana Alliluyeva, do her memoirs. Isn't that checkbook journalism?

They paid her?

Mike Wallace: They paid her, of course. And Life magazine paid the astronauts to tell their story. That also is checkbook journalism. They were not questioned skeptically. It remains a bad idea, in my estimation, to pay for a news interview. If you are a corrupt politician who says "I'll tell it to you if you pay me," and decides to tell what he wants to tell, et cetera, et cetera. It's a bad idea.

So it was a bad idea to pay Haldeman?

Mike Wallace: We got nothing. It was a bad idea. We certainly did not get our money's worth. He must have laughed all the way to the bank about being paid $100,000 to tell us virtually nothing.

Mike Wallace Interview, Page: 1   2   3   4   5   6   7