Mike Wallace Interview (page: 5 / 7) CBS News Correspondent	Print Interview

The adventure of Jeffrey Weigand and the tobacco industry story has been captured in the film The Insider. Was the film accurate or was the film fiction?

Mike Wallace: Two-thirds of the film is quite accurate. It was dramatized excessively.

How was it watching Christopher Plummer play you?

Mike Wallace: Listen, I could have been a contender if I was that good-looking. He did a good job, I thought, he got some of my tics. But, the basis of the film was that I had lost my moral compass and had gone along with the company and caved in for fear of a lawsuit or something like that. Also, Don Hewitt, who is the Executive Producer of 60 Minutes, but mainly me. That was utter bullshit. It was done for the drama involved. Then finally, at the end, I found my moral compass again, except it was not true.

In a quote from the movie, your character says, "I'm with Don on this." In other words, "Yeah, we should kill it." You didn't do that?

Mike Wallace: Certainly not. In the broadcast that we did do at that time, I did a mea culpa on behalf of CBS. I negotiated it with the people at CBS, which permitted me to say that for the first time in the history of 60 Minutes, for the first time in the history of CBS News, as I know it, I was told not to do something. We weren't going to broadcast something that I had done for fear of a law suit or something of that nature. God, that happily is not my reputation, and it was a lie. But it made it more dramatic.

Well, it's up there on this big screen and people are going to see it all over the country. That must have been very frustrating for you.

Mike Wallace: It was especially frustrating because I had never been contacted to get my side of the story. This is ostensibly history, but no one -- not the writers, not the producer -- called me and said, "Mike, okay, we want to do this. Tell us your version of the story." Nothing of that sort happened.

What is your version of the story?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Mike Wallace: It was difficult to get Jeffrey Weigand to speak. He came to New York on two occasions with his wife. His wife did not want him to speak about it because he had an agreement with the Brown & Williamson Tobacco company that he was not going to talk about that. We tried to persuade him. We were all in this together, the camera crews, the technicians, Lowell Bergman who was the producer, and I. Finally, finally, he decided to sit down and tell his story, which was extraordinary. Now came the fact that unbeknownst to us, Larry Tisch owned and was running the CBS network at the time, was in the middle of negotiations with the Brown & Williamson corporation, which was the corporation involved in this whole business with Jeffrey Weigand. Negotiation about some off-brands or one thing or another. Also, there was a concern that perhaps there would be a major, major lawsuit. We were told by the attorneys at CBS that chances are the lawsuit would be brought against CBS in Kentucky and that conceivably a Kentucky jury, obviously, would go against us and conceivably there could be a levy, if you will or a fine, something in the amount of $15 billion if it came down against us, and that naturally, we would appeal and in order to appeal, CBS would have to put up a tenth of that $15 billion, which is $1.5 billion. Look, I had no idea if it was accurate or inaccurate, but therefore they decided that they were simply not going to permit this thing to be broadcast. Well, you can imagine! As far as we were concerned, we had never had anything like this before.

Meantime, Lowell Bergman is taking careful notes about what everybody was saying. I had no idea why he was taking notes, but in any case...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. We finally decided that we were going to broadcast a piece about it, the same piece that we were intending to do, except we would not name Brown & Williamson, Jeffrey Weigand and all of the individuals. So, if you hadn't named the people, you couldn't be sued. I mean, who would sue you? In any case, that was what finally took place. Obviously, we were all not enthusiastic about it because we wanted the real thing on, but all of the information that would have been there would be there, except for the name of the company, the name of the scientist, and the name of the CEO, and so forth. So, we put it on the air, except that I demanded and got the opportunity to tell the audience that nothing like this had ever happened in my decade at CBS. You can imagine, prior to all of this, that there had been fights between the lawyers -- the company lawyers and the outside lawyers and things of that nature. But, we put it on the air and I said, "When it becomes possible, we will broadcast the whole thing." Well, that took not very long because the Wall Street Journal had the story, published the story and obviously, as soon as that was published, they said, "Go ahead because they can't very well sue you and not the Wall Street Journal." So we put it on the air.

But...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Mr. Bergman, with whom I had worked for 13 years, suggested that he had been against putting that sanitized piece on the air, and said that I had caved in and Hewitt had caved in. He leaked that misinformation to The New York Times. What else he leaked, I have no idea. So it came off as though -- I mean Hewitt and I were virtually not speaking because Don had indeed gone along with the company, and I had for a period of maybe about 12 hours and then I said, "Unh-unh, I'm not going to do this." All of this is on the record. It's on the record, what I'm saying. Naturally, I was upset about it and made it apparent that I was upset about it. There was no talk about a movie at that time. Then, I suddenly realized that Mr. Bergman had been forwarding all of this information to Michael Mann, an old friend of his, who was producing and/or directing and/or writing the film. So that, he knew everything that was going on inside our shop.

He was privy to what we knew at the same time that it was happening.

Lowell always felt that he had gotten insufficient attention for his work and he probably had. Producers by and large don't get sufficient attention for their work.

Do you think there was actually a vindictive feeling on his part? If not consciously maybe subconsciously?

Mike Wallace: Not subconsciously. In any case, I asked Lowell to get me a copy of the manuscript. He said he couldn't do it. Couldn't do it! I finally called Michael Mann and got a copy of the manuscript within 24 hours. I pointed out some of the wrongs things in there, just outright dead wrong. Michael Mann corrected those, but he quite candidly said, "Look we need the drama." He didn't say it this way. But, "We need the drama of the fellow who loses his compass and finally gets it back and everything resolves itself." Well, what can you do under those circumstances?

Looking back on that, is there anything you would have done differently, regardless of what the film said?

Mike Wallace: There was nothing that I could have done.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. It never occurred to me that this kind of disloyalty -- that's not the right word -- that this kind of connivery would have gone on behind the scenes. I mean Bergman and I had been working together for years and years. He saw a chance to make some money and so forth. Then the amusing thing or the ironic thing, he said that he'd been fired and so forth. He was never fired. He stayed on and collected his salary for two years more, I believe it was. Then he wanted a job on 60 Minutes II and came to my apartment to ask if I would help him get his job back at 60 Minutes II, which I declined to do.

It must have been a painful chapter.

Mike Wallace: It was a very painful chapter.

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