The Method Journalist
DORFMAN, HERBERT
The Method Journalist Close Encounters: Mike Wallace's Own Story By Mike Wallace and Gary Paul Gates Morrow. 416 pp. $17.95. 60 Minutes: The Power and the Politics By Axel Madsen Dodd Mead....
...Is the program just a little too show-biz, too entertainment-oriented...
...The show, he boasts, "could go on forever...
...He came to his 60 Minutes session with Ehrlich-man in 1973 ready to unbutton the Watergate story...
...It did not help that Hal-deman asked for and was paid a big fee —$100,000...
...If no one watching thought Haldeman was innocent of Watergate shenanigans, there were no new insights from these two dismal hours either...
...Gates is co-author of Close Encounters: Mike Wallace's Own Story...
...Even long enough for CBS to discover the six happiest words in the English language: mike wallace retired, but we survived...
...it was to make sure the repeat showing did not have any inaccuracies...
...He had, in Wallace's words, "been shunning the press...
...Very few of his experiences have provoked such sarcasm...
...Wallace came out swinging...
...His reporting in those years, says Gates, constituted "a body of work that stands out as one of the major accomplishments of his career...
...That was not normal procedure...
...Wallace's description is on target: "a steady stream of clumsy evasions, sudden attacks of amnesia and transparent lies...
...I barely laid a glove on him...
...He believed it would succeed...
...Perhaps most ironically, CBS itself has failed to come up with a clone or a distant relation...
...It is unlikely that he is as shocked or as perplexed as he appears to be on 60 Minutes, because (as he tells us) he goes into a film session thoroughly prepared...
...A meeting that he and Hewitt had with a delegation from the American Jewish Congress, he recalls, was marked by "snide allusions to our moral defects as Jews...
...This did not create problems until Wallace began serious coverage of the Middle East in the course of the 1970s...
...In 1976 Wallace went back to Syria, took another look, and returned with essentially the same account...
...I grimaced with impatience or irritation...
...It didn't, and Wallace comments:" This did not endear us to the watchdogs from the American Jewish Congress...
...He hung in during its early low ratings and schedule shifts...
...16.95...
...In fact, that was something he never did...
...Years before 60 Minutes Wallace was emcee of a late-night variety show, and I happened to be one of his writers...
...It is, of course, a result of a CBS documentary Wallace was involved in...
...Most of the interviews were innocuous, yet for each one Wallace insisted on a careful briefing and a complete script (questions and answers...
...Wallace suggests: "I was still in good odor with the Nixon people...
...Certainly the finding that Jews in Syria did not suffer oppression, that most of them preferred to stay right where they were, caused an uproar among Jewish viewers...
...Wallace was brought into a head-to-head confrontation with the American Jewish Congress, which called the report "inaccurate and distorted...
...And 60 Minutes— very possibly the most fascinating program development in the life of the medium, a news show that won the ratings battle against high-powered, high-budget entertainments that have long since fallen by the wayside—is now 16 years old...
...Wallace is, in a phrase, a method journalist...
...The former number three man at the White House was on the defensive throughout...
...He was further angered by being called "a dupe of the Arabs...
...He was 50 when the experiment started...
...The person we see, though, despite all the details the authors provide, is essentially the man on the screen...
...As Gary Paul Gates writes, Wallace "became the first correspondent in the history of CBS News who was authorized to remain on duty, in a competitive and fully active role, past the age of 65...
...In addition, it is unique, one of a kind...
...One of the few deeper shades of the Wallace personality that is allowed to emerge in Close Encounters is his sensitivity to the matter of his Jewishness...
...A fearful prospect indeed, but at CBS the four words they most dread are: mike Wallace is gone...
...That is quite a feat in a medium where imitation is not merely flattery, it is expected...
...Reviewed by Herbert Dorfman Television writer, producer In the spring of 1983, a company that had been the subject of a story on 60 Minutes took out newspaper ads bearing the headline:" The f our most dreaded words in the English language: mike Wallace is here...
...It has the power to get things done, to move people, occasionally to move government...
...This time the reaction was mild and short-lived...
...For him, Watergate was truly dismaying...
...He is also not modest...
...Headded: "Thank God we were right...
...The boss of 60 Minutes gives no ground in this area...
...It also included some of his most controversial efforts—particularly a 1975 story on Syrian Jews that Gates thinks may be the "most explosive report ever aired on 60Minutes...
...Virtually everybody who has worked with Mike Wallace agrees he is a driven man," says Madsen...
...For good reason...
...Ethical or not, CBS wanted its money's worth...
...The furor reached Don Hewitt, who is Jewish, and CBS Chairman William Paley, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants...
...Over the years he has rarely mentioned being Jewish...
...the very strong CBS president, Frank Stanton, was forced to retire at 65...
...At one point or another, says Madsen, all of these have been true, but the public has not been turned off...
...Before he finally steps down, he will be making $1 million a year...
...He believed in its creator and still executive producer, Don Hewitt...
...Wallace had been an early and constant supporter of Richard Nixon...
...ABC's 20/20 has the form but not the impact...
...it was a devastating exercise in self-incrimination...
...Madsen notes that 60 Minutes has "been accused of every sin—of being biased, sensational, superficial, and invading people's privacy and then walking off without regard to the pain and chaos left behind...
...CBS News stars like Eric Sevareid and Charles Collingwood did not get that opportunity...
...256pp...
...The familiar 60 Minutes game—the good guy-bad guy, victim-villain format—is played by all of its reporters, but no one matches Wallace...
...Once the whole storm subsided, Paley admitted it had been "a painful experience...
...He deeply resented the mail that questioned why the Syrian report was done by a Jew, pointing to the bunches of postcards asking "Is Mike Wallace trying to deny he's Jewish...
...The Bob Haldeman interview was something else...
...He responded: "I don't have to be surprised...
...they did regard me—quite accurately—as one of the few reporters who did not carry a grudge against Nixon and who was, in fact, generally sympathetic to him...
...Haldeman was relaxed, unflustered and elusive...
...To ward off that frightful day, the network has given Wallace a contract running to age 70...
...Close Encounters does not tell us much about the private conflicts of Mike Wallace, but we do learn how concerned he is about his public image, especially when he speaks of some of the more famous interviews—with John Ehrlich-man and Bob Haldeman, for example...
...Forty million viewers every Sunday do guarantee it will go on for a long time...
...Maybe, concedes Don Hewitt, but what about the gossip columns and features and games in so many major newspapers...
...Wallace admits: "We did more research on the story after it was first broadcast than before we put it on the air...
...Madsen sees him in an allegorical drama, assuming the roles of both Truth and Everyman...
...and Walter Cron-kite apparently decided to avoid the issue by voluntarily stepping down...
...No breakthrough here for method journalism...
...No, what we get is the skillful journalist utilizing just enough show business savvy to make his style different from all the rest...
...Half the chapters are written by him, in the third person...
...I once suggested that he might ad lib his interview with a certain comedian—allow himself to be "surprised...
...An overwhelming triumph for the Wallace style...
...He did...
...NBC has struck out in every attempt to produce its own version...
...He quotes a former producer: "Had there been no Mike Wallace, 60 Minutes wouldn't be anything like it is...
...The identification of Mike Wallace with 60 Minutes, and vice versa, is so strong that the two are often hard to separate...
...Wallace is a key figure in General Westmoreland's current libel suit against CBS, too, and more than one reporter covering that trial seems to think it grew out of a 60 Minutes story...
...So a book about Mike Wallace is largely about 60 Minutes, and a book about 60Minutes comes back again and again to Wallace...
...In writing about the episode in Close Encounters, Wallace reflects a great deal of bitterness...
...Ahead of him lay years of incessant travel to places no travel agent would send you, and interminable interviews with people in all walks of life...
...I'll look surprised...
...His tactics, Wallace says, "brought out the worst in me...
...he knows it is drama, as well as journalism...
...Viewers frequently blame or praise him for stories that another correspondent has done...
...Still, 60 Minutes is its own phenomenon...
...Humility," he observes, "is not the chief character trait at 60Minutes, " and criticism is for the most part pushed aside...
...He is fascinating when he succeeds, and often even when he fails...
...Yet 60 Minutes has defied successful imitation...
...He felt he was being sized up as "a soft touch, a safe interviewer...
...Although Wallace would agree, he gives considerable weight to the program's fairness and originality, then goes on to make a comment that is so relevant to his own style: "Our pieces are constructed almost like morality plays...
...And thank God our correspondent was Mike Wallace...
...He was ready...
...The Haldeman taping took up two full successive 60 Minutes slots, and Wallace is frank to admit it was a disaster...
...He not only thrives on the sheer drama of the confrontation...
...Wallace was there at the beginning, when 60 Minutes was given a trial by a skeptical network...
...In Axel Madsen's 60 Minutes—The Power and the Politics we see more of the program and less of Wallace, yet even in context he is clearly first among equals...
...Ehrlichman was not ready...
...The news of that predictably brought cries of "checkbook journalism...
...But mostly he believed he could do it better than anyone else...
...It could not really be otherwise, for here we have the confluence of two extraordinary stories: Mike Wallace—a former actor, host of a nightly variety show, star of a sensationalist interview show—is today recognized as one of the two or three top television journalists...
...The initial Syrian segment was eventually rerun, a normal procedure...
...He couldn't wait to get at it...
...Part of his explanation for the ferocity of the criticism is that "the so-called Jewish lobby was one of the most powerful pressure groups in America...
...the other half are written by Wallace, in the first person...
...Why then did he agree to appear...
Vol. 67 • October 1984 • No. 18
