Myron's Story

When Mike Wallace was born 88 years ago in Brookline, Mass., his parents actually named him Myron. He thought Myron sounded a bit wimpy, and changed it to the more manly Mike.

Since correspondent Morley Safer has known him, shared a lot with him and fought with him longer than just about anybody else still around 60 Minutes, it falls to him to add a little armchair psychology. Asking the question: if the child is indeed father to the man, what makes Myron run?

"Do you feel that it's time to maybe pack it in and reflect or ..." Safer asked.

"Reflect about what?" Wallace asked.

"Whatever," Safer said.

"Give me a break. Reflect. What am I gonna reflect about?" Wallace replied.

The 60 Minutes team knew it would not be easy trying to get him to reflect on his life and times, his legacy and all that. Reflection has never been Mike Wallace's long suit.

He likes to work — and argue.

In one famous argument with 60 Minutes founder Don Hewitt, caught on camera, Wallace argued that Hewitt was "gutting" his story.

"Forget '60 Minutes,' you're not getting on this week," Hewitt fired back.

Though their dustups were by far the loudest, Wallace and Safer also had their moments.

"I mean we were colleagues and competitors at the same time," Wallace reflects. "And so, when I wanted to do a story, and you wanted to do a story, and it's the same story …"

"And I come into the office the next day and you're out of town doing the story," Safer said, laughing.

"What happened when we really didn't talk to each other for about a year?" Wallace asked Safer.

"What happened? What was the initiator of that?" Safer replied. "I honestly do not remember. It has been a very bumpy and satisfying road, though."

"That's exactly right," Wallace agreed.

Truth be told, Mike's story — Myron's story — is of the road not taken. If his parents had their way, young Myron probably would have become just what the world needed, one more lawyer.

Looking back, Wallace says he was a pretty good kid, an overachiever who worked pretty hard. "Played a hell of a fiddle," he said.

In college, he got interested in radio. And soon after, in 1941, he reached a kind of pinnacle: announcer on the radio drama "The Green Hornet."

And that was that — no lawyer for the Wallaces.

Myron — Mike — went on to do all kinds of early television shows, from variety shows to commercials, from talk to soap.

"It was fine, it was honest work. But I was not especially proud of it," Wallace said.

In 1962, an event happened that would change his life. While sightseeing on a mountaintop in Greece, Wallace's 19-year-old son Peter was killed.

"And we went over and found him," he said. "He had fallen off a cliff. He, you know. What can you say? He was a glorious young man."

To honor Peter's memory, Wallace decided to concentrate on more meaningful work. Soon, CBS News became his professional home.

During the early years of 60 Minutes, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Wallace labored on a broadcast not many people watched.

"We finished regularly 85 out of 100 shows and so forth. But we got our act together during those years," Wallace said.

"It was spring training," Safer remarked.

"That's exactly right," Wallace agreed.

The rest, as they say, is history.

On screen, of course, there was little evidence of the toll taken by the brutal hours and the arguments and the hundreds upon hundreds of airplane flights and hotel rooms.

But like all members of 60 Minutes, Wallace did not escape untouched. He passed out on a plane 15 years ago. Doctors put in a pacemaker, and still monitor his heart by long distance.

Over the years he has been involved in some major embarrassments for CBS.

There was his interview with whistle blower Jeffery Wigand, who charged that despite its denials, the tobacco industry had known for years how harmful cigarettes were.

"It's a delivery device for nicotine," Wigand told Wallace.

"A delivery device for nicotine. Put it in your mouth, light it up, and you're gonna get your fix?" Wallace asked.

"Get your fix," Wigand agreed.

CBS management first refused to air the interview. By the time it finally did run, the network had a very public black eye. But it was a lawsuit over a Vietnam documentary that literally took him to the edge.

Gen. William Westmoreland sued Wallace and CBS for reporting that Westmoreland had deliberately falsified estimates of enemy troop strength in Vietnam. The suit was eventually dropped, and Wallace has talked many times about the deep depression that descended on him during that trial.

What he's not talked about is something a few of his colleagues always suspected.

"Did you try to commit suicide at one point?" Safer asked Wallace.

"Uh, I've never said this before. Yeah. I tried," Wallace admitted. "I don't know why the hell you asked me that question because I, other people have and I've — it's the first time I've answered it honestly. I wrote a note. And Mary found it. And she found the pills that I was taking on the floor. I was asleep."

But that was over 20 years ago. Wallace's wife, Mary, got him through it. And those 20 intervening years have been some of the most productive in his career.

"You've since become — I mean this in the best sense — a kind of poster boy for dealing with depression," Safer said.

"Yes, I have," Wallace agreed. "Because, I — listen. Depression can be treated."

So what's next? Like so many others in this confessional age, he's already put out two books of memoirs. But what about retirement — or whatever you want to call it.

Asked if he is scared about what faces him ahead after this, Wallace told Safer, "Yeah, I am. You're 13 years younger than I."

"Fourteen," Safer corrected. "Well, yes."

"And I've always thought, you know, what the Dickens would I do? You paint. You write. You do all kinds of things I don't. I work," Wallace told Safer.

Perhaps it's time to dust off that fiddle. 60 Minutes took him to the violin virtuoso Itzhak Perlman, whom Wallace once profiled, to see if there was a second career in the old war horse.

"Let me see you hold it. Let me see your bow grip," Perlman instructed. "Thumb a little bent, like this. Nah, nah, nah, nah. This is a real challenge."

"We're not going to play," Wallace said.

"What? You're going to play a note. That's it, that's it," Perlman said, as Wallace scratched a note. "Do you remember songs you played when you were a kid?"

"Mediation from Thais," Wallace responded, referring to a composition by Jules Massenet.

"You actually played that?" Perlman asked.

"Yes," Wallace said.

"Do you remember the note, the first note? There is a career here. There is a career …," Perlman joked, after Wallace hummed the first note.

"Come on," Wallace said. "I used to talk about my fiddle playing and so forth. And at Christmas celebration, the whole family was there and they got on the old man, the buzzard, to play 'Meditation from Thais.' And I started to play it, and everybody began to laugh."

"Cry?" Perlman asked.

"No, to laugh. I never have picked up the fiddle since. And you know what this morning has done, this? I am never going to pick up the fiddle again," Wallace said.
Produced By David Browning/Warren Lustig