Abstract
Filmmaker Peter Rader’s biography of Mike (né Myron) Wallace—the irascible CBS newsman who died on April 7, 2012, at the age of ninety-three—pulls together the personal and professional strands of a life. Although almost all of Rader’s material comes from other sources, the book offers a comprehensive look at Wallace’s extraordinary career and introduces the reader to supporting characters that are almost as colorful as Wallace himself. Rader provides extensive endnotes and a useful index but no bibliography. However, his “cinematic style” of writing introduces an uncomfortable element of fiction into an otherwise well-documented biography.
Four times married, Wallace spent the half of his career in entertainment—hosting titillating talk shows, acting, and huckstering for cigarettes and shortening. He then switched to news and pioneered, among other things, the terrifying “ambush” interview, a double-edged sword for Wallace because of his own grave fear that a plaintiff’s lawyer in a high-stakes libel trial would turn the tables on him. The book’s strongest sections deal with the rise of 60 Minutes and Wallace’s legal troubles with Gen. William Westmoreland and Col. Anthony Herbert. Rader posits that those lawsuits pushed Wallace into life-threatening clinical depression.
The Herbert lawsuit (Herbert v. Lando, 1979) reached the Supreme Court, where the justices held that a public figure libel plaintiff could question the “state of mind” of reporters to establish New York Times’ actual malice. Col. Herbert had sued CBS and producer Barry Lando over a 60 Minutes segment that attacked the colonel’s credibility. Gen. Westmoreland (Westmoreland v. CBS, 1985) sued CBS for $120 million over “The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception,” a CBS Reports documentary that accused Westmoreland, who commanded American troops in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, of deliberately underestimating enemy troop strength to create the false impression of progress in Vietnam. Both lengthy lawsuits ultimately were heard in the fall and winter of 1984-1985 in federal court in New York. Wallace was the correspondent for both stories.
During the Westmoreland trial, Wallace listened day after day to testimony savaging his integrity and credibility. He received an avalanche of hate mail in which “liar,” “cheat,” and “whore” were among the kinder epithets. In December of 1984, while the trial wore on and Wallace was dreading the day he would have to testify about his “state of mind,” he took an overdose of sleeping pills and almost died. He then started seeing a New York psychiatrist, Dr. Marvin Kaplan, who diagnosed clinical depression. Rader offers this exchange between Wallace and the doctor:
“You know something, Mr. Wallace,” he said. “What you’re worried about . . . is that you’re going to have to get ready to answer the kind of questions that you like to ask.”
Mike stared at him in realization. He had hit the nail on the head. They had reached the critical moment. Paradoxically, one way out of depression is to look squarely at the worse-case scenario.
“You have to get ready to lose,” intoned Dr. Kaplan. “Because if you lose, you think your life is gone.”
Mike swallowed, taking it all in.
“Well,” continued Dr. Kaplan, “we’re going to try in these sessions to get you ready for that.”
Wallace worked with Dr. Kaplan to prepare his testimony but never had to take the stand. Gen. Westmoreland withdrew his complaint just before the case went to the jury. CBS also prevailed in the Herbert case.
The exchange illustrates one of Rader’s central notions about Wallace: that his early days in entertainment fostered a fear that, as a newsman, he was a fraud—that he was not really a journalist, but an actor playing the part of one on TV. Rader cites evidence from Wallace himself that bolsters the idea, such as this quote from a magazine article:
“The accusations ate at me,” Mike remembered, “Doubts started to haunt me. Did I do something wrong? It was as if all my experience in TV news didn’t count for anything anymore. What if I really am dishonest as a reporter? Dishonest as a person?”
Rader carefully cited the passage in his endnotes. However, the exchange with Dr. Kaplan does not carry a citation, and that is one of the problems with the book.
Rader is a magna cum laude Harvard graduate, and his writing credits include Waterworld and a remake of Escape from Witch Mountain. In an Author’s Note, he cites his film background and says he wrote the biography using a “cinematic” writing style:
I tried to evoke vividly the setting and mood of the many dramatic scenes that took place in Mike’s story. In certain cases, where specific information was not available, I employed a narrative convention: constructing a plausible situation with imagined dialogue that reflects the attitudes and feelings I know to have been present at the time.
Rader writes that his goal was to “tell the story of the legend who shaped television news.” He first thought that the story should be a movie, but his research changed his mind. “It became clear that the narrative demanded to be a book first.” One wishes he had stuck with his original impulse. Wallace’s life is the stuff of a potentially great movie: multiple marriages, the tragedy of searching for a lost child and finding his body, the ability to strike fear into the hearts of the powerful. In the hands of a talented filmmaker, Wallace could come alive for a whole new generation. This book, though useful, does not deliver that version of Mike Wallace. One hopes Mr. Rader retained his own film rights.