New collection celebrates groundbreaking journalist, U-M alumnus

The Bentley Historical Library has received a major collection of papers from legendary journalist and U-M alumnus Mike Wallace documenting his 40-year career at CBS News.

The papers of legendary CBS News journalist and U-M alumnus Mike Wallace now can be found at the Bentley Historical Library. The materials will add to the Wallace collection on campus, which includes this photo of him with President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan, below. The papers include story ideas in various stages of development that never were aired or dropped altogether from the popular TV newsmagazine, "60 Minutes." (Photos courtesy CBS/60 Minutes)

The papers span Wallace's career at the network and "60 Minutes" and provide a window into the inner working of television news. The heart of the collection comprises "60 Minutes" program files, including transcripts of broadcasts and interviews with participants, viewer correspondence, background research, newspaper clippings and photographs, and story ideas in various stages of development that were dropped or never aired.

"My 40 years with CBS News have been a fascinating voyage of discovery," Wallace says. "Thirty seven years with '60 Minutes' have given me a chance to travel the globe, meet and report on world leaders, and broadcast what I've learned to an audience at home that had long trusted CBS News reporters like Walter Cronkite and Eric Severeid."

Wallace's personal and professional materials also cover his responsibilities within CBS News beyond "60 Minutes," notably his work covering the war in Vietnam and political campaigns in the 1960s and 1970s. The index to the materials is an evocation of recent American history, from a story in 1971 about South Vietnamese elections, to one about chemical dumping in the Niagara River in 1981, to another about land mines in Cambodia in 1997.

"Researchers will find these papers an archival treasure trove. These papers reconstruct the thinking that lay behind groundbreaking television journalism," says Francis X. Blouin, Bentley director. "Wallace's well-created interviews explored the gamut of major issues of our time. His body of work is truly of historic proportions."

Wallace is a 1939 graduate of U-M, where he discovered his passion for broadcasting when he worked at the University's 10-watt radio station. He is a member of the board of the Knight Wallace Fellows at Michigan, a program that supports study at U-M for 18 mid-career journalists from the United States and abroad each year, and he formerly was on the board of the Livingston Awards, the largest all-media, general reporting prizes in American journalism, administered by the Knight Wallace Fellows program.

Wallace also is a large supporter of the Knight Wallace Fellows. He provided a $1 million gift to the program in 2002, and earlier endowed a fellowship in investigative reporting and, with his wife, provided the building that houses the program, the Mike and Mary Wallace House. He currently serves as an honorary co-chairman of The Michigan Difference, the University's $2.5 billion fundraising campaign.

"We are absolutely delighted to be receiving the papers of Mike Wallace, a loyal U-M alumnus and a man who has shown such dedication to nurturing new generations of journalists," President Mary Sue Coleman says.

The new items in the Bentley collection span the 1960s-2002, and include papers covering Wallace's activities at CBS and within the larger broadcast community. The Bentley earlier had become the repository for Wallace's papers from the 1950s when he wrote a newspaper column and hosted a television interview program on ABC. The Wallace holdings measure more than 150 linear feet of files, or more than 50 filing cabinet drawers. Not included are broadcast tapes of the individual programs, which remain with CBS.

Wallace joined CBS in 1951, left the network in 1955, and returned in 1963 when he was named a CBS News correspondent and anchored "The CBS Morning News" (1963-66). At CBS, Wallace was political correspondent and a floor reporter at the Democratic and Republican conventions in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1968, CBS News executive producer Don Hewitt, with co-editors Mike Wallace and Harry Reasoner, launched "60 Minutes." The program was a weekly newsmagazine that revolutionized television news programming.

"As co-founder and senior on-camera presence of the most successful news show in television history, the place Mike Wallace occupies in American journalism is as large and as central as any in the history of the country," says Charles Eisendrath, director of the Knight Wallace Fellows program at U-M. "Pioneer of investigative reporting, author, inventor of 'the Mike Wallace Interview' and a journalist whose range spans wars and crimes but also the performing arts, he maintains a stiff working schedule in his ninth decade."