CBS' Mike Wallace dead at 93

Wallace died Saturday night, CBS has announced. He was a genius at grilling subjects in a manner just personable and folksy enough to keep them from ending the interview. Only Barbrara Walters, who chooses to chase ratings through titillation rather than substance (though she can do both) comes close. In 1967, a year before it started 60 minutes, CBS aired a one-hour documentary, The Homosexuals, narrated by Wallace, who didn't want to do the project until he saw the rough cut.



From the Wikipedia entry on the documentary:

Lars Larson, the first interview subject, was infuriated after seeing the finished program. He had been led to believe that the episode would present a far more positive picture of American gay life. Larson, whose interview had been altered to make him seem less happy, filed a formal fraud complaint and withdrew his release.
    "They had some rather nasty, angry anti-gay people on there who were treated as professionals," he said. "I had no problem with Harry Morgan or Mike Wallace because they were thorough. But obviously others in the decision-making process were truly upset with homosexuality. They saw it as a threat to the human race and were out to kill as best they could." Jack Nichols was fired from his job as a hotel sales manager the day after the program aired.
    For his part, anchor Mike Wallace came to regret his participation in the episode. "I should have known better," he said in 1992. Speaking in 1996, Wallace stated, "That is — God help us — what our understanding was of the homosexual lifestyle a mere twenty-five years ago because nobody was out of the closet and because that's what we heard from doctors — that's what Socarides told us, it was a matter of shame."
     However, Wallace was at the time of broadcast close friends with noted designer James Amster (creator of the landmark Amster Yard courtyard in New York City) and Amster's male long-term companion, men whom Wallace later described as "a wonderful old married couple" and "[b]oth people that [he] admired".
     Despite this personal knowledge, Wallace relied on the American Psychiatric Association's categorization of homosexuality as a mental illness rather than his own experience in creating the episode. As recently as 1995, Wallace told an interviewer that he believed homosexuals could change their orientation if they really wanted to.