Mike Wallace

In his four decades as the front man for 60 Minutes, the most successful show in television history, Mike Wallace earned the distinction of being hyperaggressive, self-assured, and unflinching in his riveting exposés of injustice and corruption. His unrivaled career includes interviews with every major newsmaker of the late twentieth century, from Martin Luther King to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Behind this intimidating facade, however, Wallace was profoundly depressed and haunted by demons that nearly drove him to suicide. Despite reaching the pinnacle of his profession, Wallace harbored deep insecurities about his credentials as a journalist. For half his life, he was more “TV Personality” than reporter, dabbling as a quiz show emcee, commercial pitchman, and actor. But in the wake of a life-changing personal tragedy, Wallace transformed himself, against all odds, into the most talked-about newsman in America.

Mike Wallace: A Life tells the story of a courageous man who triumphed over personal adversity and redefined the landscape of television news.

"Mike Wallace was a television pioneer who transformed the news interview. In his quest to make news reporting less deferential and more hard-hitting, he also helped blur the lines between factual program making and entertainment. This makes him a controversial figure in the history of popular culture - and Peter Rader has done an excellent job of putting him in the context of a fast changing America. Rader's greatest accomplishment is to show how the drama of Wallace's private life reflected...the complex revolution going on in television journalism. Full of repressed desires, ambition, foolishness and regret, this book is a fine example of how one life can represent the triumphs and tribulations of an entire generation."-Timothy Stanley, author of The Crusader: the Life and Tumultuous Times of Pat Buchanan

"Mike Wallace as a groundbreaking, tough-minded journalist and Mike Wallace as a thin-skinned, self-doubting bully. While the broad outlines of Wallace's trajectory have been told before, no one has probed as deeply, or with as much intelligence, insight and good judgment, as Peter Rader. This is a first-rate biography that captures the life of a man who has shaped his profession and embodies all of its myriad strengths and weaknesses."-Timothy L. O'Brien, Executive Editor, The Huffington Post

"Mike Wallace, whose probing TV interviews with everyone from Malcolm X to Barbara Streisand to Richard Nixon made him, too, a household name - was both a journalist and an entertainer: a career-split which exacerbated the personal insecurities of an over-achiever prone to crippling bouts of depression. Peter Rader neither dwells on nor ignores his hard-charging subject's less attractive traits, in a swift and cinematic narrative that earns a verdict Wallace once suggested for his own epitaph: ‘Tough But Fair.'"-Tom Nolan, author of Artie Shaw, King of the Clarinet: His Life and Times