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there was no harm in listening, even though he knew Hewitt had spent much of the last four years in purgatory and suspected CBS would never truly entrust an hour of its prime-time schedule to him. Besides, he didn’t like the show’s name: 60 Minutes sounded too pedestrian, Wallace thought. But Hewitt could not be deterred.
    â€œThis is going to be a radical departure in both form and content,” he told Wallace, as recounted in Wallace’s memoir, Close Encounters. “Our documentaries are so damn stuffy. . . . Most subjects don’t deserve the full hour treatment we give them.” Hewitt barely seemed to be stopping for breath.
    â€œYou know as well as I do,” he went on, “that television practically ignores what the newsmagazines call the back of the book—the arts and sciences and all that stuff. We’ll be going into those subjects, and there will be features and profiles of personalities from all walks of life. The idea is to strike a balance between those pieces and the more serious, conventional stories we’ll be doing. And Mike, listen to this: You’ll have a chance to do your long interviews again. How about that? ”
    Wallace still wasn’t convinced, but he was willing to let Hewitt shoot a second pilot with Reasoner and him. They slapped it together quickly—this time using old footage from a documentary about Bobby Kennedy, showing the New York senator on a ski trip with his family. Wallace didn’t think very much of it; he later described it as a “banal pastiche of leftovers and outtakes from pieces that had already been on the air”—at least what he saw of it. He didn’t even bother to watch the whole thing.
    Wallace’s path to the crossroads of 60 Minutes couldn’t have differed more from Hewitt’s, yet somehow, he was just as anxiously in need of redemption. And so he figured, what the hell. He dropped off the Nixon campaign trail in August 1968 and went to work on Don Hewitt’s new show.
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    Wallace and Hewitt both grew up in immigrant Jewish families, but that’s where the similarity ends. While Hewitt, the kid from New Rochelle with the New York accent, scraped his way into journalism through the service entrance, the smooth-talking Wallace sauntered in through the front door in middle age, his notable gifts as an interviewer and television performer already well established.
    Young Mike had shown an early interest in theater and spent summers at Interlochen, the fabled music and theater camp in upstate Michigan. By the time he started college at the University of Michigan in 1936 , he’d suffered the ravages of teenage acne that he has referred to as disfiguring, though it never seemed to detract from people’s desire to look at him. Wallace emerged from college with a degree in broadcasting and got himself a radio job in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which led to a job in Detroit, then one in Chicago. By then he’d married college sweetheart Norma Kaplan and fathered two sons, Peter and Chris.
    In 1946 , radio station WGN hired Wallace to host a celebrity-interview show called Famous Names, sponsored by Walgreens. That’s where he chatted one morning with an actress named Buff Cobb, who had come to town to appear in Noel Coward’s Private Lives. Wallace’s marriage to Norma Kaplan skidded to a halt as he began a relationship with Cobb that resulted not only in marriage number two but also a professional partnership on a radio show dreamed up by Wallace called The Chez Show, broadcast from a Chicago nightclub.
    In 1951 , Wallace and Cobb packed up their lives and moved to New York and an afternoon television talk show on CBS called Mike and Buff. Built around the notion of the natural bickering between husband and wife, the show dwelled on the specific issues that faced a young married couple (Wallace was 33 when the show first aired). And it worked, at least for a while, allowing