MIKE WALLACE

I don't think I have the face - may have the voice but not the demeanor for an anchor. And I defied it.

I'm just not that comfortable writing so much about myself.

In the best of all possible worlds, everybody would be honorable, but that's not the way the world works. Reputations for reporters are made by discovering things underneath that rock.

We were the first people who did investigative stuff, who asked occasionally abrasive, occasionally confrontational questions.

Yeah, I was a pretty good kid, you know, I was - I was- I was an overachiever and I worked very hard, played a hell of a fiddle.

In making the jump from a local program to the showcase of a coast-to-coast broadcast, Ted Yates and I were determined to maintain the candid, sometimes combative style we'd introduced on 'Night Beat.' But that proved easier said than done.

My parents came from Russia and suddenly they wound up in Boston, Massachusetts, Brookline, Massachusetts and they felt the sun rose and set on Franklin Delano Roosevelt's backside because he meant so much to them. This was freedom. This was something totally different from the Russia they had left.

Let the answer hang there for two or three or four seconds.

Rooney, of course, he believes that he is the reason that people stick around all the way through the show. They'll put up with anything, you know, in order to get to Rooney, and that's why we're at number 16 or 14 or whatever.

I love the urgency of what we do. I like the battles that take place, the jousting.

Even though Jack Kennedy and I were about the same age and lived in the same neighborhood and attended the same elementary school, our paths seldom crossed during the years he lived in Brookline. I'm sure that in time, I would have gotten to know him better if he hadn't moved away.

I'm nearing the end of the road and still learning.

The problem became this: We became a caricature of ourselves. We were after light, and it began to look as though we were after heat, not to reveal some information or not to find out the story.

I read rip-and-read news, but I wasn't a reporter. I was reading the wire, and the other thing was, I was reading commercials - and I could do a hell of a commercial.

But I was never, you know, when I see some kids today who are close to their parents, close to their friends... I think it's simply wonderful. I was not a happy kid. Back in those days, I remember the sick, gray days were better. Because when it was sunny I'd feel worse.

I was always nosy and can you imagine a better 60 years, 40 of which or 37 of which traveling any place in the world.

When I came to CBS it was the mother church. I mean that was - everybody wanted to go to work for CBS News.

You're not a nutcase if you want to go see a psychiatrist.

I was copeless. Not just hopeless, but copeless. I tried to keep on working because I was ashamed of acknowledging the fact that I was depressed. You don't use that word.

What's an ambush interview? You walk up to a fellow who you want to talk to, and he hasn't been - he hadn't been willing to talk to you before. You've sent him letters, and you've tried to talk to him on the phone. So you walk up to him on the street and ask him a question - that's an ambush?

I even asked Eleanor Roosevelt difficult questions and she loved it.

When I went to Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, what I really wanted to be was a radio announcer.

I used to have acne when I was a kid growing up. You can imagine how serious that was in making you feel bad. And I had skinny bow legs. I mean, as a kid growing up, I was an insecure fella.

You want to put a man at ease.

Retiring is one thing. Being retired is something else altogether.