Mike Wallace was often remembered as a prickly, hard-nosed interviewer, but he softened when recalling the impact his son Peter’s disappearance had on him. Mike Wallace died in April, a month before his 94th birthday.
By Richard H. Schneider
Mike Wallace was often remembered as a prickly, hard-nosed interviewer, but he softened when recalling the impact his son Peter’s disappearance had on him. Mike Wallace died in April, a month before his 94th birthday.
When I interviewed Mike Wallace about his battle with depression (“My Darkest Hour,” January 2002, Guideposts), I didn’t realize I’d also be talking with him about another painful experience — the death of his 19-year-old son Peter in 1962. When I first brought it up, he was quiet for a moment, pensive.
As a father of two sons myself, I knew how difficult this would be for him. I worried I had overstepped. But then in his matter-of-fact way, he said, “Okay.” This is when I learned how his son’s death came to change Mike Wallace’s life.
“I’ll always remember that late summer in 1962, leaning against a jet window, staring down at the Mediterranean. My 19-year-old son had disappeared and I was on my way to find him.”
The strapping Yale student was Wallace’s eldest. “The last we heard was that he was on a jaunt in Greece.” The newsman smiled in memory. “If there was one place Peter loved to be, it was that ancient Mediterranean country. Even as a youngster, he had explored its history. I could still see him as a little boy dressed in a bed-sheet toga, brandishing a wooden sword from behind a garbage-can-lid shield.
“Peter had written about going to a little town called Kamari on Santorini Island. Suddenly his letters stopped,” Wallace said. “Despite our attempts to locate him, it was as if he had disappeared from the face of the earth.”
Fraught with anxiety, Wallace cancelled a global news trip and caught the next plane to Athens. From the Athens airport he raced to the American Embassy. Together with an understanding consul, he flew to Kamari, a beautiful seaside town with ancient ruins and black-sand beaches.
“Just the kind of place Peter loved,” Wallace said. “Many of the local folks we talked to remembered the tall, brown-eyed man.
“They pointed up a mountain that loomed over the sea,” he continued. “They said a monastery was on top of it and Peter had gone up alone to see it.”
Wallace said he could understand, as he squinted up in the dazzling sun. Just like Peter, he thought.
But he had never returned. Searchers found no leads. Those in the monastery had not seen him. “My son seemed to have vanished into thin air,” he said.
There was only one thing to do.
The consul and he got some donkeys, a necessity for the precipitous stony mountain climb, unless one was a young athlete like Peter. They slowly ascended, the Mediterranean sun hot on their backs, while their dun-colored beasts picked their way up the dusty ochre path.
As they climbed higher, Wallace began to sense Peter’s presence; he had trod this very path.
“The view took my breath away. Thrown out before us was a scene I could have never imagined — a vast panorama of the Aegean stretching across the horizon. Dark islands punctuated its cerulean surface.
Wallace turned to the consul. “Let’s take a break for a moment,” he said. They dismounted and stepped to the overlook.
“And then I happened to look down at the earth before my feet. It had been disturbed, as if it had given way under . . . someone? My heart pounded. I didn’t want to look down that mountainside. But I had to.
“Some 500 feet below lay the crumpled body of my son. Even from that height I knew it was Peter. He was wearing the madras shorts we had bought together at the Rogers Peet in Manhattan.”
Wallace’s voice choked. “We buried Peter at the spot where we found him, where he would have loved to be, looking out over the Aegean,” he said softly. “Some of the townsfolk joined our little family as we left him to God.
In 1962, Wallace was mostly reading news on television. “Rip and read, as we called it,” said Wallace, a term dating back to when reporters snatched the news off the teletype to read over the air.
But Peter’s death changed him.
“I felt strongly led to do something more significant, more meaningful. Peter wanted to follow in my footsteps. But so far I didn’t think he’d be proud of the ones I had been leaving,” said his father.
That’s when Wallace quit everything and decided to take a year off and reevaluate his life. He wouldn’t go back to work until he found something Peter and he would be proud of.
Wallace had been making $125,000 a year when a call came offering him the news anchor at KTLA in California. It was tempting, but then he heard from Richard Salant, President of CBS News, whom he had interviewed on “Night Beat”.
“Mike,” Salant urged, “I know you’ve been making more money, but if you’re really serious about doing something special, come on over here. The salary is $40,000 a year, but it may be the beginning of something for you.”
Wallace said he didn’t know what he was being groomed for, but in 1968 Salant finally gave producer Don Hewitt the okay to start “60 Minutes”, which is where he worked until he retired.
“Sometime later, I returned to Peter’s grave to kind of tell him what I had been doing, though I’m sure he knew it all along.” Again he rode a donkey up that very steep, stony climb to where the Aegean spread out before him. When he reached Peter’s grave he was stunned.
The Kamari townsfolk, who knew how much Peter had loved their homeland, had erected a simple tombstone and enclosed his grave with a wrought-iron fence entwined with graceful metallic leaves.
Struggling with emotion, Wallace looked out on the sea his son had loved so well and whispered, “Thank you, Peter.”
