INSIDE EDITION sits down with colleagues of Mike Wallace as they mourn the loss of the legendary 60 Minutes host who helped change the face of television.
Mike Wallace is being mourned across America. His 60 Minutes colleague Lesley Stahl can't believe he's gone.
"It still is a shocker. Mike Wallace...he was going to live forever," Stahl told INSIDE EDITION's Les Trent.
On The View, a saddened Barbara Walters had this to say about the legendary newsman:
"There was no journalist like Mike, and I don't think there will be. His questions were so tough."
Sadly, Wallace's final days were spent in a nursing home in New Canaan, Connecticut. The man whose hard-nosed interviewing style made presidents and criminals alike quake with fear was a shadow of his former self. Believe it or not, he didn't even remember his days on 60 Minutes.
Wallace's longtime 60 Minutes colleague Bob Simon was stunned when he last went to see Wallace at the nursing home. Les Trent spoke with Simon.
"Last time I went to see him, he didn't recognize me and I knew that my visit wasn't helping him at all," Simon said. "People who loved him and hated him would all agree that he had one of the quickest minds on the planet. To see him lying there speechless, completely out of it, was an awful spectacle."
Wallace's son, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, said in a recent interview, "It's as if that part of his memory is completely gone. The only thing he really talks about is family—me, my kids, my grandkids, his great-grandchildren. There's a lesson there. This is a man who had a fabulous career and for whom work always came first. Now he can't even remember it."
Morley Safer and Mike Wallace were colleagues and friends for four decades. INSIDE EDITION's Les Trent asked Safer how tough it was to see what he went through those last few years.
Safer said, "That was very tough. But it's life, isn't it? He used to say, 'The only way I'm leaving is when they carry me out.' "
When Mike Wallace thought he was right, he refused to back down. He even had an argument with his boss, 60 Minutes executive producer Don Hewitt.
INSIDE EDITION caught up with Donald Trump as he was promoting Celebrity Apprentice in New York. Trump recalled what it was like to be on the receiving end of Mike Wallace's questions.
"He was tough, but he was so fair, and we actually became friends after that. He was a great reporter, correspondent. Anything having to do with the news, there was nobody like Mike Wallace," said Trump.
