Mike Wallace, hard-hitting and controversial interviewer for 60 minutes, has passed away.
Rendered feeble by natural complications, he succombed to one interlocutor with whom no one has the final word: death.
He also put to death the notion that an interview would be an easy tussle of breezy answers and cheesy one-liners. Questioning some of the most provocative and menacing of figures in the modern world, Wallace placed truth in the mouth of an abrasive and unrelentinng onslaught of questions, some of which rendered his subjects mute with rage or stilled into silence.
If any journalist better exemplified the notion of "parrhesia", or boldness of speech, it was Mike Wallaace. Collapsed by debilitating depression in the midst of more trying times, he represented also that no matter how brash the mouth or vocal the mind, a man has a dying body and a heart of flesh.
To witness the sudden death of two monumental crumudgeons in one year, Rooney then Wallace, one can only suspect that future commentators will either attempt a more subtle style of upbraiding their time and the celebrities who define it, or they will engage in petty attacks without plunging the depths of the people who accomplish so much without revealing very much about themselves.
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