Myron Leon Wallace (May 9, 1918 – April 7, 2012) was an American journalist, game show host, actor, and media personality.

Wallace interviewed many politicians, celebrities, and academics, such as Tina Turner, Joseph Bonanno, Vladimir Horowitz, Bobby Fischer, Luciano Pavarotti, Maria Callas, Malcolm X, Richard Nixon, Pearl S. Buck, Deng Xiaoping, Ronald Reagan, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Jiang Zemin, Ruhollah Khomeini, Kurt Waldheim, Frank Lloyd Wright, Yasser Arafat, Menachem Begin, Anwar Sadat, Louis Farrakhan, Manuel Noriega, John Nash, Gordon B. Hinckley, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Vladimir Putin, Barbra Streisand, Salvador Dalí, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, William Carlos Williams, Mickey Cohen, Roy Cohn, Dean Reed, Jimmy Fratianno, Morgan Freeman, Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, and Ayn Rand.

[2][3][4] Wallace, whose family's surname was originally Wallik, was born on May 9, 1918, in Brookline, Massachusetts, to Russian Jewish immigrant parents.

While a college student, he was a reporter for the Michigan Daily and belonged to the Alpha Gamma chapter of the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity.

[9] Wallace appeared as a guest on the popular radio quiz show Information Please on February 7, 1939, when he was in his last year at the University of Michigan.

Wallace enlisted in the United States Navy in 1943 and during World War II served as a communications officer on the USS Anthedon, a submarine tender.

As Myron Wallace, he portrayed New York City detective Lou Kagel on the short-lived radio drama series Crime on the Waterfront.

The program marked the first time that most white people heard about the Nation, its leader, Elijah Muhammad, and its charismatic spokesman, Malcolm X.

Between June 1961 and June 1962, Wallace and Joyce Davidson hosted a New York-based nightly interview program for Westinghouse Broadcasting[20] called PM East for one hour; it was paired with the half-hour PM West, which was hosted by San Francisco Chronicle television critic Terrence O'Flaherty.

WFAA channel 8 in Dallas, Texas carried it, but viewers in other southwestern states, in the Deep South and in the metropolitan areas of Chicago and Philadelphia were unable to watch it.

A frequent guest on the PM East segment was Barbra Streisand, though only the audio of some of her conversations with Wallace survives,[20] as Westinghouse wiped the videotapes and kinescopes were never made or were thrown away.

Wallace's career as the lead reporter on 60 Minutes led to some run-ins with the people interviewed and claims of misconduct by female colleagues.

Farrakhan immediately shot back that Americans were in no moral position to judge, declaring "Has Nigeria dropped an atomic bomb that killed people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

[22] Wallace interviewed General William Westmoreland for the CBS special The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception that aired on January 23, 1982.

Each side agreed to pay its own costs and attorney fees, and CBS issued a clarification of its intent with respect to the original story.

"[24][25][26][27] Attention was again drawn to that incident several years later when protests were raised after Wallace was selected to deliver a university commencement address during a ceremony within which Nelson Mandela was awarded an honorary doctorate in absentia for his fight against racism.

I was keenly aware of being Jewish, and quick to detect slights, real or imagined.... We Jews felt a kind of kinship [with blacks]", but "Lord knows, we weren't riding the same slave ship.

[35] Wallace's previously vigorous health (Morley Safer described him in 2006 as "having the energy of a man half his age") began to fail, and in June 2008 his son Chris said that his father would not be returning to television.

"[45] His condition worsened in 1984 after General William Westmoreland filed a $120 million libel lawsuit against Wallace and CBS over statements that were made in the documentary The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception (1982).

[5] In 2011, CNN host Larry King visited him and reported that he was in good spirits, but that his physical condition was noticeably declining.

Interviewed by his son on Fox News Sunday, he was asked if he understood why people feel disaffection toward the mainstream media.

[54] Wallace's professional honors included 21 Emmy Awards,[5] among them a report just weeks before the September 11 attacks for an investigation on the former Soviet Union's smallpox program and concerns about terrorism.

[citation needed] Most recently, on October 13, 2007, Wallace was awarded the University of Illinois Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism.

The screenplay was based on the Vanity Fair article "The Man Who Knew Too Much" by Marie Brenner, which was about Wallace caving in to corporate pressure to kill a story about Jeffrey Wigand, a whistle-blower trying to expose Brown & Williamson's dangerous business practices in the manufacture of cigarettes.

Wallace was played by actor Stephen Rowe in the stage version of Frost/Nixon, but he was omitted from the screenplay of the 2008 film adaptation and thus the movie itself.