Although Wallace was nervous about the interview — a rarity for him — he became calm after that meeting. "It turned into a glorious piece. And it was the first time he'd done such an interview. But my interviews with Shirley MacLaine and Tina Turner were also satisfying — so much so that I knew I'd probably done better with them than I have a right to believe I could ever do."

MacLaine became more than just an interview subject, however. Wallace, who was single at the time, asserts he has "never been courted, if that's the word, the way Shirley MacLaine did with me. Following our interview, she began to believe we were going to wind up together. She was a journalism groupie — but it just didn't work."

As members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints know, when Wallace interviewed President Gordon B. Hinckley for the first time, they connected well. Although Wallace had been trying for years to get "a Mormon leader" to talk to him, he says he was always "stonewalled." Then he heard President Hinckley speak at New York's Harvard Club and then saw him throw it open for questions.

"It was stunning," Wallace said. "I interviewed him afterward, then we did another interview in Salt Lake City. He was willing to answer every question. So we just became good friends, Gordon and I. He's simply an extraordinary man."

Wallace says he has learned a lot doing these interviews. "You have to! I'm looking now at the wall in my office with pictures of Yasser Arafat, Eric Severeid, Dan Rather, Harry Reasoner, Ed Bradley — and a picture of me getting arrested at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. As well as a letter from Spiro Agnew (Richard Nixon's vice president, who resigned in the 1970s after charges of corruption). The letter says, 'Mike, have lunch with me and I'll pay you.' It's signed, 'Ted' (Agnew's nickname). We had a bet about a baseball game."

According to Wallace, "60 Minutes" didn't get a strong audience until about five years into the show. "We were finishing 85 or 90 out of 100 shows. Then came the oil embargo, in 1973, at the time of the Yom Kippur War, and people didn't have gas to drive to grandma's house on Sunday afternoon, so they stayed at home with the remote and discovered us. We had our act together by then. These have been wonderful days."

Wallace is a strong enough personality that he and Don Hewitt, the founder and, until recently, producer of "60 Minutes," often went the rounds about stories. "Think blood, shouts, noisy, mean — the kind of creative tension that works out for the best."

In Wallace's opinion, the recent ascension of Sean McManus to the presidency of CBS News could result in the return of Hewitt. "Who knows how soon? Don still has the appetite for it."