ANN ARBOR—The University of Michigan Bentley Library welcomes a major collection of papers from legendary journalist and U-M alumnus Mike Wallace documenting his 40-year career at CBS News.

The papers, from Wallace and CBS News, span his career at the network and” 60 Minutes” and provide a remarkable window into the inner working of television news. The heart of the collection comprises the” 60 Minutes” program files, including transcripts of the broadcasts and interviews with participants, viewer correspondence, background research, newspaper clippings and photographs, and story ideas in various stages of development that were dropped or never aired.

Wallace’s personal and professional materials also cover his responsibilities within CBS News beyond” 60 Minutes,” notably his work covering the war in Vietnam and political campaigns in the 1960s and 1970s. The index to the materials is an evocation of recent American history, from a story in 1971 about South Vietnamese elections, to one about chemical dumping in the Niagara River in 1981 and another about land mines in Cambodia in 1997.

Reflecting on having his papers at his alma mater, Wallace said,” My 40 years with CBS News have been a fascinating voyage of discovery. Thirty seven years with ’60Minutes’ have given me a chance to travel the globe, meet and report on world leaders, and broadcast what I?ve learned to an audience at home that had long trusted CBS News reporters like Walter Cronkite and Eric Severeid.”

“Researchers will find these papers an archival treasure trove. These papers reconstruct the thinking that lay behind ground-breaking television journalism. Wallace’s well-created interviews explored the gamut of major issues of our time. His body of work is truly of historic proportions,” said Francis X. Blouin, Bentley director.

Wallace is a 1939 graduate of the University of Michigan where he discovered his passion for broadcasting when he worked at the University’s 10-watt radio station. He is a member of the board of the Knight Wallace Fellows at Michigan, a program that supports study at U-M for 18 mid-career journalists from the U.S. and abroad each year, and he formerly was on the board of the Livingston Awards, the largest all-media, general reporting prizes in American journalism, administered by the Knight Wallace Fellows program. Wallace is also a large supporter of the Knight Wallace Fellows. He provided a $1 million gift to the program in 2002, and earlier endowed a fellowship in investigative reporting and, with his wife, provided the building that houses the program, the Mike and Mary Wallace House. He currently serves as an honorary co-chairman of The Michigan Difference, the University’s $2.5 billion fundraising campaign.

“We are absolutely delighted to be receiving the papers of Mike Wallace, a loyal U-M alumnus and a man who has shown such dedication to nurturing new generations of journalists,” said U-M President Mary Sue Coleman.

The new items in the Bentley collection span the 1960s to 2002, and include papers covering Wallace’s activities at CBS and within the larger broadcast community. The Bentley had earlier become the repository for Wallace’s papers from the 1950s when he wrote a newspaper column and hosted a television interview program on ABC. The Wallace holdings measure more than 150 linear feet of files, or more than 50 filing cabinet drawers. Not included are broadcast tapes of the individual programs, which remain with CBS.

Wallace’s journalistic coups span the decades of his work in broadcast media. In 2000, he brought together on” 60 Minutes” Louis Farrakhan and the eldest daughter of Malcolm X who accused Farrakhan of complicity in her father’s assassination. In 1998, he was the only reporter to accompany U.N.Secretary General Kofi Annan on a mission to Iraq in an effort to prevent war between Saddam Hussein and the allies. He interviewed presidents George Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, and Bill Clinton and world leaders including Margaret Sanger, Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry Kissinger, Deng Xiaoping, Yassir Arafat, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Anwar el-Sadat and Menachem Begin. Wallace also excelled with celebrity profiles, which included Johnny Carson, Bette Davis, Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Miller.

“As co-founder and senior on-camera presence of the most successful news show in television history, the place Mike Wallace occupies in American journalism is as large and as central as any in the history of the country,” said Charles Eisendrath, director of the Knight Wallace Fellows program at U-M.” Pioneer of investigative reporting, author, inventor of ‘the Mike Wallace Interview’ and a journalist whose range spans wars and crimes but also the performing arts, he maintains a stiff working schedule in his ninth decade.”

Wallace was born May 9, 1918 in Brookline, Mass., the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. He graduated from high school in 1935, then attended the University of Michigan at the encouragement of his uncle Leo Sharfman, a longtime chair of the economics department. After graduation, Wallace began his radio broadcasting career in Grand Rapids, Mich., and at Detroit’s WXYZ, where he did newscasting and also narrated” The Green Hornet.”

In 1941, Wallace was hired by the Chicago Sun’s radio station as a newscaster, but soon wartime service as a naval communications officer interrupted his career. After the war, he worked as a news reporter for radio station WMAQ Chicago. His television credits include” Night Beat” (1956-57) and” The Mike Wallace Interview” (1957-60). From 1959 to 1961, he anchored the Peabody Award-winning public affairs series” Biography.”

He joined CBS in 1951, left the network in 1955, and returned in 1963 when he was named a CBS News correspondent and anchored” The CBS Morning News” (1963-66). At CBS, Wallace was political correspondent and a floor reporter at the Democratic and Republican conventions in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1968, CBS News executive producer Don Hewitt, with co-editors Mike Wallace and Harry Reasoner, launched” 60 Minutes.” The program was a weekly newsmagazine that revolutionized television news programming.

Wallace has been the recipient of numerous broadcasting awards and honors. He won the Fred Friendly First Amendment Award given by Quinnipiac College for his journalistic contributions to free speech in 2002. He is the recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, 20 Emmy Awards, three Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards, three George Foster Peabody Awards, a Robert E. Sherwood Award, a Distinguished Achievement Award from the University of Southern California School of Journalism, and the Radio/Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) Paul White Award. He is an inductee of the Television Academy Hall of Fame, and was named Broadcaster of the Year by the International Radio and Television Society in 1993.

In May 1987, he received an honorary doctorate of laws from the University of Michigan He was awarded a doctorate in humane letters, honoris causa, from the University of Massachusetts in 1978 and an honorary doctorate of laws from the University of Pennsylvania in 1989. He was elected a fellow of the Society of Professional Journalists, Sigma Delta Chi in 1975.

Wallace is the author of several books.” Mike Wallace Asks,” a compilation of interviews from” Night Beat” and” The Mike Wallace Interview” (1958), two memoirs” Close Encounter” (1984) and” Between You and Me” (2005), co-authored with Gary Paul Gate, and” Medal of Honor: Profiles of America’s Military Heroes from the Civil War to the Present,” co-authored with Allen Mikaelian (2002).