Mike Wallace to retire from '60 Minutes'

Mike Wallace, the combative television journalist known for his tough-as-nails questioning of the famous and the infamous, is retiring from ''60 Minutes" after 38 years on the program, CBS announced yesterday.

Although the 87-year-old Brookline native told the Globe just three months ago that he would work ''until my toes turn up," Wallace said yesterday in a statement that his toes are ''just beginning to curl a trifle."

''It's become apparent to me that my eyes and ears, among other appurtenances, aren't quite what they used to be," he said. ''And the prospect of long flights to wherever in search of whatever are not quite as appealing."

Wallace, who cut his workload on the program three years ago, stressed that his decision to step aside at the end of the television season this May is voluntary. ''CBS is not pushing me," he said. He added that he will remain a correspondent emeritus, available for ''whatever chore" the network cooks up for him in the future.

Wallace has worked on ''60 Minutes" since its inception in 1968. In his heyday, he was reporting 20 stories a year, interviewing newsmakers around the globe, from Anwar Sadat and the Ayatollah Khomeini to Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and Malcolm X. This year, he had cut his list down to just a few stories, including profiles of actor Morgan Freeman and NFL player Ricky Williams.

Jeff Fager, the executive producer of ''60 Minutes," called Wallace the ''heart and soul" of the broadcast. ''He's had such a powerful impact on all of us who work here, on how we conduct interviews and how we report stories, that there will always be a piece of Mike in everything we do," Fager said in a statement yesterday.

Industry insiders called the retirement news inevitable. ''You can't go on forever," said Marvin Kalb, a former CBS News correspondent and a senior fellow at Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics & Public Policy.

Kalb remembers watching Wallace host a local New York television show called ''Night Beat" in the 1950s. Even then, Wallace's reporting style was aggressive. ''He would sit there through the smoke, because he was smoking on camera at that time," said Kalb. ''He used to dig into these people and leave a corpse at the end of 30 minutes. It was quite remarkable."

Indeed, Wallace and ''60 Minutes" creator Don Hewitt (who retired two years ago) should be credited with creating a new genre of television news, Kalb added: ''The idea of having a short documentary. The idea of finding a mix of the serious and the silly. The idea that a number of crackerjack reporters could get along and produce a first-rate product for so many years. I take my hat off to them. Mike has been an extraordinary performer."

Wallace's retirement comes at a time when network newsmagazines have struggled to retain viewers. ''60 Minutes," however, has averaged a respectable 14 million viewers this season, placing it among the top 20 shows overall and ranking it as the number one newsmagazine.

Tom Rosenstiel, director of Columbia University's Project for Excellence in Journalism, predicted that the program will flourish even without Wallace. ''Had Mike Wallace retired three or four years ago, people would have said, 'What's going to happen?' But Don Hewitt left and '60 Minutes' continued. In the last year, all three network news anchors left their chairs for one reason or another and the programs have continued.

''In a television landscape where there are fewer prime-time newsmagazines, '60 Minutes' stands out as one of the few places where you can still see a long-form treatment of a serious topic," Rosenstiel added. ''If you are a newsmaker or you have a book or a major story you want to break, '60 Minutes' is still the program of choice."

Wallace and his colleagues at ''60 Minutes" weren't available for interviews yesterday. Av Westin, a former producer at CBS News who worked with Wallace in the 1960s, predicted that the retiree will spend his time ''buying season tickets to every tennis tournament going."

''He will probably make some speeches and then just relax," Westin added. ''It's been a long run."

Westin recalls asking Wallace why people bother to sit down with him on camera. ''He said, 'Because they always think they can beat me and they can't.' He would do incredible amounts of research before an interview. People would think that they could put something over him, but he was waiting to pounce. 'Oh, really? What about this?' He always did his homework."

Suzanne Ryan can be reached at sryan@globe.com.