Chris Wallace Is Fox News's Man in the Middle
Given the praise Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have slathered on each other, it wasn’t a surprise that, last July, after the pair met in Helsinki, Putin granted his sole post-summit American interview to Fox News, the only network permitted on the screens of Air Force One and one of the few outlets the president has never accused of being “fake news.”
But judging from the pained look on Putin’s face, he hadn’t anticipated that sitting down with Fox News would mean an interrogation by the channel’s Chris Wallace.
When Wallace asked him why so many of the Russian president’s political enemies “end up dead,” the normally imperturbable Putin began to flail, and at the interview’s end he couldn’t remove his lapel mic fast enough. It’s worth remembering that the late Roger Ailes, Wallace’s former Fox News boss, once toasted Wallace by saying, “You’re a great questioner, and, frankly, every guest who comes on hates you.”
Making subjects squirm isn’t a goal for Wallace, who, in the 14 years he has hosted Fox News Sunday, has become the top news anchor on the most successful cable news channel. “I view my job as being the cop on the beat, walking around with a nightstick and trying to keep people honest—both Republicans and Democrats,” he says.
He has done it well enough to distinguish himself as an impartial voice on a network considered by some to be anything but. “A lot of what the Fox News opinion hosts do is misleading and disorienting, but then Chris Wallace comes on and attempts to provide the truth,” says Brian Stelter, senior media correspondent for CNN and the host of Reliable Sources.
Veteran broadcaster Sam Donaldson, who, during his 42 years at ABC News, was at times both a competitor and a colleague of Wallace’s, says, “If Fox News is the type of entertainment people want, believing somehow that they’re listening to solid news reporting, more power to them. But Chris has not joined that pack. He plays it straight. He deserves his reputation for doing that.”
That reputation was reinforced in September. Just before Christine Blasey Ford’s Senate testimony, in which she alleged that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in high school, Wallace made headlines for noting on air that the national conversation had inspired his daughters to recount their own similar experiences.
“I don’t think we can disregard Christine Blasey Ford and the seriousness of this,” he said at the time. “I think that would be a big mistake.” (Wallace doesn’t make it through these news cycles unscathed. Twitter mobs have come after him with suggestions like, “You should go work at CNN.”)
One crisp day in Annapolis, Maryland, Wallace is in the living room of the estate overlooking Chesapeake Bay that he and Lorraine, his wife of 21 years, bought in 2015. The house is a gathering place for Wallace’s four grown kids from his first marriage, Lorraine’s two from her previous marriage (to comedian Dick Smothers), and their six grandkids. Wallace is holding “The Crab,” a crustacean trophy engraved with his name made to commemorate a July 2017 victory over his sons in a putt-putt tournament.
The Crab is a testament to Wallace’s famous competitiveness; back when he was NBC’s chief White House correspondent, he and Donaldson nearly came to blows after Wallace hijacked Donaldson’s briefing room spot. “No punches were thrown,” Donaldson says, noting that he did eventually get his spot back, “but Chris’s tactics would be put in a very aggressive category.”
Wallace admits that it rankles him every time a George Stephanopoulos or Chuck Todd interview makes news and his doesn’t.“Honestly, I think I’m better,” he says when asked about how he stacks up against the other Sunday morning hosts; neither Stephanopoulos nor Todd would comment for this story. “ The only one I didn’t feel that about was Tim Russert.”
In the Wallace family, Trivial Pursuit, skeet shooting, and mini golf matches can be equally cutthroat. “I think it’s important to note that I was not at that tournament,” says his son Peter Wallace, referring to the Crab. “He is in possession of the trophy, and is the reigning champion, but only my brother, my stepbrother, and my brother-in-law played.”
Chris Wallace surely internalized many lessons from watching his father Mike suffer publicly for what his son labels “unforced errors”: a 1981 scandal after a 60 Minutes hot mic caught him making a racist comment (for which he later apologized), the 1982 libel suit led by U.S. Army Chief of Staff William Westmoreland over his portrayal in a CBS Reports documentary. Chris’s career is virtually unblemished.
On TV he comes off as composed, his expression suggesting a feline bemusement that can unnerve guests. Bill Clinton, after Wallace asked him in 2006 if his administration should have done more to stop Osama bin Laden, growled, “You’ve got that little smirk on your face. You think you’re so clever.” After the New York Times referred to Wallace as “prickly and probing,” Lorraine had the words committed to a pillow in needlepoint.
President Trump got his initial taste of the prickly Wallace during Fox News’s first Republican primary debate in August 2015, when Wallace asked how a businessman who had run four businesses into bankruptcy could lead a country with a GDP of $18 trillion. The following night on CNN, during the rant when he said co-moderator Megyn Kelly had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her...wherever!,” Trump said Wallace had “blood pouring out of his eyes too!”
He finished by needling Wallace with a familiar insult. “The great Mike Wallace was a friend of mine,” Trump said. “He was a tough cookie and he was great. And the son is only a tiny action of Mike, believe me.” If Trump’s comment ever stung him, Wallace is over it. “One of us has daddy issues, and it isn’t me,” he says.
Myron “Mike” Wallace married Norma “Kappy” Kaphan, whom he met at the University of Michigan in 1937. Just after son Peter was born in 1942, Mike enlisted in the navy and was sent to the Pacific. Around the time Chris was born, in 1947, a 20-year-old blond starlet named Buff Cobb moved to their block in Chicago.
“At a certain point he started living with Buff and not with my mother,” Chris says. Cobb became the second of four Mrs. Mike Wallaces, and the couple moved to New York to co-host a talkshow, disappearing from the Wallace kids’ lives.
In 1957, Kappy married Bill Leonard, a CBS News reporter, and Leonard became known to the Wallace brothers as “Dad.” “As much as I love my father and mother,” Wallace says, “the person who was most influential in who I have become is Bill Leonard.”
After Leonard was transferred to New York, Mike (“Mike” is the only way Chris ever addressed his father) tried to initiate a relationship with his younger son, but they wouldn’t have any real connection until 1962, when Peter Wallace went backpacking in the mountains of Greece and fell to his death. Chris’s eyes well up as he tells the story of learning of his brother’s death. He says, “This is an absolutely unhealed wound 55 years later.”
In grade school Chris was awarded a medal for being “honor boy” every year from fifth to ninth grade except one (“it would have caused a riot if I got it again”). He has smoked exactly one cigarette in his life, drinks only occasionally, and, despite graduating from Harvard in 1969, never got high there.
He began his journalism career in 1964 as a gofer for Walter Cronkite. He was accepted to Yale Law School in the same class as Hillary Clinton but at the last minute took a job with the Boston Globe. (He was a city hall reporter when he met Elizabeth Farrell, whom he would marry in 1973.)
He moved to TV news and worked his way up through local stations until NBC News drafted him into the majors. He rose quickly at NBC, becoming chief White House correspondent, and, in 1987, host of Meet the Press. A year later, after the new president of NBC News told him he was being replaced in both capacities, ABC hired him for the new news magazine PrimeTime Live.
After Bill Leonard died, in 1994, Chris and Mike became closer. Chris’s marriage collapsed around the same time, and Mike, also divorced, started calling nightly. Chris now says, “That’s really when we became best friends.” It wasn’t always easy, though. In 1996, Chris arrived at a comedy club to interview the comedian Chris Rock, only to be told that 60 Minutes had big-footed PrimeTime for the booking—and the poacher had been Mike Wallace himself.
When Mike died, in 2012, his son opened his eulogy by saying, “Let’s be honest...at some point over the years...many people in this room were not speaking to my father.”
Chris found himself stuck at ABC after Diane Sawyer decided she wanted to merge PrimeTime Live with 20/20. In 1999 he got an offer to join the soon-to-launch 60 Minutes II, which would have allowed him to work with his father, but he says that even though he was miserable at ABC, Sawyer stood in the way of the network letting him out of his contract. In 2003, at the end of that contract, Wallace made a different move: His friend Brit Hume, who had leaped from ABC to Fox News, introduced him to Roger Ailes.
Throughout his career, Wallace has kept his politics to himself, acknowledging only that he was registered as a Democrat; to do otherwise as a resident of reliably blue Washington, DC, means having no say in the local primaries. George Clooney, despite an avowed hatred of Fox News, invited Wallace to stay at his Lake Como house in 2012. “Obviously, he works for a network with a political point of view different from mine, but that makes no difference when you have respect for someone,” Clooney says.“I’m glad Chris is out there asking tough questions.”
Sometimes those questions have been directed at colleagues. During President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, in a tense appearance on Fox & Friends, Wallace chided the hosts for distorting an Obama quote on race. A year later, after a withering exchange with Tucker Carlson on the same show, Wallace stopped appearing. Ailes was unhappy. “His one thing was, if you’re upset with something that’s going on at Fox, you don’t make it public,” Wallace says.
Some things went public anyway, including the harassment charges that ultimately led to the firing of Ailes and the network’s biggest star, Bill O’Reilly, and, eventually, executive Bill Shine, now White House communications director, for his mishandling of the allegations. (To understand the relationship between the White House and Fox News, one should note that Hope Hicks, the president’s former communications director, has landed a job as chief communications officer at the channel’s parent company.)
Wallace cried in 2016 when he learned of the numerous allegations against Ailes, who died a year after his ouster. “There is no excuse for it,” Wallace says, “but having said that, that doesn’t take away from how profoundly grateful I am to him.”
Fox News, he says, is the last job he’ll have in journalism. According to industry sources, Wallace was approached about taking over CBS Evening News last year, but a network newscast didn’t appeal to him (his Fox contract extends beyond the 2020 election).
In October 2015, just two months after the debate contretemps, Wallace scored an interview with Trump, who was horrifying many but impressing Wallace—a feeling the anchor still has. “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen as big a difference between somebody’s public and private personae as I have with President Trump,” he says today. “He is thoughtful, asks questions about you, and is very pleasant to be around. On a personal level, I kind of like him.”
No one would ever mistake Wallace for a member of the anti-Trump resistance, and he’s not secretly attempting to save FoxNews viewers from their beliefs. “There are things that trouble me, but I have faith in the American government and the separation of powers, and so far it seems institutions are holding,” he says of the administration.
He also believes in what conservatives call Trump Derangement Syndrome. “While there are things that are going on now that disturb me, I do think there is some anti-Trump hysteria that exaggerates what’s going on as well,” he says. Even so, since his election Trump has refused every offer to go on Fox News Sunday, preferring Sean Hannity’s gentler touch. Wallace could never lay off his famous fastball, even for a president he likes.
Update: Donald Trump has agreed to appear on Fox News Sunday on November 18. This is Wallace's first interview with the President since the election.
This story appears in the December 2018/January 2019 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
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