ANDREW HEYWARD: Now I'd like to call up another very long-time colleague of Charles's, Mike Wallace. Mike, of course, has been a co-anchor of 60 MINUTES since the broadcast premiered in September of 1968. Mike?

MIKE WALLACE: I confess that I've been sitting here the last hour thinking, "What in the world are you up there for?" because, like Walter, Charles and I were good friends,: but not as close as some of the people like Bernie Birnbaum and Phil—I never worked with him day-to-day—and the word that kept occurring to me as I sat there was what love everybody who knew him—whether they knew him very well or pretty well, as I did—felt for him.
So I'm going to, if I may, cut short what few remarks I had prepared. I don't look at this memorial for Charles with sadness, except, of course, that it was a sin for him to leave us so early. I think of it, instead, as a kind of celebration of his courage and integrity and his fulfillment.

A lot of us have been turning up at more and more of these occasions in recent years as some of the best of us have passed—Dick Salant and Eric Sevareid, Harry Reasoner and Charlie Collingwood, Bill Leonard, Doug Edwards, Bud Benjamin—leaving behind an extraordinary legacy for us to try to live up to. When you turn 79, you begin to take the occasions like this pretty seriously, but you are no longer just a spectator—you begin to listen to what is said more attentively, wonder how you're going to measure up, how much of the truth they're telling today and how much they're gonna tell about you before too much time goes on.

What's so great about Charlie is that everything that was said here today has been the utter truth. For a lot of us, I'll venture that these gatherings have turned out to be strangely satisfying occasions, for they give us a chance to catch up with old pals that we haven't seen in a while—old colleagues with whom we've shared decades of working, shoulder to shoulder, to capture and to broadcast the facts and the flavor of the parade that has passed before us, we who've been given the privilege of telling America the truth about what is going on, what is occurring here and around the world. All of us here today owe a debt to Charlie and to those others that I've named, a debt that we can repay them, day by day, simply by honoring the CBS News legacy they have left us.

We're gonna hear from brother Rooney now, and then we'll have a drink or two for old times' sake.

Additional Tributes

Phil Scheffler | Dan Rather | Shad Northshield
Ed Bradley | Walter Cronkite | Bernie Birnbaum
Linda Mason | Missie Rennie | Mike Wallace
Andy Rooney

USA Today Editorial
Forgiving Charles Kuralt

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