I'm sure I'm making more of this than the event was worth but, heck, that's what weblogs are for. Rick Scheckman sent me a batch of newspaper clippings about the John Daly/Mike Wallace tempest. It's interesting that in those days, it was permissible for John Daly to work all week as an exec in the ABC news department…then, some Sunday nights, he would put on his tuxedo and brave the puns of Bennett Cerf to host a game show on a competing network. (Wallace had his own game show connections. He hosted several, including the pilot of To Tell the Truth, and even turned up as a panelist on some of the imitations of What's My Line? produced by the same production company, Goodson-Todman.) Although the dispute was over the Mickey Cohen interview in particular, one does get the feeling that there was also a breach of styles fanning the flames. Mike Wallace was then a kind of in-your-face TV host who supposedly — it didn't happen as often as people later remembered — got someone in the guest chair and cross-examined them until they revealed something they might have preferred not reveal on television. Daly was an enormously polite man — What's My Line? was sometimes so thick with etiquette as to be laughable — and he clearly resented what others called "rude journalism." He didn't think it was journalism at all.
In another clipping Rick sent me but which is too big to post here, Daly defends his position by noting that What's My Line? was a live, ad-lib show. Therefore, he said, there was the chance that the Mickey Cohen interview might somehow come up in conversation, and Daly didn't want that.
Interesting to note that in the article, Mr. Cohen is referred to as an "ex-gangster." In 1957, there were those who would have quibbled with the "ex" part. Four years later, he was in Alcatraz, serving his second sentence for income tax evasion.