“Fox News Sunday” anchor Chris Wallace got personal in a new episode of “Ride to Work” that aired Friday, revealing his inner monologue before moderating a 2016 general election debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and talking about the time he did a radio broadcast from jail.
Wallace told Abby Hornacek, who hosts the show on Fox News’ streaming platform Fox Nation, about moderating the debate in Las Vegas three years ago: “I had done a lot of presidential debates, but they were Republican primary debates. This is a general election debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. And, you know, when you’re doing one of the presidential general election debates, it’s a big deal. I was also the first Fox person ever to be asked to do it and, in my case, the audience was 80 million people. I have to tell you, there were times when the wave of anxiety would wash over me and I would think, ‘I can’t do it, I just–I can’t do it.’”
Ultimately, he said, he made an appeal to a higher power: “Dear God, if you get me through the next 90 minutes, I will never ask you for anything ever again.”
That wasn’t the first sticky situation Wallace powered through in the name of journalism, though.
He also told Hornacek about the time he was arrested during his years at Harvard University.
“It isn’t even that great of a story,” he warned her. “I actually wasn’t one of the student protestors who shut down Harvard. I was at the college radio station and I was in the building with the protestors who shut down the anti-Vietnam protestors. So when they arrested them, they arrested us. We ended up in jail, in the Middlesex county jail, literally behind bars. In any case, we each got to make a phone call. Some people called their girlfriends. Some people called their roommates. I called the radio station and did a phoner and I signed off, ‘This is Chris Wallace, in custody.’”