{"id":226518,"date":"2023-01-02T12:00:57","date_gmt":"2023-01-02T12:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=226518"},"modified":"2023-01-01T05:28:59","modified_gmt":"2023-01-01T05:28:59","slug":"barbara-walters-25-sep-1929-30-dec-2022-tvs-tireless-pursuer-of-the-newsmaker-get-dies-at-93","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/01\/barbara-walters-25-sep-1929-30-dec-2022-tvs-tireless-pursuer-of-the-newsmaker-get-dies-at-93\/","title":{"rendered":"Barbara Walters (25 Sep 1929 \u2013 30 Dec 2022), TV\u2019s Tireless Pursuer of the Newsmaker \u2018Get,\u2019 Dies at 93"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wielding a bemused and intimate style, she became one of television\u2019s premier interrogators of the newsworthy.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Newscaster Barbara Walters, the nation’s first female anchorwoman, sits in her office as she prepares for her debut on ABC’s evening news program on Oct. 4, 1976.\u00a0 (AP\/ASSOCIATED PRESS)<\/p><\/div>\n

30 Dec 2022<\/em> – When Barbara Walters was starting her career as a network TV writer in 1961, she received advice from a prominent producer who went on to create \u201c60 Minutes.\u201d Learn production, Don Hewitt said, but don\u2019t try for the camera. Your looks are wrong. That speech impediment is a killer.<\/p>\n

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Ms. Walters, who died Dec. 30 at her home in New York, according to ABC, spent the following decades overcoming her mangled r\u2019s and became one of television\u2019s premier interrogators of the newsworthy. At NBC and later ABC News, she was tireless in her pursuit of \u201cgets\u201d \u2014 interviews with the hard-to-corner. She questioned presidents from Richard M. Nixon to Barack Obama, dictators from Fidel Castro to Bashar al-Assad, murderers and crooks, and stars of stage, screen and scandal.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The biggest get of all, she said, was the first televised interview with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky<\/a>, whose affair with President Bill Clinton led to his impeachment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWhat will you tell your children when you have them?\u201d Ms. Walters, then with ABC\u2019s \u201c20\/20,\u201d asked Lewinsky in March 1999, a month after Clinton was acquitted in the Senate of charges related to lying about his sexual encounter in the Oval Office.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cMommy made a big mistake,\u201d Lewinsky replied.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cAnd that,\u201d Ms. Walters said, turning to the camera, \u201cis the understatement of the year.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The line was characteristic of her wry and intimate style that helped lure more than 70 million viewers to the Lewinsky segment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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President Barack Obama with Ms. Walters in 2010. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais\/AP)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Ms. Walters repeatedly enjoyed the last guffaw over doubters and detractors during a career spanning five decades. She shattered glass ceilings, sending shards into many male egos. She became the most durable and versatile TV host of her era, as well as a celebrity more controversial than many of the ones she covered.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Analysts debated whether she had helped push network news down the slide toward sensation and trivia or merely rode the inevitable flow. Traditionalists said she became too involved in events she covered. Her face adorned magazine covers. Oprah Winfrey called her a personal role model. Tabloids tracked her romances, real and rumored.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Her 2008 memoir, \u201cAudition,\u201d provided a dramatic personal narrative much like the ones she extracted from interview subjects. She described a difficult childhood, losing her virginity, painful shyness, three failed marriages, affairs with prominent men, and heartache over her daughter\u2019s substance-abuse problems. Like some in the elite Washington, New York and Hollywood crowds she frequented, she played coy about her age.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A statement by Bob Iger, chief executive of ABC parent company Disney, confirmed the death but gave no cause.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Ms. Walters\u2019s ascent was fueled by grit rather than raw talent. \u201cPushy cookie,\u201d she called herself. Her hard-won female \u201cfirsts\u201d \u2014 co-host of \u201cToday\u201d from 1974 to 1976 and co-anchor of ABC\u2019s evening news show from 1976 to 1978 \u2014 opened the field to younger women. In 1976, she became the first TV news personality of either gender to get a $1 million contract, prompting pay spikes for male competitors.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Unlike her TV pantheon peers, such as Mike Wallace<\/a>, Johnny Carson<\/a> and Winfrey, Ms. Walters mastered diverse time slots and genres. She straddled entertainment and hard news.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Barbara Walters, a \u2018shining example of possibility\u2019 for women in a man\u2019s world<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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Periodic \u201cspecials\u201d attracted huge audiences. For extended periods, Ms. Walters starred on two programs. While doing \u201cToday,\u201d she presided over \u201cNot for Women Only.\u201d In 1997, while a mainstay on \u201c20\/20,\u201d she helped create \u201cThe View,\u201d a frothy talkfest also featuring panelists such as Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg, Star Jones, Meredith Vieira, Rosie O\u2019Donnell, Lisa Ling and Elisabeth Hasselbeck.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In whatever setting, she displayed a distinctive knack for building a rapport with audiences. \u201cShe invented intimacy on television,\u201d Ene Riisna, an ABC producer, was quoted as saying in Nichola Gutgold\u2019s book \u201cSeen and Heard: The Women of Television News.\u201d \u201cNo one had done it before.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Ms. Walters\u2019s fans loved watching what often seemed like a private conversation in a cozy setting. Even her critics struggled to look away when a Barbara Walters \u201cspecial\u201d was on the air. Guests returned for sequels because she avoided Wallace-style confrontations and often persuaded them that she wanted to hear their side \u2014 that she cared.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In a 1980 interview on \u201c20\/20,\u201d<\/a> Nixon conceded, after Ms. Walters\u2019s persistent coaxing, that he should have destroyed the Oval Office recordings that sealed his ouster.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cAre you sorry you didn\u2019t burn the tapes?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThe answer is, I probably should have,\u201d he replied. \u201cBut mainly, I shouldn\u2019t have even installed them.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIf you had it to do all over again, you\u2019d burn them?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cYes,\u201d the former president said, \u201cI think so, because they were private conversations subject to misinterpretation, as we have all seen.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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5 interviews that show Barbara Walters was a master journalist<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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Ms. Walters spent two years trying to arrange an interview with Cuban leader Fidel Castro<\/a>. Her efforts came through in 1977.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cYou allow no dissent,\u201d she told him in what is often regarded as one of her most memorable broadcasts. \u201cYour newspapers, radio, television, motion pictures are under state control.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cBarbara,\u201d Castro <\/b>replied, \u201cour concept of freedom of the press is not like yours.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In 1993, she got the first post-prison interview with Jean Harris<\/a>, the former headmistress of a McLean private school who was convicted in 1981 of killing her paramour, Herman Tarnower, a doctor who wrote the best-selling Scarsdale Diet book. The story became a national sensation amid revelations of Tarnower\u2019s psychological cruelty and rampant womanizing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cYou did become the symbol of the woman wronged,\u201d Ms. Walters said in the broadcast.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cNo, I think I\u2019m the woman who let herself be wronged,\u201d Harris replied.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Ms. Walters said she regretted her handling of a much-watched 1981 interview with Oscar-winning actress Katharine Hepburn. The conversation stumbled into bizarre territory when Hepburn said she was a strong person \u2014 \u201clike a tree or something.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cWhat kind of tree are you, if you think you are a tree?\u201d<\/a> Ms. Walters asked, in one of the oddest follow-ups in TV history.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Hepburn, flummoxed, said she\u2019d probably be an oak. Ms. Walters received years of taunting for the question, but she said it was not as terrible as her worst interview ever, with actor Warren Beatty.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI asked him \u2018How are you?\u2019\u2008\u201d she recalled years later. \u201cThere was interminable dead silence. Finally he said, \u2018Fine.\u2019\u2008\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Ms. Walters and Gen. Colin Powell greet each other in 1997. (Joel Richardson\/The Washington Post)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Four years after Ms. Walters scored the two-hour Lewinsky coup, knowing that the interview had angered the Clintons, ABC executives told her not to compete for another major \u201cget\u201d \u2014 Hillary Clinton, who was preparing to promote her memoir \u201cLiving History.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Ms. Walters stood aside for a colleague, and was astonished when then-Sen. Clinton (D-N.Y.) invited her in anyway. Clinton knew that her husband\u2019s philandering would come up but may not have expected so direct a query: \u201cWhat if he does it again?\u201d Ms. Walters inquired.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Clinton parried: \u201cThat will be between us, and that will be the zone of privacy I believe in.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Writing in The Washington Post, television critic Tom Shales described the interview as an \u201chour-long book plug masquerading as a news special.\u201d Ms. Walters, he added, \u201cseemed now and then to get Clinton to spill a bean or three more than she wanted to, or at least to be more intimately revealing than she maybe planned on being. It was by no means an hour chock-full of surprises, but neither was it ever a bore.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Ms. Walters frequently focused on her subjects\u2019 formative years. \u201cI like difficult childhoods,\u201d she once observed. Her own qualified.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2018I was never young\u2019<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Barbara Jill Walters was born in Boston on Sept. 25, 1929. Her father, Lou, a vaudeville agent aspiring to be an impresario, and her mother, the former Dena Selett, who yearned for stability, had suffered grief. Their son died in infancy. Their daughter Jacqueline was mentally disabled.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Lou Walters eventually operated successful Latin Quarter night clubs in Boston, New York and Miami. A better showman than businessman, Lou gyrated between wealth and penury. His family shuttled between penthouses and cramped flats. Barbara changed schools frequently.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Whatever the venue, Lou was rarely present. Worries about money and her older daughter preoccupied Dena. From an early age, Ms. Walters wrote in \u201cAudition\u201d that she knew she would be responsible for Jacqueline, if not the whole family. \u201cI realize I was never young,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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At Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., theater classes and acting fascinated her, but she lacked the nerve to pursue a stage career. Lou arranged auditions; Barbara didn\u2019t show up.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As the Class of 1951 dispersed, she found a job as an ad agency stenographer. Then, by chance, she found work in the publicity department of WNBT (now WNBC), a television station in New York.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The manager wanted all staffers to learn the rudiments of production, and Ms. Walters was an avid pupil. She had an affair with the executive, whom she recalled as \u201cbalding and short, with a bit of a belly.\u201d She had decided \u201cit was time\u201d to part with virginity. He lost his temper when she dated someone else, and she lost the job.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Ms. Walters with her husband, Merv Adelson, moments after their wedding ceremony in 1986. (Peter Borsari\/AP)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Then she tried marriage. Bob Katz was a handsome businessman from a family that produced children\u2019s bonnets. She called him Katz Hats behind his back and tried to break the engagement because he bored her. But Lou Walters had rented a Plaza Hotel ballroom. Besides, he said, all brides suffer nerves.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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When she married in 1955, she wrote, \u201cMy heart never felt so heavy. But .\u2009.\u2009. my heart would be heavy every time I married.\u201d She divorced Katz in 1957. With her second husband, Lee Guber<\/a>, a theater owner, she adopted a daughter, Jacqueline, after suffering three miscarriages. That union also ended in divorce. Her third partner in marriage and divorce was Merv Adelson<\/a>, a television producer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A turning point<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Unhappy as Mrs. Katz, the housewife, she became a booker on CBS\u2019s floundering morning show. When it folded, she went into public relations, finding valuable contacts but no satisfaction. In 1961, a surprise offer proved a turning point. \u201cToday\u201d needed a temporary producer-writer for a daily segment targeting women.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The initial assignment died just as a slot for a regular staff writer opened, and Ms. Walters got it. The program in that period had a succession of \u201cToday girls,\u201d usually decorative former models or actresses who flanked the male host but had limited aptitude for live give-and-take. When another \u201cgirl\u201d flunked in 1964, managers decided to give the diligent, serious Ms. Walters a tryout.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Ms. Walters as a member of NBC’s “Today Show” in 1965. (AP\/Ap)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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She gradually expanded the female turf to include hard-news interviews, particularly after Nixon won the presidency in 1968. She had called the charisma-challenged candidate \u201csexy\u201d and done a friendly piece on the new president\u2019s daughter Tricia.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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He reciprocated by telling national security adviser Henry Kissinger and Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman<\/a> to grant Ms. Walters their first on-camera interviews. During a royal visit in 1969, Nixon even brokered a Walters session with Prince Philip<\/a>, who had long declined such requests.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Might Queen Elizabeth abdicate, Ms. Walters asked, in favor of Prince Charles? \u201cWho knows,\u201d Philip responded. \u201cAnything can happen.\u201d In Britain, their repartee<\/a> became the sensation du jour.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Nixon, she wrote later, \u201cturned out to be one of my greatest champions.\u201d While Ms. Walters never displayed partisanship, and chatter on \u201cThe View\u201d decades later tilted liberal, she had particularly close relationships with prominent Republicans. Kissinger and Roy Cohn, the notorious former aide to redbaiting Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.), were good friends for decades.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Among numerous lovers, the three she labeled \u201cspecial men\u201d were also Republicans: Alan Greenspan, while chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers; John Warner<\/a>, after he headed the Navy Department; and Edward Brooke<\/a>, the first African American popularly elected U.S. senator.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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She never let romance trump work. By 1971, Ms. Walters was \u201cToday\u2019s\u201d untitled co-host. When Frank McGee took over as host and demanded that she revert to \u201cgirlie\u201d material only, she eked out a crumb of compromise. She would be able to participate in some major interviews \u2014 after McGee asked the first three questions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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McGee\u2019s diktat did not apply to pieces done outside the \u201cToday\u201d studio, so Ms. Walters accelerated her pursuit of \u201cgets\u201d in Washington. Her standing with the White House got her a seat on the press plane accompanying Nixon to China in 1972. She was the only female network correspondent.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Meanwhile, she wrangled a contract clause ensuring her promotion to co-host in the event that McGee left \u201cToday\u201d \u2014 a circumstance NBC thought would be many years off. But his sudden death in 1974 activated the provision. Newsweek\u2019s cover story dubbed her \u201cqueen of the morning\u201d and noted her workaholic ways. It quoted her father: \u201cI think a halo of fear affected Barbara and affects her today, [fear] that she might not be able to get a job tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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That apprehension, and the realization that NBC would keep her on dawn patrol indefinitely, made her receptive to ABC\u2019s courtship in 1976. As the also-ran network, ABC sought star power and innovation. She would co-anchor the evening news with Harry Reasoner<\/a> and do four entertainment specials annually. Salary: an unprecedented $1 million.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Playing to her strengths<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Her coup immediately soured. Walter Cronkite of CBS, dean of anchors, echoed other prominent naysayers when he reported feeling \u201csickened\u201d at the mixing of news and show business. Gilda Radner, a comic on \u201cSaturday Night Live,\u201d invented a new caricature: Baba Wawa<\/a>, a funny-talking ditz.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And it became generally known that Reasoner wanted no co-pilot \u2014 certainly not a female derided as the \u201cmillion dollar baby.\u201d On air, their chemistry curdled. \u201cHarry and I were mismatched, misguided and so painfully uncomfortable together,\u201d Ms. Walters later said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Their program remained in third place. Then Ms. Walters\u2019s first special got mixed reviews. \u201cI felt very wounded,\u201d she told the New York Times in 1992. \u201cI had a mother, a father, a retarded sister and a daughter I was supporting. And my career [seemed] finished.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But the new head of ABC News, Roone Arledge<\/a>, knew that changes would be necessary and enabled Ms. Walters to play to her strengths \u2014 major interviews and big events.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In 1977, she was one of four journalists on the plane carrying Egyptian President Anwar Sadat<\/a> on his historic flight to Israel, where he would meet Prime Minister Menachem Begin<\/a>. She had earlier interviewed \u2014 and charmed \u2014 both leaders.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In flight, Sadat kidded her about her salary; his was only $12,000. \u201cBut you have fringe benefits, like palaces,\u201d she replied.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Passing notes while Cronkite and NBC\u2019s John Chancellor<\/a> weren\u2019t looking, she got Sadat to agree to an interview. But he balked at a joint conversation with Begin. Once on the ground, however, she sold the idea to Begin, who told Sadat: \u201cLet\u2019s do a favor for our friend Barbara.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The conversation was more important for its atmospherics than its content but was a notable scoop nonetheless. ABC\u2019s tapes were en route to New York when Cronkite learned he had been skunked. He pleaded for, and got, his own joint interview. His final words were caught on a mic he thought dead: \u201cDid Barbara get anything I didn\u2019t get?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The incident strengthened her news credentials. Arledge soon revamped the evening news format, Reasoner left the network, and Ms. Walters became a roving correspondent while continuing the entertainment specials. She found a firm base at \u201c20\/20\u201d in 1979 and did most of her serious work there over the next 25 years.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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CBS, once home to her sternest critics, in 1991 offered a $10 million annual contract and stewardship of her own news magazine program. Ms. Walters declined, explaining later that she wanted to avoid further professional upheaval.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Critics continued to carp, even as she neared retirement. Echoing Cronkite\u2019s complaint in 1976, the cultural historian Neal Gabler wrote in the Times decades later that she \u201ctore down the wall separating news from entertainment, the serious from the frivolous.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But by the end of her career, she increasingly seemed a creature of an industry that followed the money by increasingly emphasizing entertainment and sensation. She tacitly acknowledged that reality in explaining why she left \u201c20\/20\u201d in 2004, of her own volition, essentially turning in her press pass. Competition for \u201cgets\u201d was fiercer than ever, and wearying.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger gives a kiss to Ms. Walters at the Plaza Hotel in New York on Nov. 28, 1978, after Ms. Walters was honored with an awards from the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. In the background left is CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite, who was also honored. (SUZANNE VLAMIS\/ASSOCIATED PRESS)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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More important, she wrote in \u201cAudition,\u201d the networks\u2019 appetite for segments on major issues and world leaders was declining dramatically. Public affairs turned off many younger viewers. Meanwhile, her fascination with entertainers and criminals had ebbed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In her final days at \u201c20\/20,\u201d the White House offered her an interview with President George W. Bush. It would have been a classy farewell. But there was competition for that time slot: a female teacher convicted of having sex with an underage boy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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ABC chose the child molester. Barbara Walters, the woman blamed for trivializing TV news, commented: \u201cI rest my case.\u201d<\/p>\n

Go to Original – washingtonpost.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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