Barbara Walters

American journalist

• Born: September 25, 1929
• Place of Birth: Boston, Massachusetts
• Died: December 30, 2022
• Place of Death: Manhattan, New York, NY

Walters became the first woman to coanchor a network evening newscast in the United States. She was especially well known for her interviews, including those of world leaders, people who had committed crimes, and celebrities. Walters was also credited with opening doors for women in the media, with changing how network news was presented, and with helping to usher in the era of “star” reporters.

Early Life

Barbara Walters was born on September 25, 1929, in Boston, Massachusetts, to Louis Edward Walters and Dena Selett Walters. Her brother, Burton, died in 1932 of pneumonia, and her older sister, Jacqueline, was born with developmental disabilities. Walters’s father ran the Latin Quarter, a chain of nightclubs in New York, Boston, and Florida. The family moved frequently, so she attended schools in New York; Brookline, Massachusetts; and Miami Beach, Florida. She earned a bachelor's degree from Sarah Lawrence College in 1951, where she studied English, dramatics, and creative writing.

After Walters’s father declared bankruptcy and suffered a heart attack, Walters took a job as a secretary to help support her parents and sister. She held several jobs in New York during the 1950s, working as an assistant to the publicity director for NBC’s WRCA-TV. She married Robert Katz, a business executive, in 1955, but they later separated and their marriage was annulled in 1957.

In 1961, Walters became a writer and researcher for NBC’s The Today Show (also known as Today) and was promoted to reporter-at-large in 1962, when she began developing, writing, and editing her own interviews and reports. At the time, there were few female reporters on television; a succession of women, many of them actors or models, had served as what was known as the "Today girl." The job required little more than reading commercials and the weather reports. Lee Ann Meriwether, Helen O'Connell, Florence Henderson, Betsy Palmer, Pat Fontaine, and Maureen O'Sullivan all held the position at one time or another. After several years, many NBC decision-makers agreed that, to give the show a more serious demeanor, among other reasons, the program needed a different sort of "Today girl." The network had reservations about the public appeal of an earnest, intelligent woman such as Walters, but in fact, viewers responded very positively to her. Today host Hugh Downs introduced Walters as “the new Today girl,” and, according to Walters, she was initially not permitted to ask questions in traditionally male-dominated areas such as economics or politics. When Frank McGee became the show’s host in 1971, he insisted that he would ask the first three questions in any hard-news interview before Walters could speak. Although Walters carried out the duties of a Today host, she was not officially promoted to cohost until 1974, after McGee’s death.

Walters married theatrical producer Lee Guber in 1963, and they adopted a daughter, Jacqueline Dena Guber, in 1968. Walters and Guber divorced in 1976. Walters later married Merv Adelson, the chief executive officer of Lorimar Television, but they divorced in 1992.

Life’s Work

Walters, throughout the 1960s, practiced and refined the interviewing skills for which she became famous. Her first major test as a reporter came early, when she covered the John F. Kennedy assassination with Downs on November 23, 1963. In less than a day, Walters and Downs prepared a program that covered the assassination as well as the arraignment of Lee Harvey Oswald, updates on Texas governor John Connally (who was injured while riding with Kennedy), the overnight return of Lyndon B. Johnson to the District of Columbia, the arrival of Kennedy’s coffin at the White House, and the world’s reaction to the assassination.

During her fourteen years on Today, Walters slowly worked her way up the career ladder, taking on more challenging assignments through the years. In 1970, she published her book How to Talk with Practically Anybody about Practically Anything. A major break came in 1972 when she was given the chance to cover Richard M. Nixon’s historic trip to China. She was the only woman on a trip that included a Washington press corps and group of television reporters who generally did not get along. Despite the professional and personal challenges, the journey to China was an important step in her career.

From 1974 to 1976, Walters was an official cohost of Today. In 1976, ABC offered her a salary of $1 million per year for five years to cohost The ABC Evening News with Harry Reasoner, and she accepted, becoming the first female cohost of a news program. Her hiring was part of a move by ABC to try to attract more viewers, particularly female viewers, to the ABC Evening News. Although her salary drew criticism from the press and from colleagues, she received the same amount as Reasoner, a salary of $500,000 per year. The other $500,000 came from ABC’s entertainment department, which had her producing four one-hour primetime specials per year.

ABC’s ratings increased slightly from the publicity around Walters’s hiring, but then they fell. Walters and Reasoner (who remained offended that ABC asked Walters to cohost the news with him) clashed behind the scenes and their relationship was visibly strained on television five nights a week. Meanwhile, Walters’s four yearly specials were huge revenue and ratings earners for ABC.

Walters knew her skills were strongest as an interviewer, and despite some poorly handled moments, she began accumulating notable interviews, including a joint interview with Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin; many had assumed the two men would never speak to each other. The specials ABC had hired Walters to develop were very popular, and Roone Arledge, then head of ABC News, moved Walters off network news in 1978. She began focusing on the specials, where her true talents were. In 1984 she took over coanchoring duties on 20/20 with her former Today coanchor Downs and helped make the show a serious competitor to CBS’s 60 Minutes and a key part of ABC’s Friday night lineup.

Soon, 20/20 expanded from Friday nights to include Wednesday and Sunday night editions as well. Sunday night editions were cohosted with Walters and Diane Sawyer; the two journalists had a notorious rivalry over stories. Walters cohosted 20/20 until 2004, interviewing world leaders, actors, singers, criminals, and celebrities. Her March 3, 1999, interview with Monica Lewinsky drew a record seventy-four million viewers. In 2000, Walters won the Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award for Daytime Television.

In 1997, Walters created and began cohosting the daytime talk show The View . In 2003, Walters won a Daytime Emmy for outstanding talk show for her work as executive producer of The View. The View’s other cohosts changed, and the show focused on lighter fare than that of Walters’s other shows, such as celebrity gossip, self-help, and light news discussion. In June 2007, Walters was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She published her autobiography, Audition: A Memoir, in 2008. In 2009, she nabbed a Daytime Emmy Award for outstanding talk show host for The View. Also in 2009, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Annual News and Documentary Emmy Awards.

In May 2010, Walters underwent open-heart surgery to repair an aortic valve. In 2011, she produced The Barbara Walters Special: A Matter of Life and Death, in which she discussed her surgery in the hopes of generating awareness about heart disease. For this special broadcast, she interviewed former president Bill Clinton, talk-show host David Letterman, and actor Robin Williams, all of whom had also underwent open-heart surgery. That same year, she interviewed Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, becoming the first American reporter to speak with al-Assad since the Syrian uprising began in 2010. In January 2013, Walters was hospitalized after a fall at the British ambassador's residence, which left her with a cut on the forehead. Four months later, on May 13, 2013, during an episode of The View, Walters announced her intention to retire as host of the show in 2014. Walters retired as cohost of The View in May 2014, although she remained an executive producer of the program. Her final public appearance overall was in 2016.

Walters died at her home in Manhattan on December 30, 2022, at the age of ninety-three. After receiving memorializing tributes from various sources and figures upon her death, in 2024 she was further recognized upon the publication of journalist Susan Page's high-profile biography The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters.

Significance

As the first woman to host a network evening news show, Walters helped change the role of women in television. She acknowledged that the women’s movement made it possible for her to cohost Today, but her own tenacity, talent, and perseverance deserve credit as well. She also made an effort to cover socially important and controversial issues, including women’s issues.

Walters’s headline-making deal with ABC helped change the nature of network news dramatically. The four celebrity specials a year that Walters produced for ABC were news “events,” planned and promoted as entertainment specials. ABC began to blur the lines between news and entertainment with shows such as 20/20 and star anchors such as Walters.

Bibliography

Alan, Jeff. Anchoring America: The Changing Face of Network News. Bonus, 2003.

Ford, Dana. "Barbara Walters to Retire Next Year." CNN, 13 May 2013. www.cnn.com/2013/05/12/showbiz/barbara-walters-retirement/index.html. Accessed 30 Aug. 2024.

Hutchison, Kay Bailey. American Heroines: The Spirited Women Who Shaped Our Country. Morrow, 2004.

Malone, Mary. Barbara Walters: TV Superstar. Enslow, 1990.

Oppenheimer, Jerry. Barbara Walters: An Unauthorized Biography. St. Martin’s, 1991.

Olson, Lynne. "For Barbara Walters, Success Was Never Enough." Review of The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters, by Susan Page. The Washington Post, 22 Apr. 2024, www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/04/22/susan-page-rulebreaker-barbara-walters/. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

Probst, Leonard. Off Camera: Leveling About Themselves. Stein, 1975.

Remstein, Henna. Barbara Walters, Journalist. Chelsea House, 1998.

Stanley, Allesandra. "Barbara Walters, a First among TV Newswomen, Is Dead at 93." The New York Times, 30 Dec. 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/12/30/business/media/barbara-walters-dead.html. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

Stanley, Alessandra. "In Barbara Walters's Highlight Reel, TV's Rise and Fade." TheNew York Times, 13 May 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/arts/television/barbara-walterss-career-mirrors-the-trajectory-of-tv.html. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

Walters, Barbara. Audition: A Memoir. Knopf, 2008.

Walters, Barbara. How to Talk with Practically Anybody about Practically Anything. Doubleday, 1970.

Walters, Barbara. Interview by Ellen Joan Pollock. "Barbara Walters on the Art of the Interview." Bloomberg Businessweek, 8 Aug. 2013, www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-08-08/barbara-walters-on-the-art-of-the-interview. Accessed 30 Aug. 2024.