‘DETERMINED TO WIN THE GAME’
FOR BARBARA WALTERS, SUCCESS WAS NEVER ENOUGH The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters
When Walter Cronkite learned in April 1976 that ABC had hired Barbara Walters as co-anchor of its nightly news broadcast, the CBS anchorman experienced what he called a “wave of nausea, the sickening sensation that perhaps we were all going under.”
As Susan Page relates in The Rulebreaker, her compelling, deliciously readable biography of Walters, for Cronkite and the other giants of broadcast journalism, the idea that Walters — a co-host of NBC’S Today show, a morning program that combined hard news with human-interest and entertainment features — would be elevated to TV journalism’s most august position was beyond the pale. So was her $1-million salary, a much higher sum than Cronkite and his cohort were making.
Left unsaid, at least in public, was arguably the most significant source of their angst over ABC’S announcement: For the first time, a woman was about to breach their old boys’ anchor club. Still, the sexism that permeated their reaction, along with that of much of the public and press, was obvious. In countless newspaper headlines, this 47-year-old woman who had spent 20 years in the business was referred to as “a million-dollar baby.” On Capitol Hill, a Democratic congressman declared the idea of a “little girl” being paid such a fantastic sum was “ridiculous.”
At the end of their first broadcast, Harry Reasoner, Walters’s ABC co-anchor and a self-proclaimed “male chauvinist,” told her on the air: “I’ve kept time on your stories and mine tonight. You owe me four minutes.” In the year and a half they worked together, Reasoner often decamped to a nearby bar after the broadcast and loudly disparaged her performance to anyone in hearing range.
ABC’S male-female experiment turned out to be a failure: Its evening news show remained mired in last place, and its battling anchors were soon replaced. But Walters would outlast Reasoner, Cronkite and the other male news stars of the day. A harbinger of the future in broadcast news, she became a three-decade fixture on ABC for her headline-making interviews of major world figures, celebrities and ordinary people who suddenly found themselves in the spotlight.
Walters’s 1999 interview with Monica Lewinsky, shortly after news broke of Lewinsky’s sexual relationship with president Bill Clinton, scored the largest audience — 74 million people — of any TV interview program in history. Calling it a master class in effective questioning, a noted Washington trial lawyer advised his colleagues to study it for tips on how to conduct their courtroom examinations.
But for the most celebrated woman in broadcast journalism, such triumphs were never enough. Her professional ascent, Page notes, brought Walters “fame and fortune but not peace.” For all her success, Walters, who died in 2022, had a profoundly disappointing personal life: three broken marriages and a contentious relationship with her only daughter. Her work was her solace, but even there, she never felt secure. According to Bill Geddie, one of her longtime producers, “She was propelled not by her strength but by her uncertainties.”
These lifelong anxieties could be traced in part to her rootless, unstable childhood. Her father, Lou Walters — a flamboyant nightclub owner in New York and Miami — made and squandered several fortunes, leaving his wife and two daughters perpetually worried about their future.
Despite the angst he caused her, Walters yearned for her father’s approval and came to share his outsized ambition, and his taste for power and wealth. Lou had always skated on the edge of propriety, consorting with organized-crime figures and, as Page puts it, other “folk who might have spent some time in prison, or were at risk of going there.” His daughter had a similar penchant for men with sketchy reputations, including Roy Cohn, Sen. Joseph Mccarthy’s right-hand man, with whom she had a hopeless romance, and Donald Trump, whom she interviewed more than a dozen times before he ran for president in 2016.
Her skill at forging connections with powerful men, shady or not, was critical to her success. Somewhat ironically, that success made her a role model for generations of young women who, inspired by her toughness and resilience, followed her into broadcasting. “Without Barbara Walters, there wouldn’t have been me — nor any other woman you see on evening, morning and daily news,” Oprah Winfrey observed.
For Walters, however, sisterhood went only so far. “Barbara was determined to win the game, not change its rules,” Page writes. “The path she ended up clearing for the women who followed her was, first and foremost, one that she was cutting for herself.”
A ruthless competitor, she was “addicted to the chase” for interview subjects, and “woe to anyone, man or woman, who stood in her path.” Her ferocious rivalry with Diane Sawyer, her younger ABC colleague, in snagging the latest hot newsmaker was the stuff of legend.
Walters’s career was the only thing that kept her going. At the age of 67, she helped create The View, a hit daytime talk show with an all-female panel, and appeared on it until she was 82. When failing health forced her to retire, she did so unwillingly. Shortly before her last appearance on The View, a colleague asked her if there was anything she wanted. “More time,” she replied.
Most of us have trouble juggling. The woman who says she doesn’t is someone whom I admire but have never met. — Barbara Walters