Barbara Walters: The Interview as an Art Form
On March 3, 1999, 74 million Americans tuned in to watch one woman ask another about a stained blue dress. Barbara Walters's interview with Monica Lewinsky remains the highest-rated news program ever broadcast by a single network, and it was a fitting peak for a career built on getting people to say the thing they had meant to keep private. Over six decades Walters interviewed every US president from Nixon to Obama, and along the way she broke down the door that had kept women out of serious American broadcast journalism.
A Nightclub Childhood
Barbara Jill Walters was born on September 25, 1929, in Boston, the daughter of Lou Walters, an impresario who ran the Latin Quarter nightclubs and made and lost several fortunes in show business. Her childhood swung between penthouses and sudden downturns, and she grew up backstage among performers, an early education in how public personas are constructed. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from Sarah Lawrence College in 1951.
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Walters began in television in 1953 as a writer-producer and joined NBC's *Today* in 1961 as a writer and researcher. Assigned the fluffy "Today Girl" duties, she pushed her way into real reporting, writing and editing her own segments. In 1974 she became the program's first female co-host. Two years later she signed a five-year, five-million-dollar contract with ABC, making her the highest-paid news anchor of either sex, and co-anchored the *ABC Evening News*, the first American woman to anchor a network evening newscast. The move was mocked and resisted; male executives doubted a woman could carry hard news, and her partnership with the resentful Harry Reasoner was strained. She endured it and outlasted the doubt.
The Interviewer
Walters found her truest form at ABC's *20/20*, where she was correspondent and co-host from 1979 to 2004, and in the primetime specials that made "the Barbara Walters interview" a genre unto itself. Her method was relentless preparation disguised as intimacy: she wrote hundreds of questions on cards and distilled them through exhaustive research, then asked things that "seemed casual but turned out to be revealing." Dan Rather said she "outworked, out-thought, and out-hustled her competitors." In November 1977 she landed the first joint interview with Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Israel's Menachem Begin as they moved toward peace; she sat with Castro, Putin, Saddam Hussein, and Margaret Thatcher. She was also willing to look foolish, famously asking Katharine Hepburn what kind of tree she would be.
The View and the Author
In 1997 Walters created, produced, and co-hosted *The View*, a daytime forum of women debating the news, which won Daytime Emmys for Best Talk Show (2003) and Best Talk Show Host (2009). She was also a writer: her 1970 book *How to Talk with Practically Anybody About Practically Anything* was a bestseller translated into at least six languages, and her 2008 autobiography *Audition: A Memoir* laid out the ambition and insecurity behind the poise.
Why Barbara Is Called a Genius
Walters's genius, if the word fits, was neither literary nor conventionally intellectual but a genius of process and human insight, and honesty requires locating it precisely. The specific quality was her ability to combine obsessive preparation with an instinct for the single disarming question that would crack a guarded subject open, then to read a person in real time and adjust. This is a real cognitive and interpersonal skill, and its results are measurable: interviews that made history and drew record audiences, and a body of work that peers across the industry regard as the gold standard of the form. Her deeper achievement, and the stronger case for the label, was structural. She proved by sheer will and competence that a woman could anchor serious news, and she is directly credited with opening the path for Jane Pauley, Katie Couric, and Diane Sawyer. That is genius of a pioneering, career-making kind. The honest counter-case is that Walters's celebrity interviews were sometimes criticized as soft, emotion-seeking "personality journalism" that blurred news and entertainment, and that her gift was craft and tenacity rather than original thought or prose. She was a supreme practitioner and a barrier-breaker, not a theorist or stylist. Within those bounds, the word is earned.
Legacy
Walters retired from *The View* in 2014 and died on December 30, 2022, at 93. Her gravestone reads, in her own words, "No regrets – I had a great life." She entered the Television Hall of Fame in 1989 and collected Daytime and News Emmys across her career. Every woman who has anchored an American newscast since works in a space Barbara Walters forced open, one revealing question at a time.
Achievements
- Notable work: Today
- Notable work: 20/20
- Notable work: The View
- Affiliated with NBC and ABC News
- Educated at Sarah Lawrence College, Miami Beach Senior High School and Ethical Culture Fieldston School
- Worked as television presenter, news presenter and broadcast journalist
