Barbara Walters, Groundbreaking Jewish TV Host, Dies At 93

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 “60 Minutes.” Learn production, Don Hewitt said, but don’t try for the camera. Your looks are wrong. That speech impediment is a killer.

Walters, whose death was reported by ABC on Dec. 30, spent the following decades overcoming her mangled r’s and became one of television’s premier interrogators of the newsworthy. At NBC and later ABC News, she was tireless in her pursuit of “gets” – 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.

Walters repeatedly enjoyed the last guffaw over doubters and detractors during a career spanning five decades. She shattered glass ceilings. 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.

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 faced adorned magazine covers. Oprah Winfrey called her a personal role model.

At her death, she was either 93, as ABC reported, or 95. A birth certificate unearthed by her biographer pointed to the latter. A special ABC report did not give a cause of death.

Walters’s ascent was fueled by grit rather than raw talent. “Pushy cookie,” she called herself. Her hard-won female “firsts” – co-host of “Today” from 1974 to 1976 and co-anchor of ABC’s evening news show from 1976 to 1978 – 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.

Unlike her TV pantheon peers, such as Mike Wallace, Johnny Carson and Winfrey, Walters mastered diverse time slots and genres. She straddled entertainment and hard news.

Periodic “specials” attracted huge audiences. For extended periods, Walters starred on two programs. While doing “Today,” she presided over “Not for Women Only.” In 1997, while a mainstay on “20/20,” she helped create “The View,” a frothy talkfest.

In whatever setting, she displayed a distinctive knack for building a rapport with audiences.

Walters’s 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 “special” 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 – that she cared.

In a 1980 interview on “20/20,” Nixon conceded, after Walters’s persistent coaxing, that he should have destroyed the Oval Office recordings that sealed his ouster.

“Are you sorry you didn’t burn the tapes?”

“The answer is, I probably should have,” he replied. “But mainly, I shouldn’t have even installed them.”

“If you had it to do all over again, you’d burn them?”

“Yes,” the former president said, “I think so, because they were private conversations subject to misinterpretation, as we have all seen.”

Walters spent two years trying to arrange an interview with Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Her efforts came through in 1977.

“You allow no dissent,” she told him in what is often regarded as one of her most memorable broadcasts. “Your newspapers, radio, television, motion pictures are under state control.”

“Barbara,” Castro replied, “our concept of freedom of the press is not like yours.”

Walters frequently focused on her subjects’ formative years. “I like difficult childhoods,” she once observed. Her own qualified.

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Barbara Jill Walters was born in Boston on Sept. 25, 1929 (according to the birth certificate). 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.

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.

Whatever the venue, Lou was rarely present. Worries about money and her older daughter preoccupied Dena. From an early age, Walters wrote in “Audition” that she knew she would be responsible for Jacqueline, if not the whole family. “I realize I was never young,” she wrote.

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’t show up.

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.

The manager wanted all staffers to learn the rudiments of production, and Walters was an avid pupil.

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Nixon, she wrote later, “turned out to be one of my greatest champions.” While Walters never displayed partisanship, and chatter on “The View” 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.

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In 1977, she was one of four journalists on the plane carrying Egyptian President Anwar Sadat on his historic flight to Israel, where he would meet Prime Minister Menachem Begin. She had earlier interviewed – and charmed – both leaders.

In flight, Sadat kidded her about her salary; his was only $12,000. “But you have fringe benefits, like palaces,” she replied.

Passing notes while Cronkite and NBC’s John Chancellor weren’t 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: “Let’s do a favor for our friend Barbara.”

The conversation was more important for its atmospherics than its content but was a notable scoop nonetheless. ABC’s 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: “Did Barbara get anything I didn’t get?”

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

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

Critics continued to carp, even as she neared retirement. Echoing Cronkite’s complaint in 1976, the cultural historian Neal Gabler wrote in the Times decades later that she “tore down the wall separating news from entertainment, the serious from the frivolous.”

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 “20/20” in 2004, of her own volition, essentially turning in her press pass. Competition for “gets” was fiercer than ever, and wearying.

More important, she wrote in “Audition,” the networks’ 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.

(c) 2022, The Washington Post · Laurence I. Barrett