Press: Barbara Walters — rule-breaker and history-maker 

There’s no platform more powerful today than television. It’s more important than education, experience or class. Television alone can make you famous and wealthy. And, as we have sadly seen, just being on television can even make you president. 

Like almost every other line of endeavor, television began as a man’s world — especially television news. Think of early television, and you think of the boy’s club: Edward R. Murrow, Water Cronkite, Hugh Downs, John Chancellor, Frank McGee, Harry Reasoner, Dan Rather and Peter Jennings. So how ironic that the person who ended up outpacing, outperforming, and outranking them all — who really conquered television and still ranks as its all-time champion — was not a man, but a woman. Her name was Barbara Walters. 

Throughout her career, as a woman striving for success in a man’s world, Walters was accused of being too pushy, too ambitious, mixing Hollywood with politics, and being more of a celebrity than a journalist. She was mercilessly lampooned by Gilda Radner on “Saturday Night Live” as “Baba Wawa.” But Walters finally gets the credit she’s due as a real trailblazer, serious journalist — and, yes, still serious celebrity with a serious sex life — in Susan Page’s rollicking new biography: “The Rulebreaker.”  

Thanks to her own insatiable drive and refusal to take no for an answer, Barbara Walters achieved more than any other TV journalist so far, unheard of for a woman: the first female co-host of a morning TV show; the first female co-anchor of the evening news; and creator of “The View,” a day-time all-female talk show that, as Page says, “reinvented television conversation” and is probably the most powerful political platform on television today, almost 20 years later.  

Of course, it’s for her news-making interviews that Barbara Walters will be most remembered. And they didn’t just fall from the tree. Using all her charms, threats, and powerful contacts, Walters pursued each of them relentlessly. Sometimes for years. Her campaign to interview Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon, took 12 years. 

She interviewed Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton. She interviewed H. R. Haldeman, Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf and Fidel Castro. She interviewed Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin at the same time. But it was her interview with Monica Lewinsky that capped her career. Again, one she worked at tirelessly, meeting several times with Monica’s father, mother, stepfather, attorney Bill Ginsberg and Monica herself, before nailing it down. 

And it paid off. Walters called it “the biggest ‘get’ of my career.” Seventy million people watched all or part of her interview with the former White House intern. By contrast, Oprah Winfrey’s highly-promoted 2022 interview with Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, drew an average of 17.1 viewers. 

How far would she go to land an interview? Page tells the story. In 1978, Walters was one of 50 reporters covering the Camp David accords who were herded onto a bus from their nearby hotel and taken to Camp David for a photo op. When the Secret Service did a head count an hour later, as the bus was prepared to leave, only 49 reporters were on the bus. Barbara Walters was missing. She was soon found hiding out in a ladies room on the property, hoping to surface after the bus had left and snag an interview with Carter, Sadat or Begin. She was lucky she wasn’t arrested. She wouldn’t have minded if she had been. It was all about the “get.” 

Barbara Walters paved the way. There’s not a man or woman on television today who isn’t in some way in her debt. 

Bill Press hosts “The Bill Press Pod.” He is the author of “From the Left: A Life in the Crossfire.”