Pioneering news anchor and interview legend Barbara Walters died Dec. 30. She was 93.
Walters shattered the glass ceiling by becoming the first woman to cohost a network evening news broadcast. She went on to have a decadeslong career in front of the camera, interviewing world leaders, top celebrities, and every living US president.
"When I see all the women now, that's an enormous reward for me," she said in an interview in 1994. "Now every morning program — Good Morning America and the Today show and CBS This Morning — the woman is a cohost."
Walters began her journalism career working as a news writer, notably for NBC's Today. She got her on-air break when she was asked to fill in for Mia Farrow’s mother, Maureen O’Sullivan, until a permanent replacement could be found. Walters said she never expected to be in front of the camera, but even so, it took nine years before she was made a cohost on Today.
She made headlines in 1976 when she left Today to accept a $1 million annual contract with ABC, at the time a record for a news personality.
"Today is 24 years old. During the first 12 years, there were 33 different women on the program; for the past 13 years, there’s been one," Walters told viewers when she left Today. "In the early years of the program, I was sort of a glorified tea pourer … but times have changed. Women in television no longer have to begin as I did, and I’m happy for whatever small contribution I’ve made toward this change.”
Walters then stayed at ABC for 25 years as cohost and chief correspondent of ABC News' 20/20. During her years on the show, she interviewed every American president and first lady since Richard Nixon and Pat Nixon. She also interviewed countless world leaders, including Cuban President Fidel Castro, Russia’s Boris Yeltsin, Chinese Premier Jiang Zemin, Great Britain’s former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Walters was also the first American journalist to interview Russian President Vladimir Putin and had the first interview with President George W. Bush following the Sept. 11 attacks. And her 1999 interview with Monica Lewinsky was, at the time, the highest-rated news program ever broadcast by a network.
She later launched her own primetime show, The Barbara Walters Special, where everyone from Barack Obama and Donald Trump to celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor, Whitney Houston, and Oprah Winfrey sat down for interviews.
In 1997, while still hosting 20/20, she introduced the daytime talk show The View and served as the show's host, co-owner, and co–executive producer. She retired from the show in 2014 at age 84. In all, she was on the air for more than 50 years and received 12 Emmys for her work.
Walters was known by her peers as a "tough cookie" and extremely competitive. But her personal, yet probing interviewing style put her subjects at ease, causing them to cry and reveal intimate details about their lives. Angelina Jolie told her in 2004 that adopting Maddox, a Cambodian boy, had given her life purpose, while also revealing that she missed having sex. Winfrey told her that her career and life would not have been possible if she had been a mother.
Walters told Diane Sawyer that her father always worried that she was going to lose her job, but after more than 40 years in the news business, she thinks she did OK.
Walters also published a memoir, Audition, in 2008, in which she shocked the media when she revealed that she had a lengthy affair with a then-married Massachusetts Sen. Edward Brooke, the first Black member of the US Senate. She said she kept the affair a secret for many years because she feared it would be disastrous for both of their careers.
Walters was married four times — twice to the same man, Merv Adelson, founder of Lorimar Television. They divorced in 1992. In 2010, at the age of 80, she successfully underwent open-heart surgery to repair a faulty valve.
She is survived by her daughter, Jackie Danforth, who ran a therapeutic wilderness camp in Maine that treated adolescent girls in crisis.