Barbara Walters, the trailblazing television news broadcaster and longtime ABC News anchor and correspondent who shattered the glass ceiling and became a dominant force in an industry once dominated by men, has died. She was 93.
Walters joined ABC News in 1976, becoming the first female anchor on an evening news program. Three years later, she became a co-host of “20/20,” and in 1997, she launched “The View.”
Known for her interviewing ability and popularity with viewers, Walters appeared as a host of numerous television programs, including Today, The View, 20/20, and the ABC Evening News. Walters was a working journalist from 1951 until her retirement in 2015. In a career that spanned five decades, Walters won 12 Emmy awards, 11 of those while at ABC News. She made her final appearance as a co-host of “The View” in 2014, but remained an executive producer of the show and continued to do some interviews and specials for ABC News.
Walters created, produced, and co-hosted the ABC daytime talk show The View, on which she appeared from 1997 until her retirement in 2014. Thereafter, she continued to host a number of special reports for 20/20 as well as documentary series for Investigation Discovery. Her final on-air appearance for ABC News was in 2015
“I do not want to appear on another program or climb another mountain,” she said at the time. “I want instead to sit on a sunny field and admire the very gifted women — and OK, some men too — who will be taking my place.”
During her childhood her father managed the Latin Quarter nightclub. This club was owned in partnership with E. M. Loew and was initially located in Boston. In 1942, her father opened the New York version of the Latin Quarter. He also worked as a Broadway producer where he produced the Ziegfeld Follies of 1943. He also was the Entertainment Director for the Tropicana Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, where he imported the “Folies Bergère” stage show from Paris to the resort’s main showroom.
Growing up around celebrities taught a young Barbara a lesson that she relied upon throughout her career.
“I would see them onstage looking one way and offstage often looking very different. I would hear my parents talk about them and know that even though those performers were very special people, they were also human beings with real-life problems,” Walters said in a 1989 interview with the Television Academy of Arts & Sciences. “I can have respect and admiration for famous people, but I have never had a sense of fear or awe.”
“Her condition also altered my life,” Walters wrote. “I think I knew from a very early age that at some point Jackie would become my responsibility. That awareness was one of the main reasons I was driven to work so hard. But my feelings went beyond financial responsibility.
After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, in the 1950s, Walters found work as a publicist and television writer, before landing a spot as a writer on NBC’s “Today” show in 1961. She would become the program’s first female co-host in 1974, and won her first Emmy award the following year for Outstanding Talk Show Host.
Previous “Today Girls” (whom Walters called “tea pourers”) included Florence Henderson, Helen O’Connell, Estelle Parsons, and Lee Meriwether. Within a year, she had become a reporter-at-large developing, writing, and editing her own reports and interviews. One very well-received film segment was “A Day in the Life of a Novice Nun,” edited by then-first assistant film editor Donald Swerdlow (now Don Canaan), who was subsequently promoted to become a full film editor at NBC News.
In 1976, Walters found a new home on ABC’s “Evening News,” making history as the first female co-anchor of an evening news program.
Walters has seldom minced words when describing the visible, on-the-air disdain her co-anchor Harry Reasoner displayed for her when she was teamed up with him on the ABC Evening News from 1976 to 1978. Reasoner had a difficult relationship with Walters because he disliked having a co-anchor, even though he worked with former CBS colleague Howard K. Smith nightly on ABC for several years. Walters has said that the tension between the two was because Reasoner did not want to work with a co-anchor and also because he was unhappy at ABC, not because he disliked Walters personally. In 1981, five years after the start of their short-lived ABC partnership and well after Reasoner returned to CBS News, Walters and her former co-anchor had a memorable (and cordial) 20/20 interview on the occasion of Reasoner’s new book release.
At ABC, her interviews were wide-ranging and her access to public figures, unparalleled; Walters crossed the Bay of Pigs with Fidel Castro and conducted the first joint interview with Sadat and Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin. She also developed a reputation for asking tough questions.
“I asked Vladimir Putin if he ever ordered anyone to be killed,” she once recalled. “For the record, he said ‘no.'”
Upon the death of Castro in 2016, Walters released a statement saying the dictator had called her two interviews with him “fiery debates.”
There were lighter interviews, too. For years, she hosted an annual Oscars special, in which she interviewed Academy Award nominees and was known for making a number of them reveal deeply personal information and even cry. In 1994, she launched the “Most Fascinating People” special, which aired every December and afforded her the opportunity to chat with the year’s top newsmakers.
In 1999, an estimated 74 million viewers tuned in to watch Walters interview Monica Lewinsky about the former White House intern’s affair with then-President Bill Clinton. Toward the end of the interview, Walters asked Lewinsky, “What will you tell your children when you have them?” Lewinsky replied, “Mommy made a big mistake” to which Walters quipped, “And that is the understatement of the year.”
With “The View,” she created a forum for women of different backgrounds and views to come together and discuss the latest hot topics in the news, a format that has since been widely imitated by other networks. In a May 2019 New York Times Magazine cover story, “The View” was deemed “the most important political TV show in America.”
“She keeps me sane, she keeps me grounded,” Walters said of her daughter. “Children do that … I think a lot of working women struggle with the job and being home and there’s never a right answer. Whatever you do is wrong, but whatever you do will turn out eventually to be OK.”
She was also the recipient of honorary doctoral degrees from her alma mater Sarah Lawrence College, as well as Ohio State University, Temple University, Marymount College, Wheaton College, Hofstra University, and Ben-Gurion University in Jerusalem.
After 25 years in television, she was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 1989 and was presented the award by Peter Jennings, then the anchor and senior editor of ABC’s “World News Tonight.”
“In all the years that Barbara has spent covering the world, those of us who have moved along in her wake have done better because she was there first setting standards, and she has taught us all something,” Jennings, who died in 2005, said at the time.
In 2000, Oprah Winfrey echoed Jennings’ speech when she presented Walters a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. “Had there not been Barbara Walters, surely all of the other women who have followed in her footsteps, including myself, could not stand where we stand and do what we do in this industry today,” Winfrey said.
In her acceptance speech, Walters said, “I have been blessed with a life I never expected, and helping me up the steps of the ladder over the years have been hundreds of people.”
Walters died at her home in New York on December 30, 2022, at the age of 93.
