For better and sometimes for worse, Barbara Walters understood how power works
A documentary about the legendary broadcaster highlights both her savvy and her unseemly connections
In 1977, Barbara Walters scored a historic joint interview with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, edging out CBS legend Walter Cronkite and NBC’s John Chancellor for one of the biggest media gets of the era. To land the interview, she had flown from Tel Aviv to Cairo, run across the tarmac to Sadat, who was already talking to Cronkite, and literally elbowed her way into the conversation.
As recounted in Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything, a documentary that premiered Sunday on Hulu, the incident marked a turning point for Walters, who was then TV’s highest-paid anchor but was still viewed as fundamentally unserious because of her gender. Her handling of the Begin-Sadat face-off proved she was more than capable of running with the big dogs.
As Victor Neufeld, former executive producer of 20/20, recalls in Tell Me Everything, “She turned out to be the best possible definition of the word ‘a killer.’”
Directed by Jackie Jesko, the documentary traces Walters’ trailblazing rise to the pinnacle of her profession, beginning with her stint at Today, where she worked her way up from writer of “women’s features” to co-host. She left NBC in 1976 for ABC, where she became the first American woman to co-anchor a network evening news program and earned $1 million a year — then a staggering sum. She remained at the network for the next 40 years, fundamentally changing not only our ideas about who should be able to cover the news, but how it should be covered.
During her years at ABC, Walters launched the newsmagazine 20/20, hosted glossy celebrity specials that gave viewers a glimpse of the rich and famous at their most vulnerable, and launched the daytime program The View, which was initially dismissed as fluff but became one of the most politically influential talk shows in American TV. More than anything, she knew the power of an exclusive, whether it was with Katharine Hepburn, Fidel Castro, Boris Yeltsin, Jack Kevorkian, or — as if anyone alive in 1999 could forget this one — Monica Lewinsky.
Walters, who died in 2022, landed these big gets by doggedly cultivating her social connections. “I wasn't born with contacts,” she says in an archival interview in the documentary. “I would pick up the phone myself. I would write letters. I would call. I didn’t just nag, I nudged.”
As Tell Me Everything makes clear, Walters understood, well before many others in the industry, that celebrities were worthy of serious news coverage not just — or even primarily — because of their creative accomplishments, but because of the cultural power they wielded. Long before social media made the rich and famous seem accessible, she went into the homes of icons like John Wayne and Lucille Ball, asked them probing questions, and often made them cry.
“She was looking to find a vulnerability that you had not offered to the rest of the world,” says Oprah Winfrey, who is one of many heavy-hitters to reflect on Walters’ legacy in Tell Me Everything. She recalls her 1988 sit-down with Walters, which was the first time Winfrey publicly disclosed the sexual abuse she had experienced as a child.
“I think many people went into every Barbara Walters interview saying, ‘I’m not gonna cry, I’m not gonna cry, I’m not gonna cry,’” Winfrey says. “And then, bam, you’re doing the thing that you thought you most didn’t want to do.”
Walters had “a vision that celebrities are news,” says Disney chief Bob Iger. “She was criticized in that regard because she actually believed — and I think she turned out to be right — that they were newsmakers.”
Conversely, Walters also understood that “serious” newsmakers could — and should — be covered as personalities. She knew that asking Castro about his private life or Muammar Gaddafi about his childhood dreams could yield surprising responses that would be every bit as illuminating as a policy discussion.
But Tell Me Everything is not a hagiography. It’s full of dishy details about Walters’ intense dislike of “bully” Peter Jennings and her feud with Diane Sawyer, her younger, glamorous, and equally well-connected rival at ABC News.
More damningly, it also portrays Walters as someone less interested in holding power to account than leveraging it for personal gain, and whose relentless glad-handing resulted in some unseemly personal connections.
As Martin Clancy, former ABC News producer, puts it in the film, “I think Barbara would be friends with the devil if we’d get the interview.”
Arguably, she was: Tell Me Everything delves into Walters’ long-time friendship with Roy Cohn, one of the most reviled figures in 20th-century American politics. We learn that she was loyal to him because he once helped her father, a failed nightlife entrepreneur, get out of some tax trouble.
“She was obsessed with three things. She was obsessed with money, fame, and power,” says Peter Gethers, editor of Walters’ autobiography. “She did not have the strongest moral compass. A lot of the relationships she developed were career moves, and she was a pretty transactional person.”
Gethers suggests this all stemmed from Walters’ relationship with her father, who was, he says, “a scoundrel…And I think she was both horrified by that and attracted to that.”
Or, as Walters herself puts it in another vintage clip in the film, “There is a certain charm about a dictator.”
Of course, the fact that Walters was a woman makes us view her supposed obsession with money, power, and fame in a different light. If she were a man, would anyone care that she was a little too cozy with Roy Cohn?
It’s impossible to say for sure. As chronicled in Tell Me Everything, Walters was forced to step into the role of family breadwinner when her father’s businesses tanked — an experience that shaped her attitudes about gender and professional ambition.
“Both Barbara and I took on the role of a guy,” says her peer Connie Chung, who also supported her family as a journalist. “We had the responsibilities of men, and we conducted our careers like men.”
This doesn’t mean that Walters neutered herself. Quite the contrary: she embraced her feminine side, even when it could seem faintly ridiculous, like when she wore a powder pink Chanel suit redolent of Jackie Kennedy to interview Gaddafi in the sweltering Libyan heat. But it did mean she was willing to do things “nice girls” would never consider — like interrupting Walter Cronkite or confronting Donald Trump about his chronic dishonesty back in 1990.
And for that, a generation of women can be grateful.
Meredith Blake is the culture columnist for The Contrarian
Reading this article on Barbara Walters reminds me of Bezos' upcoming nuptials in Venice:
Wife no. 1, MacKenzie Scott: CLASS
Wife to be no. 2 Lauren whatever: CRASS
Goes right along with the new Bezos ass kissing of the orange felon
I “listened” to the AI review and even though that sultry voice kind of irritates me, gives me great chuckles trying to decipher the stupid pronunciations of names and words, I was motivated to watch the documentary that I had seen advertised on my Hulu feed. Hulu should pay you even though I pay for the non commercial feed because AMEX reimburses me. The documentary was one of the best I have ever watched. I highly recommend it, especially if you are a woman or a man who can respect strong women (ie. not the orange f*ing turd who she put in his sorry a*sed place back in the day). And that is the beauty of Babawa’s story. She braced at least three generations of women - certainly MY grandmother’s, mother’s and mine. My grandmother was born in Arizona when it was a territory, my mother was a whoops baby and her father died with leukemia when she was 13, my father died at 41 with colon cancer leaving my mother with four kids at 34 yrs of age in 1975 when a women couldn’t even get a credit card or a mortgage without a husband. By the grace of kind Christians, not the kind we have today, somehow we made it. I wasn’t much of a tv watcher, but I did know who Barbara Walters was and I grew in my quiet feminism while her career flourished. I felt badly for her daughter but I don’t think any woman who grew up in the turmoil of the 60’s - 90’s had a very good experience. But back to the documentary (and I hate to be a spoiler) but the phenomenal parade of luminaries who came to honor Ms. Walters when she retired from the View was absolutely staggering. You forget these women journalists, media mega ladies until you remember them. I was entranced. I highly recommend the “viewing”. Kudos to the author - an influential piece.