How Barbara Walters changed the world
Barbara Walters, 1976 Photo by Getty Images
By Julia M. Klein April 22, 2024
The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters
By Susan Page
Simon & Schuster; 464 pages, $30.99
During her storied, half-century-long television career, Barbara Walters interviewed foreign dictators and American presidents, tech moguls and movie stars. She rode a jeep with Fidel Castro, mounted a motorcycle with Sylvester Stallone, and asked Vladimir Putin if he had ever ordered anyone killed.
But Walters’ biggest “get” was Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern whose sexual liaison with Bill Clinton nearly took down his presidency. In her dishy, page-turning biography The Rulebreaker, Susan Page delivers a detailed account of how Walters managed it: by playing the long game, capitalizing on her contacts, deploying charm and empathy, and then preparing with meticulous care.
According to Page, the Washington Bureau chief of USA Today, Lewinsky told Walters in an off-the-record conversation that she was “basically a good kid growing up” who never took drugs or shoplifted. “Next time, shoplift,” Walters quipped. Lewinsky later said she found the humor endearing. Their eventual interview was riveting television and a ratings bonanza.
As The Rulebreaker makes clear, not everyone was charmed by the hard-charging Walters. Often insecure off camera, she could be infuriatingly competitive, poaching interviews from other correspondents. Diane Sawyer, also at ABC, was an arch-rival, and the two vied frequently for interview subjects. “She knifes me any chance she gets,” Sawyer told a colleague.
Walters’ television news career was nevertheless barrier-breaking for other women, and some of her successors — Katie Couric, Lesley Stahl, Norah O’Donnell and Connie Chung — blurb Page’s book. Chung, for example, notes that Walters “paved our way and earned her divadom.”
Page’s balanced account argues that Walters, the devoutly secular granddaughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, paid a high personal cost for her obsessive dedication to work. “In her personal life,” Page writes, “she would never seem to find firm footing.”
The biographer notes that all three of Walters’ marriages began with ambivalence and ended in divorce (though not necessarily acrimony). Just as tellingly, Walters called off what Page terms “the most serious affair of her life” — with then-married Sen. Edward Brooke, a Massachusetts Republican and the first Black senator since Reconstruction — to avoid a career-blemishing scandal.
Page also suggests that Walters was less attentive than she should have been to her adoptive daughter, Jacqueline, who later struggled with substance abuse and other problems. Mother and daughter remained estranged for many years, but ultimately reconciled. On the other hand, Walters played a caretaker role for her family of origin, paying off her father’s debts and supporting her mother and disabled sister, Jackie.
Page, the author of best-selling biographies of former First Lady Barbara Bush and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has a feel for the complexity of women’s lives. She also knows how to make a narrative gallop, with short chapters, punchy prose and just enough foreshadowing. The Rulebreaker is unsparing at times in its portrait of Walters, but never malicious. Not unlike Walters herself, her biographer combines toughness and empathy.
Page attributes Walters’ drive and insecurities, as well as her attraction to difficult men, to her unstable childhood and, in particular, her colorful but neglectful father. Lou Walters was a nightclub impresario who lured top stars to his Latin Club in New York and elsewhere. He was also an adulterer and a gambler, in business and cards, adept at parlaying success into failure. “He was both an inspirational figure and a cautionary tale,” Page writes. The family moved repeatedly in service to his business ventures, and Barbara later described her childhood as lonely.
One benefit to her upbringing, however, was Walters’ comfort with celebrities of all sorts. She was uncowed by notoriety. She flirted with Castro, found Richard Nixon to be the sexiest of U.S. presidents, and maintained a lifelong friendship with the lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn, chief counsel to Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy and mentor to Donald J. Trump.
Graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in 1951, Walters found herself in a pre-feminist world. Sexual harassment in the workplace was routine, and women were underpaid, disparaged and mostly excluded from professional jobs. It took tremendous grit and talent to leapfrog those constraints; Walters indisputably had both. She started as a secretary, then worked in public relations and television production. She moved from writing and reporting for CBS’s The Morning Show and NBC’s Today to co-hosting Today, her first big break.
Her career, which included co-hosting the newsmagazine 20/20, a raft of interview specials and the launch of the daytime talk show The View, had a mostly upward trajectory. Her one dramatic failure involved co-anchoring ABC Evening News, at a record-setting salary. But the job didn’t play to her strengths as an interviewer, and it teamed her with an openly hostile, proudly chauvinist Harry Reasoner.
“He survived the disastrous pairing. Barbara transcended it,” Page writes. “In the decades that followed, her career would span and define the golden age of television journalism in a way no one else, male or female, would ever exceed.” Page describes Walters as “the interviewer-as-Jewish-mother, sympathetic but probing enough to make you talk about the places where it hurt.”
Walters was slow to retire, doing occasional interview specials into her eighties, even as she showed signs of cognitive decline. Page attributes the cognitive issues not just to age but to a fall Walters took at a Washington party in 2013 that caused a traumatic brain injury. “It would be a pivot point in her life, with repercussions from which she would never recover,” Page writes.
The Rulebreaker lifts the curtain on Walters’ sad final years, during which the party-hopping celebrity interviewer became increasingly reclusive. She shut out most of her friends, relying on a cadre of caregivers. Page, researching this biography, was unable to interview her. When Walters died, in 2022, at 93, there was no public memorial. But her gravestone conveyed a final upbeat message: “No regrets,” it says. “I had a great life.”
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