Exclusive: How Barbara Walters broke the rules and changed the world for women and TV

Adapted from "The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters" by Susan Page. (464 pp. Simon and Schuster, April 23)

She had been warned.

Barbara Walters had finally won the anchor’s chair in 1976, the prize she had long sought and one that NBC News had refused to give her. ABC, then the third-ranking network with little to lose, offered her the job of co-anchoring the nightly news with Harry Reasoner and hosting four annual specials for the then-breathtaking salary of a million dollars a year.

She was the first newswoman — the first newsperson, in fact — to get such an astronomical sum. She achieved that distinction by shrewdly playing each network against the other. But her price came with its own price. No one would ever let her forget it.

“Barbara Walters: Million-Dollar Baby?” The Miami Herald asked in a headline trumpeted across all six columns at the top of page 1. “A Million-Dollar Baby Handling 5-and-10 Cent News?” ridiculed a column in The Washington Post. Richard Salant, the president of CBS News, asked sarcastically, “Is Barbara a journalist or is she Cher?”

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Walter Cronkite said he had experienced “a first wave of nausea, the sickening sensation that perhaps we were all going under, that all of our efforts to hold network television news aloof from show business had failed.”

Despite that queasy feeling, Cronkite demanded a big raise himself, to $900,000 a year, plus summers off, membership in private clubs, and a corporate plane to take him to and from Martha’s Vineyard. “Walter complained about me getting $1 million,” Barbara said. “But he soon was the great beneficiary. He didn’t complain about making a lot more money a year, because I broke the mold, very loudly.”

Loudly, and to the particular dismay of Harry Reasoner. He got a raise, too. But he didn’t want to co-anchor the news with anyone. Especially with a woman.

“You’re going to have a rough time,” veteran broadcaster Howard K. Smith cautioned her beforehand. “Do you know that?”

“I’m beginning to think so,” she replied. But she had no idea how bad it would be.

Smith was her predecessor on the show and a member in good standing of the old boys’ club, part of the fabled team of CBS World War II correspondents known as the Murrow Boys. He had begun co-anchoring the evening news in 1969, paired first with Frank Reynolds and then with Reasoner. In 1975, to Reasoner’s satisfaction, Smith had been sidelined to be a commentator. He knew better than anyone how unenthusiastic Reasoner was about having a partner on the air.

“Be strong and stand up to it, but he’s not going to treat you well,” Smith predicted.Smith didn’t do her many favors, either. On the Friday night before Barbara’s debut the following Monday, he delivered an essay on the evening broadcast.

He called Walters “network television’s first female anchorman, a lady whose beauty sometimes disguises a talent rarely equaled in this craft.” He noted that women were making inroads in other jobs in TV news as well. “Now on this report I will answer to a lady anchorman, Barbara,” he said, referring to his continuing role as the show’s occasional commentator. “Any bruise to the male ego is assuaged by the thought that if you’ve got to go, then being a male island in a sea of pretty women, well, what a way to go.”

The condescension came from the man who supposedly was in her corner.

From Reasoner, an affable manner masking sharp edges

Reasoner made no pretense that he was on her side.

He was fifty-three years old, with graying hair and an affable manner that masked his sharp edges. He had already described himself on the air as a chauvinist, proudly out of step with an age in which women were pushing for more parity in the workplace and more possibilities in their lives. He made comments about women and about feminism that would have cost him his job a half-century later. They raised eyebrows even then.

He opposed the Equal Rights Amendment. He endorsed a bride’s vow to “obey” her husband, “observing” that women “who are submissive to a husband with a strong personality seem to be happier than those who are equal or dominant decision-making partners.” He called the first issue of Gloria Steinem’s Ms. magazine “pretty sad” and predicted it would soon fail, although he said “the girls” who were putting it out were “prettier than H. L. Mencken if not as good when it came to editing.” He questioned whether the advent of the first female anchor would really be a “step forward.”

When female flight attendants were battling sexist stereotypes and airline rules about their appearance, he said he preferred that they retain an ornamental role. “They should remain patches of color in the business of flying,” he opined. “They should be there for a few years and then, like the clouds outside the windows, be replaced with soft and fluffy new ones.”

There was nothing “soft and fluffy” about Barbara Walters, of course.

She was now forty-seven years old (although she told everyone she was forty-five), twice divorced and a single mother of a child who would struggle with substance abuse. She was supporting her aging parents and special-needs sister. She was determined and ambitious, if cautious about aligning herself too closely with the emerging women’s movement. And she had experience in dealing with resistant men.

Near the beginning of her career, at NBC’s Today show, host Frank McGee had issued an edict that she couldn’t speak during on-air interviews with Washington newsmakers until he had asked the first three questions.

Now, in a commentary at the end of their first joint ABC Evening News show, Reasoner raised a spookily similar objection to how much airtime Barbara could claim. Even in the mid-1970s, when the Supreme Court had recognized abortion rights nationwide in Roe v. Wade and First Lady Betty Ford had endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment, some things apparently hadn’t changed all that much.

They sat side by side at the anchor desk for a show more notable for Barbara’s arrival than the news they reported that first night, starting with the resignation of Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz and including a satellite interview with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. In a commentary at the close, Reasoner said he had a “little trouble” in thinking what to say to greet her that didn’t sound sexist or patronizing or sycophantic. It was an odd beginning; how hard could it be for a noted wordsmith to say “Welcome”?

“The decision was to welcome you as I would any respected and competent colleague of any sex by noting that I’ve kept time on your stories and mine tonight,” Reasoner finally told her. “You owe me four minutes.”

Looking a bit perplexed, Barbara laughed. He didn’t.

'Her fists were clenched'

After those early shows, Victor Neufeld, then a junior producer, would walk Barbara back to her office from the studio, which was in a building across the street. “She never said a word to me, but I knew she was very anxious and upset,” he told me, describing her as hurt and humiliated. “Her fists were clenched. She grabbed the script in her hands. She held on to the script, just walked looking down, not a word said. And I said, ‘It was a good show.’ She didn’t answer me.”

Reasoner’s bullying unnerved her. So did the onslaught of commentary dissecting her speech patterns, her looks, her clothes, her credentials, her performance in ways no man had ever faced. On Capitol Hill, a powerful congressman weighed in, outraged. “It’s ridiculous,” said Democratic senator John Pastore of Rhode Island, an important figure in the broadcast business because he chaired the Commerce Committee’s subcommittee on communications. “The networks come before my committee and shed crocodile tears and complain about their profits. Then they pay this little girl a million dollars. That’s five times better than the president of the United States makes.”

This little girl.

She was by then a woman who had spent a dozen years working her way up the ranks at NBC, where she had become co-host of the nation’s top-rated morning show. Other critiques also took a demeaning tone, referring to her as “Barbie” and “baby.” “Doll Barbie to Learn Her ABC’s” was the headline on the front page of the New York Daily News. One newspaper depicted her in a cartoon as a chorus girl, reading the news.

Everything she had achieved, and at considerable personal cost, seemed imperiled. “I would pick up the paper every day and read what a flop I was,” she said. She thought about quitting. Instead, for nearly two years she waged what became a war of attrition against Reasoner, one that would damage both of their careers, at least for a time.

He eventually would retreat to a perch on the venerable CBS news program 60 Minutes. He survived the disastrous pairing.

Barbara transcended it.

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.

Presidents, movie stars, criminals and despots

Barbara Jill Walters was a force from the time TV was exploding on the American scene in the 1960s to its waning preeminence in a new world of competition from streaming services and social media a half-century later. She was a groundbreaker for women. She expanded the big TV interview and then dominated the genre. By the end of her career, she had interviewed more of the famous and infamous, of presidents and movie stars and criminals and despots, than any journalist in history. With the media landscape changing, she would set a record no one was likely to ever break.

Then, at sixty-seven, past the age many female broadcasters found themselves involuntarily retired, she pioneered a new form of talk TV called The View. The show would still be going strong a quarter century later.

“She was so brilliant,” Diane Sawyer, an erstwhile rival and a groundbreaking journalist herself, told me. “She had such a wonderful idea for creating a signature, just writing it across the sky.”

None of it came easy.

Barbara broke in not only before the #MeToo movement spotlighted sexual harassment but before The Feminine Mystique had been published and validated bigger ambitions for women. She had no role models, no mentors. Reasoner was just one of the colleagues who pulled for her to fail. Traditionalists like Cronkite viewed her with disdain, even as she was scooping them on historic interviews in the Mideast and elsewhere. Some rivals never saw her as a real journalist but as a “celebrity interviewer,” one step from her father’s vaudeville roots.

Yet she became an inspiration for many women and girls who followed, in journalism and other fields.

A seventeen-year-old high school student in Nashville entered the local Miss Fire Prevention Contest and told the judges that her aspiration was to be a TV journalist. “I want to be like Barbara Walters,” Oprah Winfrey told them.

Growing up in Stamford, Connecticut, Jen Psaki would negotiate with her parents to stay up past her bedtime to watch Barbara on ABC’s 20 ⁄ 20. “You didn’t feel like you were in a history class and you were bored,” Psaki, who would become a White House press secretary for President Joe Biden and then pursue a TV career herself, told me. “You were being brought on a journey.”

Young people with broadcast ambitions would come up to Barbara and say, “I want to be you.” She had a stock response: “Then you have to take the whole package.”

For her, the whole package included a dysfunctional childhood—a father she couldn’t remember ever hugging as a girl; a distracted and disgruntled mother; a disabled sister she both loved and hated. It encompassed three failed marriages and a daughter who was estranged before reconciling. While she savored her success and all it brought her, contentment was forever elusive. Toward the end, she withdrew into bitterness.

She succeeded not because she was confident, but because she was not. She was a perfectionist and a second-guesser who could drive those around her crazy. (Her second husband, Lee Guber, jokingly told her that the inscription on her gravestone should reflect her constant indecision: “On the other hand, maybe I should have lived.”) She was ferociously competitive—her rivalry with Diane Sawyer became a drama of epic dimensions—and she worked harder than anyone else.

“Given everything she’s accomplished, what is it that keeps her at that level of intensity?” Diane asked in 1996. "What is it she fears will happen if she doesn’t work this hard?”

A quarter-century later, after Barbara had passed away, I asked Diane if she had ever found the answer to those questions. “I’m not sure I ever cracked the code of what kept her getting up in the morning the way she did, and this sheer desire every day,” she told me. “There was nothing more that she could do to make us honor her more than we did.”

Barbara titled her 2008 memoir Audition because she had “always felt I was auditioning, either for a new job or to make sure that I could hold on to the one I had.” The trepidation never went away, not entirely. “No matter how high my profile became, how many awards I received, or how much money I made, my fear was that it all could be taken away from me,” she said late in life, when she could have simply relished all she had achieved.

She never did.

Av Westin, a producer who worked with her at the start of her career and at its peak, described her restless drive to me in words that were cinematic. We talked in his West Side apartment one afternoon, not long before his death at age ninety-two. As we spoke, Barbara was in failing health just across Central Park, in her East Side apartment. They were almost precisely the same age, born weeks apart, though she wouldn’t always admit that. In 2022, they would die months apart.

They had known one another for a lifetime, since he was the twentysomething director of the CBS morning show where she had landed her first job as a TV writer. Decades later, they worked together at the ABC Evening News and 20 ⁄ 20.

Even when she was dominating the ratings and earning millions of dollars a year, she was never at peace, Av said. “I used to characterize her—describe it as Barbara waking up in the middle of the night . . . and in the reflected light from a streetlight, which came through the bathroom window, was Barbara’s shadow,” he told me, waving one hand in the air as if conjuring the image. “And she would say to the mirror, ‘Tomorrow, they will find me out.’”

She would feel that knot of insecurity even at moments of triumph. Perhaps especially then.

Susan Page is the Washington Bureau chief of USA TODAY.