Barbara Walters

[1][2] Known for her interviewing ability and popularity with viewers, she appeared as a host of numerous television programs, including Today, the ABC Evening News, 20/20, and The View.

Walters began her career at WNBT-TV (NBC's flagship station in New York) in 1953 as writer-producer of a news-and-information program aimed at the juvenile audience, Ask the Camera, hosted by Sandy Becker.

During her career, Walters interviewed every sitting U.S. president and first lady from Richard and Pat Nixon to Barack and Michelle Obama.

She also gained acclaim and notoriety for interviewing subjects such as Fidel Castro, Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin, Katharine Hepburn, Sean Connery, Monica Lewinsky, Hugo Chávez, Vladimir Putin,[11] Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Jiang Zemin, and Bashar al-Assad.

[23][24] Her paternal grandfather, Abraham Isaac Waremwasser, was born in the Polish city of Łódź and emigrated to England where he changed his surname to Warmwater.

[44] Walters was employed for about a year at a small advertising agency in New York City and began working at the NBC network's flagship station WNBT-TV (now WNBC), doing publicity and writing press releases.

Previous "Today Girls" (whom Walters called "tea pourers") included Florence Henderson, Helen O'Connell, Estelle Parsons, and Lee Meriwether.

[56] Walters signed a five-year, $5 million contract with ABC, establishing her as the highest-paid news anchor, either male or female.

[56] 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.

She was also chosen to be the moderator for the third and final debate between candidates Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, held on the campus of the College of William and Mary at Phi Beta Kappa Memorial Hall in Williamsburg, Virginia, during the 1976 presidential election.

[60] In 1984, she moderated a presidential debate which was held at the Dana Center for the Humanities at Saint Anselm College in Goffstown, New Hampshire.

[64] In November 1977, she landed the first joint interview with Egyptian president Anwar Al Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, while they were working out the terms of the eventual Egypt–Israel peace treaty.

"[67] Walters had sit-down interviews with world leaders, including the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and his wife, the Empress Farah Pahlavi;[68] Russia's Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin;[69] China's Jiang Zemin; the UK's Margaret Thatcher;[70] Cuba's Fidel Castro,[71] as well as India's Indira Gandhi,[72] Czechoslovakia's Václav Havel,[73] Libya's Muammar al-Gaddafi,[74] King Hussein of Jordan,[75] King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia,[76] Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez[77] and many others.

Walters interviewed other influential people including pop icon Michael Jackson, Katharine Hepburn, Vogue editor Anna Wintour,[78] and Laurence Olivier in 1980.

Although the footage of her two days of interviewing Castro in Cuba showed his personality, in part, as freewheeling, charming, and humorous,[83] she pointedly said to him, "You allow no dissent.

"[85] At the time, Walters kept quiet that she had seen New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, pitcher Whitey Ford, and several coaches in Cuba who were there to assist Cuban ballplayers.

Lewinsky replied, "Mommy made a big mistake," at which point Walters brought the program to a dramatic conclusion, turning to the viewers and saying, "... that is the understatement of the year.

[91] Walters was a co-host of the daytime talk show The View; for 25 years she was also a co-executive producer of BarWall Productions alongside her business partner, Bill Geddie.

After leaving her role as 20/20 co-host in 2004, Walters remained a part-time contributor of special programming and interviews for ABC News until 2016.

[101][102] Six weeks later Walters confirmed that she would be retiring from television hosting and interviewing, as originally reported; she made the official announcement on the May 13, 2013, episode of The View.

[15][108] In 2015, Walters hosted special 20/20 episodes featuring interviews with Mary Kay Letourneau[14] and Donald and Melania Trump.

[111][112] On January 1, 2023, ABC ran a special called "Our Barbara" and a 20/20 senior producer noted, "For a number of years we kept her office just as is (after 2016), the papers came every day.

According to Walters, her father was the subject of an arrest warrant for "failure to appear" after he failed to show up for a New York court date because the family was in Las Vegas; Cohn was able to have the charge dismissed.

[123] Walters dated future U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan in the 1970s[124] and was linked romantically to United States Senator John Warner in the 1990s.

[125] In Walters's autobiography Audition, she wrote that she had an affair in the 1970s with Edward Brooke, then a married United States Senator from Massachusetts.

[127] Walters was a close friend of Tom Brokaw, Woody Allen, Joan Rivers, and Fox News head Roger Ailes.

Four days after the operation, Walters' spokeswoman, Cindi Berger, said that the procedure to fix the faulty heart valve "went well, and the doctors are very pleased with the outcome".

[137] Walters began her career when the prevalent view among television executives (all of whom were male) was that women reporting news about war, politics and other important matters would be taken lightly by viewers.

[65] Her success is credited with creating career opportunities for future female network anchors, including Jane Pauley, Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer.

Walters felt that it would help "tongue-tied, socially awkward people—the many people who worry that they can't think of the right thing to say to start a conversation.

Gene Shalit , Walters, and Frank McGee on The Today Show , 1973
Walters with George W. Romney and Richard Nixon in 1969
Walters interviewing President Gerald Ford and Betty Ford in 1976
Walters with President Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan in 1986
Walters in Washington, D.C., 2004
The View ' s panel (left–right: Whoopi Goldberg , Walters, Joy Behar , Sherri Shepherd and Elisabeth Hasselbeck ) interview President Barack Obama on July 29, 2010
Walters in 2007
Walters at the Metropolitan Opera in 2008