The Rulebreaker: The new biography of legendary journalist Barbara Walters | The Excerpt

On a special episode (first released on Thursday, April 11) of The Excerpt podcast: At age 47, Barbara Walters broke the glass ceiling for women in broadcast journalism, becoming co-anchor of a network evening news program at ABC. She would go on to land big interviews, from U.S. presidents to world leaders like Vladimir Putin and Fidel Castro but also celebrities like the singer Courtney Love and boxer Mike Tyson. Through it all, Walters brought a signature style of interviewing. Her interview subjects laughed with her and cried with her. Actor Patrick Swayze even danced with her. What drove this bold and ambitious woman? Here to talk about the incredible life and career of Barbara Walters is USA TODAY Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page. Susan’s new book “The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters” takes readers behind the glamour of the famous broadcaster to share the story of a woman who broke all the rules, shattered glass ceilings and gave women a permanent place on America’s news airwaves.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Caren Bohan:

Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Caren Bohan, executive editor for politics at USA TODAY. At age 47, Barbara Walters broke the glass ceiling for women in broadcast journalism, becoming co-anchor of a network evening news program at ABC. She also negotiated a salary that broke records, $1 million a year, which was a huge sum back in 1976. She would go on to land big interviews from US presidents to world leaders like Vladimir Putin and Fidel Castro, but also celebrities like the singer, Courtney Love, and Boxer Mike Tyson. And there was her famous interview with Monica Lewinsky about the fallout from her affair with Bill Clinton.

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Through it all, Walters brought a signature style of interviewing. Her interview subjects laughed with her and cried with her. Actor Patrick Swayze even danced with her. What drove this bold and ambitious woman? Here to talk about the incredible life and career of Barbara Walters is USA Today Washington bureau chief, Susan Page. Susan's new book, The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters, takes readers behind the glamour of the famous broadcaster to share the story of a woman who broke all the rules, shattered glass ceilings, and gave women a permanent place on America's news airwaves. Susan, thanks for joining me.

Susan Page:

Hey, Caren, it's great to be with you.

Caren Bohan:

I want to start with rule breaking and sexism. What were the biggest rules Barbara Walters broke?

Susan Page:

Well, when she was starting out in the business, the rule was that women were not substantive enough to do the big interviews, the big newsmaker interviews. So she just went ahead and did them. And the rule was that women's voices weren't authoritative enough for viewers on the evening news to accept as anchors. So she just pushed her way onto the air. And then the rule was that women were not allowed to age on the air. So when she was 67 years old, she started a show called The View, and she appeared on that until she was in her 80s. So for Barbara Walters, it's not just that she broke the rules. It's that she ignored the rules. She pretended that the rules simply could not possibly apply to her.

Caren Bohan:

Bring us inside a TV newsroom in the 1960s and 70s. What was it like for a young woman when Barbara Walters was getting her start?

Susan Page:

So she got her first job on TV as a writer for a short-lived CBS morning show, because the man doing the hiring said she had the cutest ass. And this was a time when that kind of comment that nobody batted an eye at it. When she finally got herself on the air with Frank McGee, he set a rule. He went to the head of the network and set a rule that she could not speak until he had asked the first three questions. So this was a world in which women didn't hold most of these jobs. And if one woman did, another woman certainly couldn't. One woman at a time. That was the rule. So that meant that there was not any great sisterhood. Women often did not support one another in the workplace. It was fierce competition between them.

Caren Bohan:

She was told she wasn't glamorous enough for on-air TV. She was passed over for socialites and movie stars. She pushed ahead anyway. And when she finally got on air, she faced open hostility from her male colleagues, on camera. How is she able to put that aside and thrive?

Susan Page:

Harry Reasoner, her co-anchor on the ABC evening new, was so hostile that they stopped doing two shots. That's a shot where you can see Harry Reasoner listening to Barbara Walters talk because he would always be scowling at her. I think it's wrong to say she ignored it. She was wounded. She was rattled by the hostile workplace that she found herself in. She would go into the makeup room and cry. And then the makeup artist would say, "Stop crying. You're messing up my makeup." So she didn't cry in front of Harry Reasoner because she would never have shown that kind of vulnerability with the men who were torturing her. But it carried a cost for her. It wounded her, it rattled her. It shook her confidence.

Caren Bohan:

For all the many male coworkers who were appalled at her rise and her salary, there was one exception.

Susan Page:

Hugh Downs was the host of the NBC Today Show, and he encouraged them to put her on the air. She was a writer for The Today Show. He saw her possibility. He was not put off by her ambition as many of the men she worked with were. And she was helpful to her in a way almost no one else was. And later in their careers, they became co-hosts again on 20/20.

Caren Bohan:

People like Walter Cronkite dismissed her as a showbiz type and said she wasn't a serious journalist. But her interviewing skills were legendary. She had this powerful connection with her interview subjects and her audience loved it. What was her secret?

Susan Page:

She just worked harder than anybody else. She sometimes worked for years to get someone to agree to do an interview with her. She got a personal connection with news makers that served her well, when she wanted to get them on the air. And she was relentless in working up questions and working over the questions and revising them again and again, putting them on five by eight cards, to say, "What is the best question I could ask, and what is the best way I could ask it?"

Caren Bohan:

Barbara Walters childhood was unconventional and painful in a lot of ways. How did that shape her path?

Susan Page:

Yeah, unconventional for sure. Her father was one of the great impresarios of the 20th century, the founder of the famous Latin Quarter. Her mother was unhappy, distracted. Her older sister was developmentally disabled. And what her father would do, he would gain a huge fortune and they would move into a penthouse off Central Park. And then he would gamble it all away and they would find themselves all but penniless. He did this more than once, and that left her with a sense of her whole life that you could never count on things to be okay. That everything you had could be lost in an instant.

Caren Bohan:

One thing that surprised me in your book was that she got into TV journalism almost by accident. She didn't at first have this grand vision of becoming Barbara Walters, the TV anchor. You write that fresh out of college, she took a job as a secretary and then left that job when her boss became too amorous. And then she ended up in PR at an NBC affiliate. But she was directionless early in her life. And then something changed when she was in her late 20s.

Susan Page:

She had no big ambitions. She had nothing that really she was passionate about in college or afterwards. But when she was 28 years old, her father attempted suicide. And her mother did not call the ambulance. Her mother called her and had her come over, and she called the ambulance and she rode in the ambulance with her father to the hospital. And at that moment, she understood that the responsibility for keeping that family afloat was about to fall on her. That was the pivot point of her life, and it fueled this fierce and unrelenting ambition that she showed for the rest of her life.

Caren Bohan:

We talk a lot in journalism and other professions about work-life balance. For Barbara Walters, what was it like to be a news anchor and a single mother in the 1970s and 80s?

Susan Page:

Barbara Walters did not worry much about work-life balance because she believed in work. Now, she adopted a daughter. But then she hired a live-in nanny and a live-out housekeeper to take care of her daughter. And there was never any question, with her daughter or with her three husbands, about who would come first if she had a chance at a big interview. Even with her close friends, they understood that they were not Barbara Walters priority. And I think she paid a great cost for that late in her life when she found herself isolated and alone and sick in her Fifth Avenue apartment.

Caren Bohan:

What was your favorite Barbara Walters interview?

Susan Page:

I think the interview she was proudest of was the one with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat, the first interview ever between an Egyptian president and an Israeli Prime minister. And she especially liked the fact that she had beaten Walter Cronkite in getting that interview. And the interview that got the biggest splash, that had the biggest ratings of any interview on a single network, before or since, was the interview with Monica Lewinsky. But I have to say the interviews that I like most are the ones where she shows how fearless she is in standing up to power. She was the first Western journalist to get an interview with Vladimir Putin after the 9/11 attacks in Moscow. And she knew the last question she wanted to ask, and she didn't write it down on one of her five by eight cards, because she was worried that Russian Intelligence Services would somehow find it and he would know this last question. And so the interview is almost over. She asked the last question. It was, "President Putin, have you ever ordered a man killed?" And he said, "Yet", which is an answer I don't think anybody believed.

Caren Bohan:

Well, it makes sense why she didn't write it down. When Barbara Walters passed away in 2022 at 93, her remains were brought to Miami where her parents and older sister are buried. The grave site is very private. But you were determined to find her parting words. Can you share the back story?

Susan Page:

So she dies, and there is a great movement among ABC and others to have a big memorial service for her, because she had been such an iconic figure. But her daughter wasn't comfortable with that. And so they cremated her body. The remains went to her daughter. Her daughter then told no one [inaudible 00:09:46], none of her friends or the ABC executives, what her plan was. Now, I assumed that she would go and be interred in the same Miami cemetery where her parents and her sister were. But the cemetery refused to tell us, number one, that she was there or number two where she was. So I hired a researcher, Romi Ruiz, who was a Miami-based editor for USA Today. And she, I cannot tell you what she had to do, moving heaven and Earth, defined Barbara Walters grave site. And the message that she left on her gravestone, which said, "No regrets. I had a wonderful life."

Caren Bohan:

Final question: Apart from being a trailblazer, how do you think Barbara Walters change the news business itself, and where does her imprint continue to be most visible?

Susan Page:

To say that Barbara Walters was a groundbreaking woman, journalist, understates her influence. She was a groundbreaking journalist of either gender. She was interested in presidents and murderers and sports figures and Hollywood figures, and she interviewed all of them. She thought all of them were worth interviewing. She was a great innovator at a time TV was just beginning to imagine its possibilities. I think she stands in the company of people like Roone Arledge and Edward R. Murrow and Oprah Winfrey, when it comes to defining this medium in exploring its possibilities.

Caren Bohan:

Susan's book is called The Rulebreaker, and you can find it out on bookshelves or at your favorite online retailer, April 23rd. Thanks so much for being on The Excerpt, Susan.

Susan Page:

Hey, thanks, Caren.

Caren Bohan:

Thanks to our senior producers, Shannon Rae Green and Bradley Glanzrock for their production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Caren Bohan. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.