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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Full Bio is back. It's our monthly book series where we spend a few days with the author of a deeply researched biography to get a fuller understanding of the subject. Today, we are discussing The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters by Susan Page. She is the Washington Bureau chief for USA Today and the author of books about Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Bush.

During Barbara Walters career, no one was like her. Walters worked her way up from a 1960s news writer of women's segments to interviewing world leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Walters became the first person to make a million dollars as a news anchor, and her famous interviews of hard-to-get subjects like Monica Lewinsky led to praise and scrutiny for her invasive questioning and what she would do to land those gets.

Just when most people would consider retiring at 67, Walters developed a show that would change the face of daytime TV, The View. Today we start with her background. Barbara Jill Walters was born in Boston, Mass. Her father, Lou, was a nightclub impresario who gambled away their fortune, time after time. The family moved from New York to Boston to Miami, and then back to New York.

Her mother, Dena, helped raise the kids. Barbara's brother died of pneumonia as a baby, and her sister, Jacqueline, had developmental disabilities, and Barbara was just trying to figure out where she fit in. We start off today's full bio with the backstory on the Walters family, which starts with a name change. Here's my conversation with Susan Page, author of The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters.

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Barbara Walters father's name was Louis Abraham Warmwater, and he was born in London in 1894. How did the Warmwaters' arrive in London?

Susan Page: His family, his father had fled the Russian Empire for safer ground in London, and his mother had also had ancestry from the Russian Empire and was the daughter of a pretty successful family in London. They met, and, of course, they weren't finished moving because then they moved on to New York.

Alison Stewart: Warmwater wasn't the actual name that we know Barbara Walters by. How did they get to Walters?

Susan Page: They started with Warmwater. For a short period of time, used the last name of Abraham, and they finally ended up with Walters at the time they moved to the United States, as did so many immigrant families when they came through Ellis Island.

Alison Stewart: It was interesting. Even though they came to the States, the family retained a certain Britishness about them, the grandmother Lillian, especially. What was an example of the Britishness she showed, and how did the Britishness affect a very young Barbara?

Susan Page: This would be Barbara's paternal grandmother, who had certain airs, you might say. They continued to have tea in the afternoon, and when King Edward abdicated the throne, it was a traumatic time for her. Barbara Walters remembered her grandmother weeping at the loss there of the British royalty.

Alison Stewart: Louis Walters, he met Dena Seletsky when he was 25 years old, but some in her family did not approve. Why would a marriage to a nice fellow be looked at so closely by her family?

Susan Page: Maybe nice fellow, but his job was booking vaudeville acts, and that struck some as not being perhaps 100% respectable, and it struck all of them as not being 100% safe kind of occupation. They had a shoe store. Dena was working in a store that sold men's ties, and that seemed to be the stable life that they had in mind for her, but Lou Walters was, by all accounts, a real charmer, both in his personal life and in his professional.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Susan Page. We're talking about Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters. It's our choice for Full Bio. Lou Walters' business would be a bit of a haunting legacy for Barbara Walters career. He had highs, he had lows. In the beginning, he founded Lou Walters booking agency above a drugstore. He turned it into a million-dollar business. We would see this over and over again. That first time he was a booking agent, who were the artists that he hired? Was it a legit business?

Susan Page: It was a legit business, but a scrambling one, because there was another agency that had all the big acts, all the famous ones. Lou Walters scrambled to get up-and-comers, or maybe people who had seen their prime in the past, taking a risk with folks who hadn't proven themselves, and he turned out to have a very keen eye for entertainers who would appeal to an audience. I think that was maybe something his daughter inherited.

Alison Stewart: He started a club, The Latin Club, and this was pre-1929 depression. What did he tap into? What would have been part of a Lou Walters production at The Latin Club?

Susan Page: He had a formula. It was big steaks and skimpy costumes.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Susan Page: He would give people a sense that they were having a wonderful evening out, a very entertaining one, with showgirls and with generous food and with fun for all.

Alison Stewart: During 1929 and the Great Depression, the Walters went from living in a mansion that he had all this great success, to living in a tiny apartment. What did the highs and lows teach Barbara?

Susan Page: Yes, and not the only time they went from a penthouse to near bankruptcy. That was a repeated pattern in Barbara Walters childhood, because her father could be enormously successful. The Latin quarter, the nightclub he founded, first in Boston, and then in Miami, and finally, in New York, they were enormously successful. Then he would gamble it all away in Gin Rummy games, or he would invest in a Broadway show, or he would have some other adventure or some other aspiration. He would pour all of this money into it and over and over again, he would bet it all and lose it all and have to build it back up again.

Alison Stewart: Ultimately, her father gambled everything away. They moved to Palm Beach, started a new nightclub that became a success. You title a chapter called The Fifth Grader and the Bootlegger. It's a tale of how a 10-year-old Barbara Walters became friends with William Dwyer, a renowned bootlegger who lived with the family because of some unusual means. We'll let people read and understand that. Why would a shy, slightly bookish girl take up a friendly relationship with a bootlegger?

Susan Page: One of the characteristics of Barbara Walter's life from that time in the fifth grade until the day she died was that she was not put off by men who had a certain past, men who were bootleggers or who had gone to prison or who were mobbed up. These were characters in her life at her father's nightclubs. You know what? She didn't find them alarming. She found them interesting. This particular bootlegger, I think he gave her attention that her parents did not.

Her father was consumed with his own business world. Her mother was overwhelmed by the responsibilities of caring for her older sister, who was disabled. Here was this nice enough guy who owned a racetrack and who wanted to spend time with her and who would place her bets at the racetrack, and by the way, when he placed her bets, she always won.

Alison Stewart: You mentioned her sister. The family initially consisted of three children, a son who died after birth, a daughter, Jacqueline, and then Barbara. On September 25, 1929, Jacqueline had some developmental difficulties, the kind that kept her back, especially considering the time. What kind of relationship did young Barbara have with her sister, Jacqueline?

Susan Page: Barbara said that her relationship with Jackie was the defining relationship of her life, that her life was shaped more by Jackie than by anything else, and that was because she loved Jackie. Jackie was her sister. Jackie could be very kind and loving, but she said she hated Jackie, too, because Jackie's limitations constrained her own life. It consumed her mother. It meant that she felt she couldn't bring friends home from school because they would be dealing with Jackie. The fact was, I think especially as a child, Barbara just didn't have the confidence to embrace Jackie publicly. Instead, she was ashamed of her and didn't want her friends to see her.

Alison Stewart: As a child, Barbara Walters claimed to have had a terrible stomach ailment. You write about this in the book, and it appeared to be fake. She even sat through a surgery, all to get attention. What do you make of the idea that she would undergo surgery as a kid?

Susan Page: Think how desperate she must have been to command her mother's attention that she did this. She complained endlessly about a stomachache, although she didn't, in fact, have a stomachache. Even when the doctors, of course, couldn't find anything wrong because there wasn't anything wrong, one of the doctors finally said, "Well, I guess we should take her appendix out."

As you said, Barbara Walters went along with this [inaudible 00:10:28] any regrets because it meant even though this was at that point significant surgery, she was in the hospital for days, it meant she had her mother and she had her mother to herself. The thing that's alarming to me about this story, the thing that made me sad was not that Barbara Walters faked a stomachache to get her mother's attention. It said, "No adult in her life recognized what was really at work here, how lonely this child was and how much she wanted more attention from her parents."

Alison Stewart: My guest is Susan Page. The book is Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters. It's our choice for Full Bio. She winds up at Sarah Lawrence for college. Where did Barbara Walters find herself at Sarah Lawrence? What did she do?

Susan Page: I think that she had some fun. I think she was not an incredibly studious student. She was once elected to head of her dorm, that was a position of a little bit of responsibility. She wasn't especially involved in current events, although some of her classmates were very involved in the many things that were going on in the world then.

She didn't have any great purpose in life. She had no big theory about what she wanted to do. She watched a lot of her friends graduate and get married and start having children. She was just drifting, I think. She did that for a couple years. She got married for the first time, a marriage that she would later conveniently forget she had ever had. Three years later, she got divorced. A quickie Alabama divorce, by the way. I hadn't known beforehand that existed, then she found herself a bit at loose ends, and then she had the biggest disaster with her family that they would ever have.

Alison Stewart: Please explain.

Susan Page: She was 28 years old. She had just gotten back from Alabama and getting divorced. She was crashing with a friend at the friend's parents' apartment in New York. Her mother called one morning and said, "Your father has taken all of his pills." Her father, the night before, had come home from his nightclub, which was at that point, failing. He had attempted suicide. It tells you something about the dynamic of the family that her mother didn't call an ambulance. Her mother called Barbara.

Barbara came rushing over to the hotel where they were staying. She called the ambulance. She rode with her father to the hospital, and she said later that she knew almost instantly that her life had just changed, that now, from then on, she was the one who was going to be responsible for holding the family together emotionally and also providing for it financially.

Alison Stewart: This is a very funny story that I'm wearing a gold chain with a golden circle on the bottom, and it says 5/30/'51, and it belonged to my mother. My mother went to Sarah Lawrence, and I didn't know what the date meant until I read your book and realized that was the graduation day, because my mother was in Barbara Walters class at Sarah Lawrence.

Susan Page: Oh, that's wonderful. Did your mother know Barbara Walters?

Alison Stewart: She did, and Barbara Walters knew of her because my mother was one of, I think, two black women at the school. She was like, "Yes, I know your mom." The thing she said that was interesting was my dad knew her, too, was it took a lot of chutzpah to enter the communications business because her speech impediment was real.

Susan Page: Before we leave your mother's experience with Barbara Walters, I'm sure your mother got a mix of treatment from other students at Sarah Lawrence. How did Barbara Walters treat her? Was she friendly? Was she respectful?

Alison Stewart: She was nice enough. She was nice enough. I think my college-- My mother's roommate's name was, "Oh, I can't remember her name," but she was friendlier with my mother's roommate. I do remember that.

Susan Page: It was quite the time, I think, to be a woman graduating from college. It was not only before we became sensitized to sexual harassment, it was a time when the expectations for women were so very low, the expectations of having a big career or making a lot of money. It was something that seemed, I think, quite unlikely for women who were growing up becoming young adults at that time. I have so much respect for the women of what we call, the silent generation, because it took a certain chutzpah for them to speak up.

Alison Stewart: When we come back, we'll hear about Barbara Walters early years and how she became the million dollar woman in her deal with ABC, but risks becoming a failure in the process. This is All Of It.

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This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We continue this edition of Full Bio. We are discussing The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters by Susan Page. We pick back up with Barbara Walters trajectory from NBC to ABC, a move that made her the first person to be paid $1 million. This was in 1976. That would be about $5 million today. It also set Walters up for a tussle with male co-anchors and female rivals. Let's get back into our conversation with Susan Page, the author of The Rulebreaker.

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Prior to her first gig on the Today Show as a writer and producer, what were Barbara's earliest tv aspirations?

Susan Page: I think that Barbara Walters always wanted to be on the air, but that realistically, she started out trying to become a writer or a gopher or a support staffer of any kind at television. She got an early job as a writer at CBS, and then she got a slightly better job as the girl writer for NBC's Today Show because God knows, first of all, you only have one girl writer. You would never have two.

You have the girl writer write for the girls on the air, not for the men, because God knows women couldn't possibly write men on the air. That's [inaudible 00:17:25] which she got started, and once she got her foot in the door, there was just no stopping her. She worked harder than anybody else. She networked more than anyone you could imagine. That was a characteristic of her whole life. She managed to first get herself on the air occasionally, and finally, to get herself on the air more regularly on NBC's Today Show.

Alison Stewart: When she got her job writing on the Today Show in the early '60s, she was producing a five minute women's segment, and she said she was there to do the job. Others felt she was, "pushy." Was she a young woman in a hurry, or was she being victimized for having ambition? What do you think?

Susan Page: Both. Even when she was very successful, she thought that people often looked askance at women who seemed to have too much ambition. There was some of that. She was not just pushy. She called herself a pushy cookie, and she was a pushy cookie like most of these people had never seen before, including the woman who was the host of that five minute segment that Barbara was writing for. She said that Barbara would stand off camera to the side of the set and mouth along with her, the words that Barbara had written for the host to say. That was when it became pretty apparent that Barbara wanted to get on the other side of the TV camera.

Alison Stewart: How did she get to the other side?

Susan Page: She started by volunteering to do features, many of them about women that could get her on the air. She did a story about nuns. She did a story about women ecologists. She did, famously, a story about going undercover as a playboy bunny. Now, this was about the same time that Gloria Steinem made a big splash with what was essentially an expose about going undercover as a playboy bunny. That was not the tone Barbara Walters took. It was one of, how much fun is this and how hard they work and how much they're trained. By the way, here's how you do the distinctive angling so that you can get a drink on the table without revealing too much of yourself.

Alison Stewart: One of her first TV gigs, she had to travel abroad, and she thought she could get Jacqueline Kennedy to speak with her. That didn't exactly work out.

Susan Page: Yes, she got herself onto Jackie Kennedy's trip to India and elsewhere with-- Jackie Kennedy, went with her sister, who had also gone to Sarah Lawrence briefly. This was an enormous story, and she was one of the very few women and very few women in broadcasting to get on this trip. She did it in part by saying she had these connections that she could play, which turned out not to be true, but it was really a valuable experience for her in that she was on the road, traveling in foreign places.

She was the number three correspondent from the network who was on this trip, so she had to really be smart and hard-working to figure out how to warm her way on the air. The men who were directing the show at that time said later that she hadn't really done a great job, but that when she came back, they explained what she had done wrong and that she would never make the same mistakes again.

Alison Stewart: She got the job on the Today Show, but after being passed over. If you can go through the list of people that they were including, that they were looking at to take the place of the anchor on the show, who was on that list?

Susan Page: The Today Show went through an endless list, it seemed like, before they finally thought, "Oh, yes, this woman who just is desperate to do it and is right in front of our faces wants to do it." There was Robbin Bain, who won a beauty contest sponsored by a New York beer company. Then there was an actress named Louise King, and they gave it to a very famous actress, Maureen O'Sullivan, who turned out to be quite ill-suited for it, and then they offered it to Betty White. They offered to Betty White, who was then living on the West Coast, so they would fly her back every week. She could stay in a really nice hotel in New York. She turned them down. It was only then that they turned to Barbara Walters.

Alison Stewart: My guest, Susan Page. We're talking about Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters. It's our choice for Full Bio. She gets to the Today Show desk and she has to deal with Frank McGee and McGee's law. Let's say he's taken over for Hugh Downs. Can I just say that he seemed like there was no need for a Barbara Walters.

Susan Page: Frank McGee had no enthusiasm for sharing the set with Barbara Walters. That was pretty clear. He was a serious newsman. He didn't think that Barbara, Barbara Walters was a real journalist, and he found her annoying. He went to the network, to the head of the network, and set a rule that Barbara Walters could not speak during an interview until Frank had asked the first three questions. Now, can you imagine Barbara Walters sitting there patiently, silently, as Frank McGee asks the first three questions?

How insulting is that? Yet, it was something that she accepted because she didn't have a real choice. There is a way, Alison, in which this turned out to be the best possible thing that could have happened to Barbara Walters, because the only way she was going to get interviews that were her own were to land them herself and to conduct them outside the studio where Frank McGee would not be. That really launched her to do the interviews, the big gets and spontaneous interviews that had people telling you their vulnerabilities and sometimes crying that became the signature of Barbara Walters.

Alison Stewart: Her big break came when Dean Rusk, secretary of state in the '60s when he wanted to be interviewed by her. First of all, why did he want to be interviewed by her, and how did that change things for Barbara Walters?

Susan Page: Well, I think he wanted to be interviewed by her because she had worked so hard to get it. She had networked. She would go to cocktail parties and dinners. She would meet newsmakers and then follow up with handwritten notes saying how much she had enjoyed meeting them, and he chose her. He was a very big name. There was a lot of unhappiness with the Washington press corps, mostly male, that this person with a morning show in New York had landed this big interview. It was groundbreaking for her. It stamped her as a serious journalist to be worthy of some consideration.

Alison Stewart: It seemed that Barbara Walters had an odd relationship with NBC. She was appreciated, but not that much. It seemed that NBC didn't care whether she decided to entertain an offer from ABC. It really gave ABC the ability to swoop in and make an offer. Why do you think NBC sort of gave up on her, or did she give up on them?

Susan Page: NBC had some things going on, on the business side that were distracting. The fundamental problem, it was that they did not think Barbara Walters would be a good anchor of the evening news, and that was the price she wanted more than anything. At this point, she had some good friends like Dick Wald, who were in very senior positions, and they wouldn't give it to her because they didn't think that dealt to her strengths.

You know what, Allison? I think they turned out to be right. It gave ABC the opportunity to come in and offer her a million-dollar contract, more than any news person had made before, and to make her the co-anchor of the ABC Evening News, the first woman ever to be the co-anchor of a network evening show.

Alison Stewart: She goes to ABC and we get the evening news with Harry Reasoner and Barbara Walters. This is in your book under the chapter heading Failure. They kind of had the opposite of good chemistry. We're going to listen to a little bit of that broadcast.

Barbara Walters: Most of you watching tonight are loyal viewers of Harry's and of ABC News. I hope, too, that some of you are friends from my early morning days at NBC. I've missed you. There may be others of you tuning in for the first time out of curiosity, drawn by the rather too much attention and overblown publicity given to my new duties and my hourly wage. It is to you that I'd like to take a moment for a personal note. Harry and I are going to bring you the essential information you need to cope with the world today. We are going to do a news program.

I hope, too, to give you a closer look at the people who are the shapers of these new events. I find interviews a way to do this, and I will do them in this program when they're relevant. Also, I'd like to pause from time to time as we shower news items on you to say, "Wait a minute. What does this mean to my life and to yours?" Whether it's understanding why every television news program gives the Dow Jones industrial averages and what it means to you, even if you don't own any stock, or trying to understand the difference between the problems of Rhodesia and South Africa.

Whether it's tying the national and international news more closely to its impact on your life or the quality of life that we all hope to enjoy. If some of the issues that are of particular concern to women have been neglected, I'll try to deal with those. Which reminds me, people have asked if I want to be called an anchorman or anchorwoman or anchor person or even, as our producer refers to us, anchor human. Titles aren't important. What is important is that Harry and I will try to bring you the best darn news program on the air. We hope if you've watched tonight out of curiosity, you'll return to watch us tomorrow out of conviction. Mr. Reasoner.

Harry Reasoner: Thank you, Barbara. I had a little trouble in thinking of what to say to welcome you. Not to sound sexist, as in that you brighten up the place, or patronizing, as in that wasn't a bad interview, or sycophantic and is, how in the world do you do it? 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. You owe me four minutes. Now for Barbara Walters and I, goodnight.

Alison Stewart: If you could give me a reason, why it was a failure because of Harry Reasoner, why it was a failure because of Barbara Walters and why it was a failure because of ABC. Let's start with Harry Reasoner first.

Susan Page: Harry Reasoner didn't want Barbara there. In fact, when he first heard they wanted to hire her, he said he would quit. Then they threw some more money his way and he decided he would stay. Number one, he liked being the solo anchor. He didn't want to share the desk. He especially didn't want to share the desk with a woman. He was a sexist, a misogynist, and he said and did things that today would get him fired.

Alison Stewart: What about Barbara Walters? What was her role in it being a failure?

Susan Page: Barbara Walters was great at landing and delivering big interviews. She was not great at sitting behind a desk and reading from a teleprompter the news that had been written by someone else. In a way, it put a spotlight on her greatest weakness, which was the fact that she had what amounted to a speech defect. She had this weird speech anomaly that she would call a Boston accent, although it's not like an accent I've heard from anyone else in Boston. It was kind of a lisp, and it was part of her persona. She went to speech coaches. She never got rid of it. Being an anchor just was not what Barbara Walters did best, even though that was the job she wanted most.

Alison Stewart: Then where would you put ABC's responsibility for it failing?

Susan Page: ABC didn't, I think, do due diligence before setting up this duo, given that it was so disastrous. They were hoping for smart repartee. Instead, what they got was a situation where the director had to stop using two shots, which is a camera shot that might show Harry Reasoner listening to Barbara Walters as she spoke, and they had to cut those out because he would always be scowling.

Alison Stewart: How awful. Roone Arledge became the head of ABC News from the sports division, and he really saw Barbara Walters as an extension of himself, an outsider kind of looking in. What did he know he could accomplish with Barbara Walters and her talents that others didn't have?

Susan Page: Roone Arledge didn't mind that some people thought Barbara was off-putting. He thought that could be a good thing in somebody on the air. It could be a reason people would tune in to see her. He saw Harry Reasoner as somebody who had tried and failed to bring the ABC News out of third place in the ratings and as someone who could be easily-- "There are other Harry Reasoners," he said, "There's not another Barbara Walters."

He was invested in Barbara Walters, whom he had known since they were both in their 20s. He recognized that the evening news was the wrong place for her, and so he engineered a change in assignment so that she went back to doing the interviews that she did so well, without ever actually acknowledging that she had gotten fired from the anchor chair.

Alison Stewart: You wrote that Barbara was determined to win the game, not change its rules at this point. Now that she's able to go and do the interview she wants to do, what was a time where she sort of broke the rules and won for it maybe?

Susan Page: One of my favorite stories is in 1976, I think it was when the Camp David Summit was being held with the leaders of Egypt and Israel trying to hammer out a landmark agreement between Egypt and Israel. The reporters, 50 reporters who were covering this were left to cool their heels in Thurmont, Maryland, which was a short distance from Camp David, but might as well been a million miles away because the newsmakers weren't there and the news wasn't happening there.

Finally, they brought two buses up with the journalists to do a photo op at Camp David where they could see Anwar el-Sadat, the leader of Egypt, and Menachem Begin, the leader of Israel, and President Carter, just briefly, not to interview them, but basically to take their picture and to get some footage of Camp David before they were sent back down the hill. When the buses loaded up, there were only 49 reporters on the buses, and that's because Barbara Walters was missing.

One of the Carter aides came on the bus and said to Sam Donaldson, the White House correspondent working for ABC, "Where is Barbara Walters?" He said, "Am I my sister's keeper?" Of course, Sam actually had no idea where Barbara Walters was. They searched Camp David. Camp David, one of the most secure places on earth, one of the most closely guarded places on earth, the presidential retreat in the mountains, and they found Barbara Walters hiding in a stall in a bathroom.

Her plan, apparently was to, when the buses had gone and all the other reporters were away, she would emerge and find some of these newsmakers, all of whom she knew, and get a scoop. Can you imagine? They march her back to the bus. She gets on the bus and is carted away. You know, Alison, what she didn't do? She didn't apologize because she thought that it was worth the risk in the hopes of getting a big prize.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Susan Page. The book is Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters is our choice for Full Bio. You write about Diane Sawyer. If someone had to bill to order the woman most likely to set off Barbara Walters, she would have looked a lot like Diane Sawyer. First of all, what would that woman look like? What would set off Barbara Walters?

Susan Page: Diane Sawyer was beautiful. Diane Sawyer did not have a speech anomaly. Diane Sawyer also had had a much easier time than Barbara Walters had in rising through the ranks of broadcast journalism. She was 16 years younger, so some time had passed. Things were a little easier for women. In Barbara Walters eyes, Diane Sawyer always had it easy. The other thing that I think really set off Barbara, Roone Arledge was enchanted by Diane Sawyer, and Roone Arledge had been Barbara's defender, Barbara's rabbi. She saw Diane Sawyer as a rival and a risk for her career.

Alison Stewart: Yes, they used to call them when they were all there, they called them, anchor monsters, at ABC because there was no central booking. They just went for it.

Susan Page: This was like the Roone Arledge style of management was to set, hire, ambitious, skilled people and set them against one another. He did that with the men that he hired as well, but no one had the kind of edge, the fierceness that the rivalry did of the rivalry between Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters. It was just of an entirely different level.

Alison Stewart: You know, that Barbara was the kind of woman who could be your best friend. She could also be your worst friend. Sometimes she would hold a grudge, as she did against a news anchor who made a joke about her having plastic surgery. What did she see as the, and this [unintelligible 00:36:25] sound weird, but the purpose of friendship?

Susan Page: I think that's a really good question, because Barbara Walters had some friends from school, from high school and college that would be friends through her whole life, and she had some friends in New York society. When she looked at women in her career, other women who worked in TV broadcasting, especially those who were on the air, she did not see potential friends or potential allies. She saw rivals. She saw people who were going to compete with her for the things that she wanted. I don't think she saw no great purpose for friendship.

I think today women in the workplace often think about sisterhood, think about helping one another, being supportive of one another. Not all the time, but it's certainly more of a thing now than it ever was during Barbara Walters Day. Especially when Barbara Walters was starting out, it was a zero sum game for women.

If some other woman got an anchor job, there wasn't going to be another woman at that anchor desk or some other woman got on the morning show, you weren't going to get on the morning show. That was an approach that she, Barbara Walters, never really lost, even after she was, by every measure, the most successful of them all.

Alison Stewart: Tomorrow on Full Bio, we hear about Barbara Walters personal life, her marriages, her estranged daughter, and how she perfected the long-form interview.

 

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