Barbara Walters, who is retiring after 50 years in television today, has had the kind of career that sends writers to their thesauruses, scrabbling around to find another synonym for “legendary” or “pioneering” or “iconic.” The scope of her professional life is nearly impossible to sum up coherently. But let’s try.
Television news looks the way it does today in large part because of her. She was one of the first people to so fully fuse journalism and celebrity, often looming larger in her interviews than the people she was talking to. And, most importantly, women are taken seriously on TV because people like her battled their way through a deeply sexist world. Walters was the first, and, because she triumphed, there will never be another like her.
Walters herself certainly never intended to make it in television, though she was born into a showbiz family. Her father, Lou, was a nightclub owner who, after several failures, finally managed to open a successful club called the Latin Quarter. Walters’ mother was a housewife, and she had a sister, Jackie, who was mentally disabled. (She would later name her adopted daughter Jackie.)
