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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.
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.
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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.
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