American journalist Barbara Walters, the first woman in the country to anchor an evening newscast, died on Friday, 30 December, at 93 in her New York home.
The India Connection
In India, Walters was best known for her exclusive interview with former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who she met with after the latter lost the Lok Sabha elections in 1977 .
While any archival records of the interview are unavailable in public domain, in her 2008 autobiography, Walters had recalled her meeting with the former Indian PM. An article in The New Yorker about this meeting read,
The young Indira Gandhi became “very human to me,” Walters recalls, when, during their first meeting, she complained about the shortage of closet space in the Indian Prime Minister’s residence.
'America's Best-Known Television Personality'
The New York Times once called her “arguably America's best-known television personality.” A winner of 12 Emmy awards, she was a pioneer of women’s journalism in the US in many ways.
Born on 25 September in Boston, Walters started as a writer and segment producer on NBC’s “Today” in 1961.
Walters had been open about how her colleague Frank McGee tried to “limit her role” while she was in NBC. And that was when, with a USD 1 million annual salary offer, she switched to ABC network, becoming the first woman to co-anchor an American network evening newscast in 1976.
After her stint on “ABC Evening News,” Walters went on to establish a magazine show “20/20” as the co-anchor. She also hosted special interviews for the network.
Prominent interviews of hers included those with Egypt’s Anwar Al Sadat, Israel’s Menachem Begin, the Shah of Iran, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and Russia’s Boris Yeltsin.
She is also known to have interviewed every US president since Richard Nixon.
She was also the creator of ABC’s “The View” in 1997 which was a roundtable discussion for women. Apart from this, Walters also hosted a pre-Oscars interview program for 29 years.
A Speech Impediment That Was Anything But An Impediment
Walters had a speech impediment which meant it was difficult for her to pronounce the letter R, which often made her the target of mockery, including on a sketch on Saturday Night Live.
In a 2004 Chicago Tribune interview, Walters had said, “I never thought I'd have this kind of a life. I've met everyone in the world. I've probably met more people, more heads of state, more important people, even almost than any president, because they've only had eight years,” reported Reuters.
In 2008, with the release of Walters’s autobiography Audition: A Memoir, her love life too became a part of headlines. Reuters reported that she “revealed an affair with then-married Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, the first black senator since post-Civil War Reconstruction.”
But even as she was broadcasting the news or being the news herself, hers was a "giant personality" often hard to ignore. An aspiring actor who somehow stumbled into journalism and went on to make history, Walters was, as The New Yorker once wrote, "at once a bourgeois, an establishmentarian, and a Hollywood queen transposed to Manhattan."
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