“She is like the autumn cherry tree,” said Time magazine in 1995, “in full flower.” When a hard-edged news magazine waxes this lyrical about a woman, one would expect her to be a movie star. In this case, the object of the admiration is a journalist with a reputation for integrity, professionalism, and, at times, unscrupulous competitiveness. But then, Barbara Walters has always elicited extreme responses.

Barbara Jill Walters was born on September 25, 1931, in Boston, to Louis Edward and Dena (Selett) Walters, and grew up in Boston, Miami ,and New York City. She had two older siblings: a sister, Jacqueline, who was developmentally disabled who died of ovarian cancer in 1985, and a brother, Burton, who died of pneumonia at a young age. Her father, known as Lew, was a well-known nightclub owner whose life was filled with celebrities, excitement, and financial success. Barbara attended both public and private schools. She attended Miami Beach Senior High School and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1953 with a bachelor’s degree in English. “Until I was about twenty-three or twenty-four,” she told interviewer Tabitha Soren in 1996, “we were very rich. I can go around New York and show you all the penthouses we lived in. And then in my later twenties it was all gone.” From that point on, Walters focused on supporting herself and helping to take care of her family.

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Personally, Walters has sometimes suffered for her success, including two divorces and an annulment\. Her relationship with her daughter, Jacqueline Dena Guber (b. June 14, 1968),  survived many difficult and painful times. She reminded USA Weekend interviewer Tabitha Soren that the world was very different when her daughter, whom she adopted with her second husband Lee Guber in 1968, was growing up. “There were women leaving their husbands and children because they had to fulfill themselves. It’s no longer like that. Joan Lunden or Katie Couric can bring her kids to work. [If I’d brought my baby] into the studios, people would have looked at me like I was bringing in a puppy that wasn’t housebroken.”

Walters  collected virtually all of the broadcasting industry’s highest awards. She received the National Association of Television Program Executives Award and was named the International Radio and Television Society’s Broadcaster of the Year in 1975, the year she received the first of her four Emmy awards (1970, 1980, 1982, 1983). In 1988, she was honored with the President’s Award by the Overseas Press Club and was given a retrospective at the Museum of Broadcasting. In 1990, she was inducted into the Television Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame and received the Lowell Thomas Award for journalistic excellence. She received the lifetime achievement award of the International Women’s Media Foundation in 1991, and that of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in 2000. She received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2007 and in 2008 the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 30th Annual News and Documentary Emmy Awards.

Her old friend and co-host Hugh Downs explained her success this way: “Barbara has operated on the premise that her first allegiance is to the person tuning in. She represents the viewer and does it without hostility.” From someone who has himself mastered the art of nonconfrontational interviewing, that is praise indeed. And according to Time, Walters often elicited praise from the specialists: “Walters is a terrific editor, say her editors. She is a great writer, say her writers. She is her own best booker, say her producers. She is her own best publicist, say her publicists. She works us hard, but she works harder than we do, they say.”

Barbara Walters died on December 30, 2022.

How to Talk to Practically Anybody about Practically Anything, with June Callwood.  New York: Doubleday, 1970.

Audition: A Memoir. New York: Knopf, 2008.