Susan Page dishes on the feud with Diane Sawyer, Walters’ lonely final years, and her remarkable legacy.
Over the past five years, Susan Page has penned three books about three immensely influential women. In 2019, she published The Matriarch about Barbara Bush; in 2021, she released Madam Speaker, her biography of Nancy Pelosi; and now she’s back with The Rulebreaker, an in-depth look at the life and groundbreaking career of the one and only Barbara Walters.
For this book, Page — USA Today’s Washington bureau chief and an exceptional journalist in her own right — researched Walters’ rise and how she became one of the most important figures in broadcast history. (Honoring Walters is something we at Katie Couric Media know plenty about, too — Katie wrote multiple tributes to the icon after her 2022 death at age 93, which you can see below and in this piece from The New York Times.)
“She was proud that she was the original,” Page tells us. “If you’re talking about women in TV journalism, you cannot start the conversation without naming Barbara Walters.”
We spoke to Page about the near-tragedy that fueled Walters’ boundless ambition, her legendary rivalry with Diane Sawyer, the loneliness of her final years, and more.
Katie Couric: I had to compete against Barbara, and it wasn’t easy. What was the funniest story you learned about how she was able to get a scoop?
Susan Page: Barbara would do anything to get a scoop — to land an interview that she and, say, Katie Couric wanted. There were even times when she would try to steal an interview that another journalist had booked. When Diane Sawyer was doing her first ever primetime show on ABC, Barbara Walters sent one of her production staff to the hotel where Diane’s chief interviewee, Thomas Root [a lawyer who was dramatically rescued after a plane accident], was being put up to try to convince him to go talk to Barbara instead. Diane’s first big show, and Barbara’s trying to steal Diane’s big guest.
Her rivalry with Diane Sawyer was legendary. Publicly, as you write, they acted as if they were great friends. I heard so many stories through the years. What was the true nature of their relationship?
It’s entirely true that they were ferocious rivals, but that’s not the only thing they were. There were also some layers to their relationship, and there were ways in which the two of them understood better than anyone the price that each was paying to have these amazing careers.
I always felt Barbara had to sacrifice her personal life for her career. Her relationship with her daughter, Jaqueline, was strained, and she herself said she “wasn’t very good at marriage.” Can you tell us about that?
Barbara paid a big price in her personal life. There was no work-life balance; there was just work. She had three failed marriages, and she was for a time estranged from her only child. It was a price she felt she didn’t have the option of not paying. She didn’t feel like she could do the things that she wanted to do and achieve the things she wanted to achieve if she let work ever come second to her personal life.
Barbara was so resilient. She went through hell at ABC when she co-anchored with Harry Reasoner, who was a real ass to her. (I loved reading about that — reminded me of some real jerks who came after Harry!) It seemed she always had to fight for everything she got.
She was a groundbreaker who pushed her way into places where nobody thought she belonged. There’s no better example of that than the ABC Evening News, when she was put on as co-anchor with Harry Reasoner. He was so openly hostile that they stopped using the camera angle where you could see Reasoner listening to Barbara talk because he was always scowling.
Do you have a sense of where her persistence and resilience comes from?
Her father, Lou Walters, was this great impresario, a creator of famous nightclubs like the Latin Quarter. He would make a million dollars and they would be living in a penthouse overlooking Central Park, and then he would gamble it all away. I think that fueled a general sense of insecurity in Barbara when she was young. Then when she was 28, he attempted suicide, and it was at that moment that I think she realized that caring for her unhappy mother and disabled sister would fall to her. That became what one person I interviewed called the “rocket fuel” that propelled Barbara Walters from then on.
What can you tell us about how she approached interviews?
She did the most extensive preparation for her interviews. She would read a lot of research about her subjects and spend hours and hours trying to craft the questions. She would write questions on three by five cards and revise them, shuffle them, throw them away to try to figure out what questions she should ask and in which order. She was also very determined to ask the question that people really wanted the answer to. For instance, when she interviewed Vladimir Putin in the first Western interview he gave after the 9/11 attacks, the last question she asked the former KGB Chief was, “Have you ever ordered someone killed?” And he gave a one-word answer: “Nyet.”
Was there anything you learned about Barbara that really surprised you?
I was struck by the isolation and loneliness of her final years. When her health was deteriorating and she was using a wheelchair, she was spending almost all of her time in her apartment on Fifth Avenue and pushing away even close friends. For somebody who loved conversation and loved being in the middle of things, I thought that would not have been the end she would’ve chosen.
When all is said and done, what do you think Barbara was proudest of?
I think the interview she was proudest of was a historic one, where she sat down with both Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. It was the first time the leaders of those two countries had ever sat down side by side and answered questions.
In a larger sense, she was proud that she was the original. If you’re talking about women in TV journalism, you cannot start the conversation without naming Barbara Walters — and Katie Couric, of course.
Was it fun writing this book?
I had so much fun. Barbara Walters was so funny and remarkable and fearless and, I think, a cautionary tale for us all about how not to live. But I’ve always liked her and respected her, and I wanted people to see her as a three-dimensional figure, because I don’t think she’s seen that way.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
