She made subjects believe they were getting an open-minded hearing and that made them talk.
Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
Chavez replied, Thats true.
But who is causing more harm?
He burns people, villages, and he invades nations.
Twenty-two years ago, she asked the Russian premier Vladimir Putin if hed ever had anyone killed.
I probably should have, he replied.
She asked Monica Lewinsky what she could imagine telling her children about her affair with President Bill Clinton.
The answer: Mommy made a mistake.
But whenever she tried to describe her methods, she couldnt entirely quantify or explain her talent.
She didnt have much use for the unofficial playbook.
But when that moment came, they somehow always seemed unprepared.
But there was a fundamental difference in their approaches, and it broke in Walterss favor.
There was a sense in which Walters turned the stereotyping shed always struggled against to her advantage.
Barbara Walters, in my estimation, really has the quality of reaching through to the person, Wallacesaid.
Walters was born in Boston, the granddaughter of Russian Jewish immigrants.
Her mother, Dena, was a homemaker.
He was an impulsive man whose fortunes rose and fell drastically and often.
We moved a lot,she said.
I went to three different high schools in my four years.
Walters was in their orbit every day and studied them like texts.
She also grew comfortable around stars and wasnt intimidated by them or by their fame.
It has made my life, in terms of interviewing celebrities, very different.
Her classmates made fun of her sister for the way she acted and spoke.
They made fun of Barbara for having a disabled sister.
They also partly motivated her early career decision to abandon the speech therapy shed undertaken to correct her lisp.
Walterss early life gave her a more sympathetic perspective on parenting and marriage.
(Cohn helped with the paperwork.)
Her daughter became a methamphetamine addict during adolescence.
No wonder parent-child relationships were so often at the heart of her interviews.
If the subject was receptive, their answers made great TV.
The ABC News specialOur Barbaraincludessnippets of Walters asking celebrities about traumas and misfortunes in their youth.
She asked Woody Harrelson about his childhood diagnosis as a mentally disturbed dyslexic.
Youve been talking to my mom!
he laughed, then spoke frankly about his experiences.
She asked Jay-Z about the impact of his father leaving the family when he was 12.
I would never let anyone get close to me because of that feeling, he said.
We all do interviews every day.
And I say, No, youre saying that because this is what I do.
Larry Flynt offered her $1 million to pose naked forHustler.
Gilda Radners impersonation portrayed her as a dingbat.
It never really happened.
She asked Katharine Hepburn something tree-relatedduring a 1981 interview the first of four that they did over the years.
Nevertheless, the apocryphal question clung to her.
Walters turned the joke back on Carson and asked him what kind of tree he would be.
I might be a tumbleweed, he said with the grin of a man who had just surprised himself.
That was one tool in her kit, a part of her sneaky virtuosity.
She was permanently unfazed by then and powerful enough to win those fights.
A formula, perhaps.
Does he hit you?
Monica, she said, you have been described as a stalker, a seductress.
I think Im very loving, Lewinsky replied.
I think Im intelligent.
I think I certainly feel that I have been misportrayed in the past year, and unfairly.
Is there something that you particularly wanted to say?
When she retired fromThe Viewin 2014, ABCnamed its news building after her.
