23 
FAILURE
1976
“Good evening,” Harry Reasoner began the evening news show, as always, then teased the day’s top story. Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz had resigned amid a firestorm over telling a racist and obscene joke to, among others, former White House counsel John Dean. He had then revealed it to the world in an article he wrote for Rolling Stone. (Butz should have thought twice if he was counting on Dean to keep the vulgar comment quiet; the young lawyer’s claim to fame was spilling the beans on President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal.) Dean didn’t name the cabinet official who had been chitchatting in the first-class cabin of a flight leaving Kansas City after the Republican National Convention in August, but Butz was quickly identified as the culprit.
Without much of a segue, Reasoner then introduced the woman seated next to him. “Closer to home, I have a new colleague to welcome,” he said with an expression that didn’t exactly convey warmth. “Barbara?”
Her arrival on set was bigger news than Butz’s demise—a media and a cultural milestone, although not everybody agreed whether it signaled a move in the right direction. Her picture was splashed on the covers of that week’s editions of People, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report. President Gerald Ford sent a congratulatory telegram. “Good luck,” rival Walter Cronkite of CBS told her in a phone call that day, “but not too much.”
ABC’s evening news show ran a perennial third place in the network ratings, but on this night, the first edition of The ABC Evening News with Harry Reasoner and Barbara Walters scored twice as many viewers as the competition on CBS or NBC. While a few women had filled in as evening network TV anchors in the past, Barbara Walters was the first to land the title and the permanent role. She had been waiting impatiently for this moment. She had been forced to spend the summer off the air after NBC declined to let her out of her contract early.
“Thank you, Harry,” she replied. “Well, tonight has finally come for me, and I’m very pleased to be with you, Harry, and with ABC News.”
After reports on Butz’s resignation by the White House correspondent covering President Ford and the political correspondent covering Democratic presidential nominee Jimmy Carter, the two anchors engaged in something seen as revolutionary at the time: unscripted conversation. Give-and-take on the air was increasingly common during local newscasts but was generally dismissed by the national broadcasts as beneath their dignity, as “happy talk,” not journalism.
This time, Barbara mentioned that she had talked to Earl Butz on the phone just before the show went on the air—a reminder of her legendary network of contacts with newsmakers. He had taken a jab at Carter, who two weeks earlier had sparked a furor of his own over an errant comment. He had told Playboy magazine that he had “looked on a lot of women with lust,” committing adultery “in my heart many times.” She quoted Butz: “Since I resigned for my indiscretion, I think Jimmy Carter should now step up to the plate himself and resign for his indiscreet remarks in Playboy.”
Harry disputed the comparison. “I suppose, I suppose the Carter people would object to having one verbal indiscretion linked to a racial joke,” he said. “Umm, let me tell you a little bit more about what Earl Butz said,” she replied, although neither ABC nor any other network show quoted the offensive language in its entirety.
Earlier that day, Barbara had recorded two interviews by satellite to air on the first two nights of the new show. One was with Golda Meir, the first woman to be elected prime minister of Israel; she had led the government when the Yom Kippur War had begun on this date three years earlier. The other was with Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt. She had promised Golda Meir her interview would go first, before Sadat, but ABC News president Bill Sheehan thought Sadat was more interesting; he decided to break his interview into two parts and to air the first one that night. Meir’s interview would follow the next day. The Israeli leader was so furious about the broken commitment over timing that for the remaining two years of her life she refused to do another interview with Barbara.
At the end of the broadcast, Barbara told the audience that she was happy to be back on the air. “I missed you,” she told those who had watched her on the Today show, and she welcomed others who might have tuned in because of “curiosity brought on by… my hourly wage.” She said she wanted to offer a closer look at the people making the news and a deeper explanation of how the news affected viewers’ lives. “I’d like to pause from time to time as we show news items to you and say, ‘Wait a minute. What does this mean to my life and yours?’ ” she said. The program reported the Dow Jones Industrial Average as a matter of course, for instance; she wanted to explain “what it means to you, even if you don’t own any stock.” She said she would also focus on issues of particular concern to women.
What she outlined would become the norm for TV news—a focus on social trends as well as government edicts, and on the impact of news developments in the lives of those who were watching. But then and later, more traditional journalists worried aloud about the risks of reducing the emphasis on hard news in pursuit of more trivial matters and of higher ratings. “None dare call it show biz,” Time magazine said, warning that the “new and less hard-newsy combination of interviews, news-you-can-use features and ad libbing is being watched closely by CBS and NBC, which now largely serve their news straight, thank you.”
“She is changing our conception of news,” a New Republic critic intoned, “I believe, for the worse.” The Los Angeles Times published a front-page, multi-part series headlined “Crisis in TV News: Show-Biz Invasion.” The tone could not have been more alarmist if the invaders had arrived from outer space. Barbara was featured in the opening paragraphs.
The first reviews of her performance on the air were reasonably positive, although they were often seasoned with sarcasm and sexism. “Miss Walters has not faltered or fumbled embarrassingly on the new job,” The New York Times said, not quite a compliment. “In addition to being attractive, Miss Walters is a thorough professional, a remarkable woman who has risen to the top in what was once almost exclusively a man’s world.” Newsday said she had gotten off to “a good start,” adding, “She didn’t fall off her chair.” Time magazine called her debut “as crisp as a new $100 bill,” an allusion not only to her delivery but also to her paycheck. That was about the amount she was being paid for every minute of the newscast, the critic had calculated.
The review also sarcastically mentioned “Walters’ weadily wecognizable deliverwy.”
But the interaction between her and Harry was tense from the start. There were no signs of the spark that network executives had hoped for from the pairing. Executive producer Robert Siegenthaler’s suggestion that they try for the sort of banter between Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in the movies went nowhere. On the second night, after Sadat had teasingly noted her million-dollar salary, Barbara turned to Reasoner and said, “But what I should have said to President Sadat is that he has better fringe benefits than we do, Harry.” He gave her a silent, pained look. He seemed “as comfortable on camera with Walters as a governor under indictment,” The New Republic observed.
Hundreds of women wrote personal letters to Walters relating their own experiences with workplace harassment and urging her to hang in there; she drafted a form letter to reply. Anita Colby, the supermodel and socialite whose Today show segments had given Barbara her first break, lodged a complaint with the president of ABC about Reasoner’s attitude. “He made a remark that had some sexual connotation and I felt was very rude,” she said. “I don’t know how she could keep a stiff upper lip. It would have dissolved me into tears—but she’s tough.”
Actor John Wayne, whom she had never met, sent a telegram she would never forget. “Don’t let the bastards get you down,” it said.
On one early show, a news story aired about Henry Kissinger, the secretary of state and an occasional escort for Barbara at high-profile social events. “You know, Harry, Kissinger didn’t do too badly as a sex symbol in Washington,” she quipped to Reasoner. He replied icily, “Well, you’d know more about that than I would.”
Both sides cited the exchange as evidence against the other. His defenders called her comment too cozy for a serious news program. Her defenders called his response nasty, a riposte that targeted her personal life.
The anchors’ animosity behind the scenes was soon no secret to viewers on the air. Their body language became so hostile that Siegenthaler ordered the news director to avoid two-shots—that is, a camera angle that would show both of them at the same time. The risk was too high that one of them, usually Harry, would be looking disgusted at whatever the other was saying.
“It was cats and dogs; it was black and white,” said Lynn Sherr, a groundbreaking correspondent herself who joined the show a year after Barbara arrived. “Harry wasn’t always the world’s nicest human being. This friendly ‘Uncle Harry’ image that he had on 60 Minutes was kind of a joke. He was very smart, a wonderful writer, had a great delivery, but he could be very snarky.” For her part, Barbara bristled at Harry’s assertion that she hadn’t earned the right to be there.
After the show each night, he would decamp to the bar at the Café Des Artistes around the block and loudly critique her performance. The camera crews and stagehands who had worked with him for years followed his lead in rebuffing her friendly overtures. Eventually, when she arrived in the newsroom each day, “she would come in with her head down; she wouldn’t look left or right, and she wouldn’t talk to anybody,” Ellen Rossen, a producer at ABC who later married Av Westin, told me. “It was like an iceberg in there.”
The rivalry between them intensified when ABC decided not to expand the nightly newscast from a half-hour to forty-five minutes or an hour, a prospect the network had used in convincing Barbara to sign a contract. That would have given her the breathing space to do her trademark interviews; it would have enabled Harry to get equal time for his commentaries.
But at a meeting with ABC affiliate stations in Los Angeles in May 1976, the first time Barbara and Harry appeared together, local TV executives were decidedly unenthusiastic about losing control to the national network of additional airtime and revenue. NBC and CBS had responded to the ABC initiative by discussing a similar move, but both decided against it. By that fall, so had ABC. A half-century later, there would be competing all-news cable stations but the network newscasts would still last only a half-hour.
Taking into account commercials, that meant Harry and Barbara had a grand total of twenty-two minutes each night to share on the air.
“He just hazed her,” said Bob Iger, then a junior production assistant on the show who would rise to become president of ABC Television and CEO of the Walt Disney Co. “The tension was palpable… and I just remember thinking, how is the network going to get out of this one?” The only person Barbara Walters felt free to confide in was her makeup artist, and even her sympathy had its limits. “I would cry,” Barbara said, “and she’d say, ‘Stop crying, you’re smearing the make-up.’ ”
The embattled Siegenthaler was replaced by Av Westin, who arrived with orders to negotiate a cease-fire on the set. Westin told me he was greeted at his new job by Bernie Cohen, a producer close to Harry. “You owe me,” Cohen said. He had been using a stopwatch to time how long each anchor spoke, and he demanded an extra five minutes and fifteen seconds for Harry because on the previous day’s show Barbara had scored that time advantage.
Their friction became fodder for humorists. In his Sunday column in The New York Times, Russell Baker offered his services as a counselor to resolve their differences. “We know, of course, that Barbara has the money, and it may be that Harry, a model of virility if there ever was one, resents having to ask her for $10 every time he wants to go bowling with the camera crew,” he wrote. Art Buchwald of The Washington Post imagined a new “Babs and Hal Show” if they could only overcome their “domestic strife”; in his vision, they would deliver the news while holding hands and sharing a loveseat. The sarcastic headline: “Babs, You’re One in a Million, Hawwy Weasoner, I Wuv You Too.”
On The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson chatted with a large mustachioed man wearing a pink Cupid costume; he was holding an oversized gold-colored bow-and-arrow. “I have to shoot an arrow into Barbara Walters,” Cupid explained. “Ah, you mean you’re making her fall in love with Harry Reasoner,” Carson replied. “No,” Cupid said. “Harry just paid me to shoot her.”
There was more serious speculation about who would survive. “The $1-million on-air marriage of Harry Reasoner and Barbara Walters is on the rocks,” TV columnist Frank Swertlow reported in the Chicago Daily News. “Harry and Babs may be heading for the divorce court after only four months together.” He quoted Sheehan as saying the network was considering sending Barbara to Washington to co-anchor the broadcast, which would mean the two of them would not have to sit side by side each night. She immediately told reporters she wasn’t moving anywhere.
“The Showdown at ABC News” was the headline in The New York Times, featuring dueling interviews with the two co-anchors in their offices on either side of the newsroom. “Harry has been unhappy since the day the new show started,” Barbara said. She pointedly asked, “And if he leaves where will he go?” As for Harry, “sources” were quoted in the story saying he “may seek a ‘her-or-me’ decision within a matter of weeks.” Whether Barbara could sustain the show without him or a similar “credible” news figure, media reporter Jeff Greenfield wrote, “is a question very much in doubt.”
The most troubling development for Barbara wasn’t the reviews from the critics but the ratings from the audience. After that first night of record numbers, ABC’s show remained stuck in third place. (“Welcome back,” David Brinkley said in a wink to viewers when he opened NBC’s newscast on the second night of the rival show.) During the last three months of 1976, ABC’s share of the audience ticked up to 19 percent from 18 percent, but Cronkite’s lead at CBS widened, to 29 percent from 27. NBC’s show with John Chancellor and David Brinkley dipped to 25 percent from 26—still well ahead of ABC.
ABC got so many letters from viewers threatening to quit watching the show that a form letter was drafted to respond.
“We feel that the new co-anchor format with Barbara Walters and Harry Reasoner will add a very exciting dimension to newscasting, and we hope you will decide to continue to be one of our viewers,” it said. “In that connection, we do ask that you keep an open mind and tune in for a reasonable period before making your decision.”
The metrics mattered, for the networks’ influence and their bottom lines.
TV newscasts were approaching the apogee of their influence. Forty million Americans tuned in to the nightly news each night to find out what had gone on in the country and the world that day. Cable TV wasn’t prevalent yet, nor social media nor streaming services nor the other myriad options for staying informed that would emerge down the road. During that era, the three TV networks had as much control over defining the news and delivering it as any set of media outlets in U.S. history, before or after. The anchors on those shows reflected the assumptions about what voices Americans wanted to hear, about whom they would believe. In some households, “Uncle Walter” Cronkite was all but a member of the family, more trusted than any elected official.
Barbara aspired to that high ground, one that had never before been held by a woman—or, for that matter, by a Jew or a person of color or someone who was openly gay.
Growing up, she had seen in her father’s career the risks of refusing to be satisfied with a success in hand, of gambling it all for some bigger prize. Now she worried she was following in Lou Walters’s footsteps. “Everything I had worked for all these past years now was crashing down because of my bad judgment,” she said. “I told myself that I should never have taken the chance. Was it ego? Was it too much ambition?”
Decades later, when she was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world, she would call the episode the greatest learning experience of her life. By then, she had long regained her equilibrium and restored her career, although never again as the anchor of the evening news show. “Our program failed and I had to prove myself and work my way back,” she recalled. “I think I did my best work then. From failure can often come success.”
At the time, though, she wasn’t sure she would ever recover. “I didn’t know how she was going to live through it without having a breakdown,” said Joyce Ashley, a psychoanalyst who had been one of her closest friends since high school. Barbara thought her career might well be over. “I was drowning,” she said. “I was not only drowning, I was reading every day about people who were happy to put my head under the water.”
Her mother, who had always doubted her husband’s big ambitions, brought the same apprehension to her daughter. When Barbara would call her in Florida, Dena Walters would fret about every negative word she had read in the gossip columns. “Mom, what they wrote isn’t true,” her daughter would assure her. “She would respond, ‘Oh darling, if it isn’t true, why is it in the papers?’ ”
By then, Lou Walters was living at the Miami Jewish Home and Hospital for the Aged, the onetime high roller now dependent on his daughter’s largesse. “He was very frail, and when I telephoned him, he struggled with the right thing to say,” Barbara recalled. “He had always been afraid that my career might be over. Now that it looked as if it was happening, he tried so hard to cheer me up. He had a television set in his room and would say, ‘You looked beautiful last night, darling. It will turn out all right.’
“And then he would add in a small voice, ‘Do you want to come down here for a while?’ ”
In the end, it would turn out all right for Barbara. But that would take time and sweat and a boost from some powerful men. Fidel Castro, for one.