The American broadcaster known for her intimate interviews with celebrities and politicians alike was a complicated figure according to a new documentary. But was her Jewishness part of her complexity?
June 20, 2025 18:54
Barbara Walters’ distinctive, probing voice was the background noise to much of my American childhood; morning and evening, when one or another news network would be playing on our living room TV, the voice of Jewish dynamo could be heard delivering biting commentary on the issues of the day, or interviewing famous folk with a preternatural coolness.
However, over the course of the comprehensive 90-minute documentary Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last week, I realised I actually very little about the woman whose trailblazing journalism career had changed the face of American broadcasting.
From her inspiring ambition as a woman relentlessly working to carve out a space in a male-dominated industry, to her morally questionable pursuit of clout via alliances with hated figures such as Roy Cohn, Tell Me Everything offers a rounded picture of Walters, who died in 2022 at the age of 93,
“I think Barbara would be friends with the devil if we’d get the interview,” a former TV producer close to Walters says of the broadcast journalist who snagged interviews with Muammar Gaddafi, Vladimir Putin, Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Assad, and who secured the first joint interview with the then Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1977 when they were in the process of establishing the Egypt-Israel peace treaty.
Barbara Walters pictured with Richard Nixon. (Photo: Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum)[Missing Credit]
Her shtick was asking tough questions in a demure tone, and she also excelled at humanising larger-than-life figures by probing them about their domestic lives past and present. Or, in the case of Putin, by asking outright the question everyone else was too afraid to pose: “Did you ever ordered anyone killed?”
Her predilection for the personal attracted the ire of her male industry colleagues into whose fraternity she was never accepted. They also scoffed at her for interviewing movie stars and singers.
“What made her different from other interviewers was she always found a way in,” says Bette Midler, whom Walters interviewed in 1980.
Walters’ parents were the children of Russian Jewish immigrants. Thanks to her father, who ran night clubs where actors and dancers performed, she learned early on that celebrities were were not gods but mortals with chinks in their armour.
Barbara Walters talks with Muammar el- Quaddafi from his tent in Libya for "20/20" in 1989. (Photo: ABC News Studios)©ABC NEWS
When she in her 20s, her father’s showbiz entreprise failed and Walters took on the role of breadwinner for her mother and disabled older sister. In 1961, she joined NBC’s Today Show mainly to cover “women’s stories”, the first of many gendered boxes into which she was expected to submissively fold herself.
In 1974, she become the first female co-host of the Today Show and, two years later, the country’s first female network news anchor of the ABC Evening News. In both posts she faced prejudice from her male co-anchors and the largely male production teams.
She is perhaps best known role as the co-host of “The View, a talk show she created in 1997 to bring women of different generations and backgrounds to mainstream TV. In it, she drove home her career-spanning belief that the personal and political are forever enmeshed, and mixing gossipy humour and topical debates to great success.
Oprah Winfrey, whose recollections feature in the documentary, alongside those of Andy Cohen, Cynthia McFadden and Connie Chung, says she modelled much of her interviewing style on Walters’.
At one point in documentary, Winfrey admits that seeing Walters’ estrangement from her adopted daughter, Jacqueline, ruined it seems because of Walters’ unyielding prioritisation of her career, confirmed for Winfrey that she didn’t want a child of her own.
NEW YORK - FEBRUARY 05: Barbara Walters poses in the lobby during Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Fall 2007 February 5, 2007 in New York City. (Photo by Katy Winn/Getty Images for IMG) Getty Images
This is a crisp and fascinating and multi-facted portrait of Walters, which even explores her odd obsession with “blonde goddess” journalist Diane Sawyer, whose perfection in Walters’ eyes revealed the chasm of her own insecurities. Was being Jewish one of them?
We simply don’t know for the documentary neglects entirely to mention her Jewish heritage. It is the programme’s only real sin of omission, but it is a big one.
Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything streams on Disney+ from 23 June
