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There should be no confusion surrounding the greatest accomplishments of Barbara Walters, who died on Dec. 30 at 93. An icon of journalism, Walters busted barrier after barrier for women in the field, joining NBC’s Today show in 1964 without her starlet predecessors’ diminutive title of “Today Girl” and building a reputation that led ABC to hire her away, in 1976, as the first woman to co-anchor a national network’s evening news program. Over the course of a career spanning more than half a century that eventually brought her to the forefront of 20/20 and dozens of high-profile primetime specials, she coaxed revelatory insights out of the world’s most powerful heroes, villains and stars.
“If I had told my young self that I would have the opportunity to interview every American President and First Lady since Richard Nixon, be able to do the first joint interview with Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin, or my unforgettable sit-down with Cuban President Fidel Castro, I would not have believed it,” Walters reflected in TIME after her 2014 retirement. “Yet, I knew I was driven to interview world leaders and icons.”
These were inarguably her most indelible achievements. But in the final decades of her singular career, Walters made another crucial contribution that is sure to outlive her: she created The View. Indeed, for many viewers too young to have watched much broadcast news in the 20th century, the long-running daytime talk show and controversy magnet is the program they most associate with her name. “How ironic is it,” her producing partner Bill Geddie asked in an interview for Ramin Setoodeh’s gossip-packed 2019 The View history Ladies Who Punch, “that whenever somebody talks about Barbara Walters in articles, it’s never the Barbara Walters as the first lady of journalism, or the Barbara Walters specials, or Barbara…
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