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CNN
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For half a century interviewing American presidents, Barbara Walters has interviewed the world’s most powerful men about their regrets, their mothers, their marriages—even their sleeping arrangements with their wives.
“A double bed,” Jimmy Carter told a news reporter in 1976. “Always had.”
Perhaps like no one else in the recent history of the American presidency, Walters helped reveal the men in the White House as human, using surprisingly intimate questions during the heyday of appointment television to help Americans understand their leaders on a human scale. The new TV journalist died on Friday at the age of 93.
Walters makes news and holds presidents accountable, though she’s sometimes criticized for being too soft. She moderated the presidential debates between Gerald Ford and Carter and Carter and Ronald Reagan. At times of national crisis, including times of war and recession, it asks important questions that shed light on policy and approach.
Yet it was her insistence on discovering the character of the president and mining whatever she found there that helped usher in a new era of personality in politics, lifting the curtain on the inner lives of the men leading the free world.
“Are you mean? Do you have a cold, hard, bad streak? Are those blue eyes cold?” she asked Carter before asking about his bedroom furnishings.
“You look more like your mother, people say,” she asked Reagan during a visit to his ranch in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1981. “Do you think so?”
“Do you discuss these things with your father?” she asked George W. Bush during a conversation about global threats in the months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
She has interviewed every sitting president, from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, and spoke with Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the years before they entered the Oval Office.
Many of these interviews featured the wives of presidents, an opportunity for her to question the first couple about their ambitions, tastes and marriages.
“You wanted him to give up politics. And you talk about it openly. It has affected your marriage. You wanted him gone,” she asked Michelle Obama in 2010. “Is there a point where you say one term is enough?”
Instead of keeping her subjects at arm’s length, she visited their ranch, climbed into their Jeeps, and sat by their Christmas trees, carrying with her pages of questions she had prepared.
She interviewed her first sitting president in 1971, settling in the Blue Room with a nervous-looking Nixon, who asked if her knee-high boots were comfortable.
After a discussion about Vietnam, Walters sought something more: “An opportunity to learn more about this secretive and distant man,” she recalled in her memoir.
“There’s been a lot of talk about your image and the fact that the American public perceives you as a rather stuffy and inhuman person,” she asked. “Does that image bother you, Mr. President?”
Thus began the decades-long procession of revealing the disposition of successive commanders-in-chief.
“I am fascinated by the personality of our leaders. Who are they? What do they believe?” she said during a 2014 episode of Oprah’s Master Class.
She joined the traveling press corps during Nixon’s landmark 1972 trip to China, one of the few women among a group of men disembarking from a Pan Am charter plane in a long shearling coat with a camera strapped to her wrist.
Her most famous interview with Nixon came after he resigned amid the Watergate scandal, asking him in a special live broadcast a few years later: “Do you regret not burning the tapes?”
“I probably should have,” he admitted.
Walters seemed charmed by the presidential apologies. She asked George HW Bush — whom she wrote was the president she knew best “on a personal level” — if he regretted his campaign catchphrase, “Read my lips: no new taxes,” after he actually was forced to raise taxes.
“It caused a trust issue at the time,” Bush admitted. “I’d have to classify that as not much of a success.”
In 2005, she asked his son George W. Bush if he regretted the US invasion of Iraq.
“But was it worth it if there were no weapons of mass destruction? Now that we know that’s wrong. Was it worth it?” she asked. (Absolutely, Bush said.)
Walters also had his regrets. She “couldn’t work up the courage” to ask Ford about falling down the stairs from Air Force One. She cringed, watching Carter earnestly plead to be “good to us” at the end of the interview. And she said she made a mistake by not airing an interview with Betty Ford when the first lady showed up drunk.
“If I were interviewing a first lady today and she was clearly intoxicated, I would certainly air it,” she wrote.
Sometimes her questions seemed to foretell upcoming events. In 1996, she asked Bill Clinton how important it was for the president to “be a role model.” A few years later, she would interview Monica Lewinsky — a former White House intern who rose to prominence in the 1990s when her affair with then-President Clinton came to light — before a television audience of 70 million.
“I never felt like I really got to Clinton,” Walters wrote in her book. “I never experienced his famous sex appeal. He never shone with me.
Reagan was another story. Like many Americans, Walters seemed captivated by his movie star charisma — though in one interview she expressed some skepticism that his ability to connect was genuine.
“Do you think any of that is acting experience?” she asked him.
In the decades since she began interviewing presidents, personal questions have become the norm for politicians and their spouses. Voters have come to expect an insight into the personalities of their leaders, or at least the ones they cultivate for public consumption.
“I’ve been criticized for asking questions like this: It doesn’t matter, what do we care what he or she thinks? The most important thing is just the hard news question. I don’t think so,” Walters said after she retired. “I think it’s important to know what’s important to them. You have to find out, if you can, what makes someone work.
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