Christiane Amanpour Remembers 'Warrior Queen' Barbara Walters: 'She Did Not Suffer Fools Easily'
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Christiane Amanpour, Chief International Anchor for CNN, remembers her friend and mentor Barbara Walters, who died on Friday at age 93 in an exclusive essay.
Barbara Walters amassed a body of work so impressive and so extensive that it will honestly never be replicated. She will forever be the queen of our profession — the queen of broadcast news. She blazed a trail, she was a pioneer.
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It's said that at least one of her male colleagues sniped that her hiring was "a gimmick" when she became the first female to co-anchor a network evening news broadcast.
Well, decades later, Barbara Walters was still beating the pants off everyone and proving she was no gimmick.
Vincent Tullo/The New York Times/Redux
I hugely respected Barbara, and I was incredibly fond of her. She was an early inspiration for me, even before I knew I wanted to be a journalist. It wasn't just her great Hollywood interviews or her interviews with Presidents, first ladies, the ones I saw were the international scoops since I was growing up abroad. In particular, her incredible joint interview with Israeli Prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat after Sadat's historic trip to Israel in 1977, when he became the very first Arab leader to visit. Watching Barbara pull off that exclusive was exhilarating. And later I decided, that's the kind of thing I want to do.
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I was fortunate to eventually call her a friend. She was a mentor and gave wise counsel. I saw her at work and on social occasions. One of the events that stands out for me so prominently was when she was asked to roast me at a Museum of Broadcasting event. Not only did she accept, but she delivered this incredibly affectionate, witty, and ballsy roast, and I was just thrilled. I found it extraordinary that Barbara Walters was doing this for me!
She was somebody who did not suffer fools easily. She was hugely competitive right to the very end, which I love. She didn't retire until well into her 80s, and as she said, "I want to walk away while I'm still doing good work," and I think that's exactly what she did. The idea that she started and innovated The View on the verge of her 70s is an extraordinary accomplishment. It spawned so many imitators.
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Just like Barbara herself spawned so many wannabes — but she kept the crown.
Barbara was obviously someone who aroused a lot of jealousy and backbiting, and that's just the nature of the game. When you're first, the most prominent, and often the only, that's the burden you bear. The fact that she succeeded — and triumphed — even with a slight pronunciation impediment, which Gilda Radner on Saturday Night Live satirized as "BabaWawa," was marvelous to behold!
I think, she understood her role as the pioneer and as the warrior queen. She dressed the part, walked the part, talked the part, and even when she asked weird questions, like what kind of tree Katharine Hepburn would like to be, it all caused water cooler moments. That was her superpower, for decades she was indispensable to the public square.
