Barbara Walters in 1971
(NBC NewsWire via AP Images)
The secrets Barbara Walters tells
What happened
Barbara Walters reveals intimate details about her personal life—including painful memories about her developmentally disabled sister and her volatile relationship with her daughter in her teen years—in her autobiography, Audition, which is being released this week. The book also discusses her battle for respect in what she called “the old-boys network of hard-news journalists,” as well as her love life. The most talked about detail is a two-year affair with a married senator, Edward Brooke, who was the first black senator since Reconstruction. (The New York Times)
What the commentators said
“Oh, you Barbara Walters,” said Gary Rotstein in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “Always titillating us. Always dishing the good dirt while amusing us with your funny R's.” But, seriously, the affair with Brooke was one juicy tidbit. Walters told Oprah that Brooke—a moderate Republican—was “exciting” and “brilliant,” and that she was “infatuated.” Wonderful, but these two were also “crossing moral” lines “that could have caused them plenty of headaches at the time. Media types, for one thing, shouldn't sleep with the people they cover.”
Yes, but that was the 1970s, and times were different, said Shaun Sutner in the Worcester, Mass., Telegram. The affair was “common knowledge” among Brooke’s friends, but “the morés of the day dictated that no one would talk about it publicly.” Even journalists who knew kept quiet. Brooke’s closest confidants were upset that she would go public, even now, but one friend of Brooke, 87, said that the “revelation of the affair illuminated issues of race” that are still unresolved today.
“For a reporter, Ms. Walters seems to have a bit of trouble with that whole confidentiality thing,” said John Ridley in The Huffington Post. But the amazing thing isn’t that the “many-times divorced Walters” was having an affair, or that it was with a sitting U.S. senator. But he was “the first black senator elected by popular vote. And he was a Republican.” No wonder the two of them stayed “tight-lipped” for so long, and decided to end the affair to avoid career suicide. “But if somebody does forget to remind me not to have an affair with her, at least remind me to ask: ‘This is off the record, right?’”
