The interview was a great success. It contained so much new and historically interesting material that we cut it into five segments and Today ran one of them every day for a week. Newspapers across the world picked up Rusk’s comments and wrote stories about them. Editorials followed. It was an important milestone for me.
Two years later I was pleased when Rusk chose me again for another headline-making interview. The top-secret Pentagon Papers had just been leaked to the New York Times, documents that chronicled the government’s internal planning and clandestine actions during the Vietnam War. Rusk, then a professor of international law at the University of Georgia law school, blamed television for much of the opposition to the Vietnam War, but he seemed beaten and heartsick as he admitted to mistakes he had made. “I, myself, underestimated the tenacity of the North Vietnamese and may have overestimated the ability or willingness of the American people to accept a protracted struggle of this sort,” he told me. “They’re an impatient people and they like this sort of a thing to come to an end.” (How prescient his words seem today in the clamor over Iraq.) I didn’t interview Rusk again, but he and I stayed in touch over the years until his death in 1994 at the age of eighty-five.
Though the first interview with Rusk helped to give me credibility as a serious political journalist, I continued to interview people in the arts—Ginger Rogers, Andrew Wyeth, Leopold Stokowski, Lauren Bacall. (I particularly loved Bacall’s tough candor. When I asked her about Frank Sinatra, who had proposed to her some years after the death of her husband, Humphrey Bogart, only to dump her after their engagement was leaked to the press, she pointed to the floor and snapped, “Frank is as dead and dry as this floor.” Remember that phrase, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”? Bacall was living proof.) But now I wasn’t limited to those sorts of interviews. I could move in different directions. One very important interview was with Golda Meir, then prime minister of Israel.
American women, especially those in the throes of the women’s movement, were fascinated by the very different lives of Israeli women. Women over eighteen were required to serve in the Israeli armed forces, many did manual work in collective farms, or kibbutzim, and one of them, Mrs. Meir, had risen to the highest political office in the country.
The prime minister seemed an unlikely role model when she arrived in the studio with her sister, who lived in Connecticut. The heavyset, stern-looking seventy-one-year-old woman seemed more like a rather forbidding grandmother than a head of state. Like my grandparents, Mrs. Meir’s parents had emigrated from Russia. The prime minister was eight when the family settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she had gone to school and then to college.
She had been a teacher in Milwaukee, she told me, before she and her husband immigrated in 1921 to Palestine, where she lived on a kibbutz raising chickens. “Before that,” she said, “I was afraid to be in the room with one chicken.” One of the founders of the State of Israel in 1948, she had gone on to serve as Israel’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union and as Israel’s minister of labor and then foreign minister before becoming Israel’s first—and to date, only—female prime minister. All this as a single mother of two. (She and her husband had long since separated.)
I was always interested in how women balanced their work life and their children, so I asked whether she, as a mother, had had to make “great sacrifices.” Her answer did not reassure me or American feminists who were clamoring for child-care centers modeled on Israeli child-care collectives, so they could work outside the home. “There’s no doubt the mothers pay for it with pangs of conscience,” the prime minister said wearily. “I suppose the children do, too.” She quoted her grown daughter as saying she’d felt “sad” and resentful as a child that her mother was away from home so much. But there was a trade-off, which every working mother, including me, hoped for: Her daughter also said, in retrospect, that her mother’s work had added “something to the home.” It had given her a “much broader aspect” and “interest.”
“Naturally one has a feeling that it’s done wrong to the children, but it turned out all right,” Mrs. Meir said. “They don’t hold it against me at any rate.” (Years later, when I left NBC for ABC, I interviewed Mrs. Meir during my opening week. Sadly, it would be my last interview with her.)
Another early interview, this one with Kathleen Neal Cleaver, the spokesperson for the militant Black Panther Party, was chilling. Married to Eldridge Cleaver, a revolutionary and convicted felon, author of the best-selling autobiography Soul on Ice, and then a fugitive living in Algiers, Kathleen articulated the racial fury among many young urban blacks at the time, which had led to riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles, Detroit, Cleveland, Newark, and nationwide after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The Black Panther ten-point program, however, did not reflect Dr. King’s nonviolent philosophy.
“If black people can’t have the freedoms of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, cannot have the fruits of their labor, then we will take the position that no one can have them,” she said. “We will have them or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain them.”
I tried to strike a common bond with the twenty-four-year-old revolutionary, pointing out that she was pregnant, that I had a baby, and that both of us shared the hope that our children would grow up in a free and good society. “Is there any way that the people like me and the people like you can come to some agreement, or does it have to be only a revolution?” I asked.
“I don’t see any solution other than a total change of the existing relationships in society,” she replied. “A total change of the economic system, of all the institutions which are not only oppressive and exploitative, but anachronistic and out of keeping with the times.”
We finally reached some shaky common ground when she agreed that the struggle was not restricted solely to race but to class as well.
“Slave against master,” she said. “The lower classes against the upper classes. The classes of the ruled against the classes of the ruler.”
The revolution she called for never came to pass. Many of the Black Panthers succumbed to internal squabbling or were killed or imprisoned. The movement, which FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called the “greatest threat to the internal security of the country,” gradually imploded. But Kathleen Cleaver went a very different route. She would go on to Yale University on a full scholarship and graduate summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. After graduating from Yale Law School, she worked in the prestigious New York law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore before joining the law faculty at Emory University, where she remains today.
In the midst of all this I also had an unexpected interview with Queen Elizabeth’s husband, Prince Philip, and with Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s national security adviser—both courtesy of the president himself.
Nixon, in fact, turned out to be one of my greatest champions. I met him in 1969 at the White House while I was filming an interview with his daughter Tricia in the Rose Garden. He had the reputation of being reserved and socially awkward, but to my surprise, he seemed relaxed and, to my bigger surprise, almost charming. He was so friendly, in fact, that I kidded him about the stag dinner he was hosting that night at the White House for Prince Philip, pointing out that it seemed a clear case of sex discrimination.
“Is Prince Philip going to do the Today show?” Nixon asked me.
“No,” I replied. “We’ve tried to get him, but so far we’ve gotten nowhere. He’s turned us down.”
“Tell you what,” Nixon said. “I’ll speak to him tonight.”
I had never thought of the president of the United States as a booking agent, but he turned out to be one. Late that night I got a call from the British Embassy saying that Prince Philip would be available in the morning. Prince Philip must have been angry as hell, but we got the royal interview—and inadvertently raised a furor in England. My question was simple enough: “Might Queen Elizabeth ever abdicate and turn the throne over to Prince Charles?” It was Pr
ince Philip’s answer—“Who can tell? Anything might happen”—that created huge headlines in the British press and brought out crowds in support of the Queen. Buckingham Palace had to issue a statement saying the Queen had no intention of standing down.
I quickly wrote Prince Philip a note of apology that I’d put him in such an embarrassing position and received a personal reply from him on Buckingham Palace stationery bearing the crest of the royal coat of arms.
Dear Miss Walters,
Thank you so much for your kind and thoughtful letter. It was most appreciated by both of us.
To be the means of unlocking such a spectacular display of cheerfulness and goodwill is a great satisfaction, particularly in this day and age when most demonstrations seem to reflect nothing but anger and provocation.
I remember the interview very well. It appears that you have forgiven The Queen for not abdicating.
Yours sincerely,
Philip
A year after that President Nixon delivered for me again. This time he persuaded Henry Kissinger to sit down for the Today show. I was pleased, but it was hardly a personal favor done out of the goodness of the president’s heart. Richard Nixon understood the use of television to promote his administration and its policies. I was well aware of that, but being on the receiving end of Nixon’s television savvy wasn’t all bad. We used each other, and that’s the way it has worked with so many guests I’ve talked to over the years. People come on TV because they want the exposure and a forum to advance whatever it is they want to advance. And I want something, too—the interview.
So it was that I introduced Henry Kissinger to our audience in December 1970. As national security adviser, Kissinger was controversial, to say the least. Though one of Nixon’s campaign promises had been to end the war in Vietnam, the United States was still bogged down there (Today had continued to run its roll call of combat deaths. There had been another 6,164 in 1970). But Kissinger, with his slight German accent, was a curiosity to the public, and a very powerful man. We discussed at length the issues of the day and then, because no one knew much about him, I asked him a few personal questions and got one response I particularly loved. My question was about how fame had changed his life. “The nice thing about being a celebrity is that, if you bore people, they think it’s their fault,” he said.
I interviewed Henry Kissinger many more times over the years, and we became close friends. Dr. Kissinger and his wife, Nancy, are frequent guests at my home and I at theirs. Of all the interviews I did with him as he went on to be secretary of state for both Nixon and his successor, Gerald Ford, one remains foremost in my mind. It took place when I was at ABC.
When his best-selling book Diplomacy was published in 1994, my producer and I took him back to Fürth, his small hometown in Germany, nestled near the larger and more famous city of Nuremberg, where the post–World War II war crimes trials of the Nazi leaders took place.
It was in Fürth, where his father taught at the gymnasium, or secondary school, that Dr. Kissinger spent the first fifteen years of his life. In 1938 he and his family fled the Nazis and came to America. As we strolled the streets during the interview, Kissinger reminisced about his childhood, pointing out his family’s old apartment, now a manicurist’s parlor, on the third floor of a building. He also took me to the site of his first passion, the town’s soccer stadium. As a child Henry was an avid fan of the local soccer club. As a Jew, however, he wasn’t welcome in the stadium, so he had to watch every game through the mesh at the end of the field.
When we got to the stadium I asked the cameras to turn off. “Come on,” I said to him. “Let’s go inside.” I took his arm, and the two of us walked into the stadium and quietly sat down. No one expected us. I don’t know who recognized Kissinger first, but one after another the people in the stands slowly turned their heads to look at him, until everyone was staring. The soccer game stopped, and even the players were looking at him. Then the clapping began and spread around the stadium. Soon the entire stadium was on its feet, applauding its native son. We both had tears in our eyes.
BUT BACK TO the Today show and another memory of a world-famous political figure. I celebrated my fortieth birthday on the air. Well, “celebrate” may be too strong a word; “endured” is more like it. There was the de rigueur cupcake with a candle in it and all sorts of funny but affectionate jokes about aging from Hugh and Joe. When the show was over I went back to my office to find my assistant, Mary Hornickel, holding the phone with a quizzical expression on her face. “There’s a man on the phone who says he’s Lyndon Johnson.” “You’re kidding,” I said, but when I took the phone and heard that familiar Texas drawl I knew that it was, indeed, the former president. He was calling from his ranch in Texas.
“Lady Bird and I are lying here in bed watching TV and she said, ‘If you had any guts you’d call Barbara and wish her happy birthday,’” he said.
“Thank you very much, Mr. President,” I responded. “But the truth is this birthday does not make me very happy.”
“I know, I know,” he said. “But you know, you really are an inspiration to women all over America.”
“That’s nice of you to say,” I told him. “But I certainly don’t feel very inspiring today.”
“Well, let me tell you a little story,” Johnson continued. “We had a man down here in Texas who ran for Congress ten times, and was defeated ten times. Finally, after twenty years of trying, he ran again—and was elected. So the press asked him, ‘What do you think this means, Mr. Congressman?’
“And he told them, ‘I’ll tell you what it means. It means that if I can make it, any idiot can make it.’”
Then Johnson paused, and said: “And Barbara, when those women out there watch you—”
I laughed, said, “Thank you, Mr. President,” and hung up the phone. To this day I don’t know whether Lyndon Johnson meant to call me an inspirational idiot or just inspirational, but no matter, I was astonished and touched by his call.
It sure was an improvement over my thirtieth birthday, when I’d gotten all dressed up in my borrowed designer outfit only to be stood up by Gianni Uzielli.
Sad Times in Florida
IN 1970 MY FAMILY RETURNED to Florida from New York. It was not an improvement. Aunt Lena was living in Miami Beach, and my parents rented a one-bedroom apartment in a building across the courtyard from her. My sister had to sleep in the living room on a pull-out couch, but it was all they could afford. My father was miserable.
My visit to that apartment was bittersweet. I brought little Jackie with me to lighten up their lives. My mother cherished the baby, and my father lavished attention on her. But one night my parents got into a terrible fight over her. Each accused the other of waking her up and making her cry, resulting in a series of charges and countercharges that got so angry my father walked out of the apartment and didn’t come home all night. I don’t know to this day where he went. Did he sleep on a park bench? Did he walk the beach all night? My mother and I were terrified that he might once more try to take his own life, but mercifully he reappeared in the morning. As with his suicide attempt, we didn’t ask any questions.
Their fight is the bitter part of my memory. The sweet part is that it was the first time my daughter kissed me. I don’t know how old babies are when they learn to do that, and maybe she was just imitating a kiss, but she put her lips on my cheek and it gave me the most wonderful feeling of happiness and love.
I knew I had to rescue my parents and sister from that cramped apartment or they would have killed one another. Back I went into my savings and bought them a larger, two-bedroom condominium in a good—I felt I couldn’t afford great—building in Miami Beach. It was in a nice-enough neighborhood, and, most important for my mother, it was just a two-block walk from the supermarket.
In retrospect I probably could have afforded “great,” and I should have bought them a condominium in a better building in Miami Beach. But I was still so afraid of the vagaries of televis
ion that I didn’t have the nerve to risk more money. So they settled into their new place. My mother and sister slept in twin beds in one bedroom; my father slept in the other. And sleep is what he did most of the time. He found some men in the building to play cards with, but no one he could really talk to. My mother, who always complained that she had no friends, continued her life with, at most, one or two new acquaintances. My parents didn’t go out much and were rarely invited to other people’s apartments. Remember, wherever they went they took my sister. They didn’t want to leave her home alone. And though my sister had perfect table manners and was very sweet, it was difficult to have any real conversation with her.
Lee tried to help out by giving my father some work, but my father’s talent was limited. It lay in producing spectacular shows with lots of sexy girls, and that didn’t translate to Lee’s “family” tent theatricals. So my father’s sixty-year career in show business quietly drew to a close.
My sister settled in better than either of them. I got her a made-up job as a teacher’s assistant at the Hope School, a local private school for intellectually impaired children. I made donations to the school and continued to do so for a great many years. It was a wonderful place. Jackie was picked up by bus every morning and stayed at the school until noon, filing papers and running errands for the teachers. She loved it and took her tasks there very seriously.
Life in the new apartment, however, continued to be tense. My mother and father argued, mostly about money. I remember one bitter scene when my mother found out that my father had spent some of the money I’d sent them to buy State of Israel Bonds. There had been a fund-raising meeting in the building, and most of the tenants were there. “He has no money,” she said to me. “How could he do it? Why does he always have to be a big shot?”
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