Audition

by Barbara Walters

  The only possible hint that it wasn’t, was when I heard that Frank and his wife used to drink something like a pitcher of martinis a night. Do you drink until you are practically blotto every night if you are really happy? Nevertheless, we who worked with Frank were mystified as to why Frank suddenly upped and left his wife for Mamye. Mamye, who had babysat for Frank and Sue’s grandchildren. Mamye, whom we all knew as fun, giggly, inefficient, and not even particularly pretty. How the drama stayed in-house and did not end up in the columns is beyond reckoning. But it didn’t. We all kept it a secret. Just try that today. In this day and age it would be front-page fodder for the tabloids, all over the Internet, and with ten-minute updates on cable news shows.

  But although it was a secret, we were noticing some changes in Frank. In the past he would have his makeup applied and his silvery hair combed in the large dressing room with the rest of us. Now he insisted on having his own dressing room, even though the other room was small and cramped. There were rumors that his hair was falling out. His skin tone seemed paler.

  Although he never said a word, we began to wonder if he was ill. But when a man is ill, isn’t that when he most wants to be with his long-faithful wife? Surely this was not the moment to run off with someone less than half his age. Or was it? It all seemed so crazy. But because Frank was more distant than ever, none of us were privy to his thoughts or feelings.

  In the midst of all this drama my friend and agent, Lee Stevens, was negotiating my new three-year contract with NBC. It was September 1973, and with Not for Women Only now being syndicated in some eighty cities, Lee felt he was dealing from a position of strength. It turned out he was. He got me a substantial raise but was not interested just in getting more money for me. Lee put in the contract that if Frank were ever to leave the program, voluntarily or involuntarily, I was to have the title of cohost with whoever succeeded him.

  It wasn’t surprising that no one at NBC questioned that clause. The brass doing the negotiations believed that Frank would be doing the program for years to come. Our ratings were solid, and he was only fifty-one. Therefore the chance that they might have to make me a permanent cohost must have seemed ridiculously slim, certainly not within the three years of the contract they were currently negotiating. So NBC included that clause. I signed off on the deal and continued to get my own interviews outside the studio. There were plenty of interviews to get.

  A scandal of historic proportions was engulfing the Nixon White House in 1973. Watergate was in full bloom, and all the players in the daily headlines were in Washington. So, for much of that tumultuous time, was I.

  Resignation in Washington. Victory in New York

  THE PLACE TO BE in the summer of 1973 was Washington. The place to stay was at the Watergate Hotel. The show to be on was the Today show.

  The Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, otherwise known as the Senate Watergate Committee, was holding public hearings to investigate the mounting crisis for the Nixon administration and the president himself. One shoe was dropping after another.

  What had begun the year before as a curious burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex had escalated into sensational charges of political spying, sabotage, wiretapping, burglary, and conspiracy. By the spring of 1973 the scandal had reached the highest echelons of Nixon’s inner circle: John Dean, the White House counsel, had been fired, and Nixon’s top staffers, including his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman—he who winked at me in China—had been forced to resign.

  And now the Senate hearings.

  I was free to be in Washington much of the summer. My little girl was with Lee, who had taken a summer house in Westhampton, Long Island. My parents and my sister were in Miami, and I spoke to them three times a week. My mother told me some disturbing news about my father. He seemed to be losing strength, she said, and slept most of the day. I felt that it was depression, but I didn’t know what I could do about it.

  I was broadcasting from the NBC studio in Washington doing features and interviews while Frank anchored the program from New York. Between us we had all the major Watergate players on Today. Hardly a day passed when I didn’t interview a congressman, a senator, a constitutional lawyer, a pollster, or somebody knowledgeable about the crisis. With so many Washington interviews to do, the McGee edict that I couldn’t come in until the fourth question quietly went away. Frank did his interviews from New York and I did mine by remote from the NBC studio in Washington and it was quite a calm period between us. I’m sure he was happy that I’d been reassigned to Washington—somewhat like sending me to China.

  Many of the journalists in town for the hearings were staying at the Watergate Hotel, and we gathered in the evening to compare notes. The old boys’ club finally had begun to accept me because I had good stories to swap from my morning interviews. (The nightly news programs did not do interviews back then.) The only other news program doing interviews, and taped at that, was 60 Minutes, but that CBS program was only on once a week. Today was on five mornings a week, live, for two hours. It was a huge advantage.

  For all of us in news, whether television or print, covering Watergate was one of the most interesting and exciting experiences you could have. The stars were the young Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who kept breaking one Watergate story after another, but there was more than enough material for all of us. It was a riveting time, particularly for me because I knew Nixon. And the pincers were closing around him.

  One bombshell followed another during the hearings, bringing the scandal closer and closer to the Oval Office—the testimony that Nixon had discussed the cover-up some thirty-five times with his counsel; the revelation that Nixon taped all his conversations and phone calls in the Oval Office; Nixon’s refusal to hand over the presidential recordings to the Senate Watergate Committee; the court-ordered (backed up by the Supreme Court) delivery of the tapes, which disclosed a mysterious eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap that was blamed on Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods.

  It didn’t help Nixon when Spiro Agnew, his vice president, was forced to resign following charges of income tax evasion. (Nixon named Gerald Ford as Agnew’s replacement.) And it certainly did not help Nixon when the House Judiciary Committee started impeachment hearings in May 1974. I was again in Washington for the three months of those hearings. At their conclusion in July, I remember being with very close friends, Shirley and Dick Clurman. Dick, who was winding up a brilliant twenty-three-year career as a journalist and chief of correspondents at Time Inc., was a close friend of Leonard Garment, John Dean’s replacement as Nixon’s special counsel. The Clurmans, Garment, and I were watching the chair of the committee, Democratic Congressman Peter Rodino, preside over the vote that would send three articles of impeachment against Nixon when Len, who had a very dry sense of humor, said, “Come on, Peter. Sink to the occasion.” I loved the line and remember it to this day.

  Soon afterward, along with the rest of the nation, I watched Richard Nixon resign, the first U.S. president ever to do so. Pat Nixon stood ghostlike behind her husband with their two daughters, Julie and Tricia. Julie, so close to her father, had begged him not to resign, but he had no option. It was Julie who admitted to me in a later interview that she was the one who had to tell her mother that her father was going to resign. For all the excitement and historical importance of the moment, it was also quite poignant.

  I thought of all the times that I had been with Nixon, this awkward man who had always been kind to me. I had interviewed him several times. I had covered Tricia’s wedding. As I watched him announce his resignation, I felt both anger and pity. Mostly I thought how devastating this must be to Pat Nixon. She never seemed to have had a close relationship with her husband. The fact that they rarely communicated must have made her all the more lonely, grappling with a situation she could not control, which was going to drag her down, too, and this so soon after her triumph in China.

  In the midst o
f this intriguing time, I did interviews with people who had nothing to do with politics. Liza Minnelli, for example, who was wowing everyone in a sold-out engagement at the Winter Garden in New York; Henry Fonda, who was winning accolades portraying the famous lawyer Clarence Darrow on Broadway; Maria Callas, the fiery Greek opera diva who had lost her longtime lover, Aristotle Onassis, to Jackie Kennedy.

  The Callas interview had a special appeal. For years people had speculated as to how she felt when Onassis jilted her. Callas admitted in our interview that she and Jackie had never met and that furthermore, she’d never wanted to meet her. She implied that Onassis had actually proposed to her several times (which I didn’t believe) but that she was wary of marriage, having been married once before. She kept talking about how all she wanted was for Onassis to be happy, but it was obvious from her protestations that she herself was heartbroken. Her career, which she had given up for Onassis, was all but over, and so was any hope of rekindling her relationship with him. When eventually Onassis and Jackie split up, Callas came back into his life, but it was, reportedly, never the same.

  Most of my interviews, however, dealt with Watergate—with Senator Ted Kennedy; with Martha Mitchell, whose soon-to-be-ex-husband, former U.S. attorney general John Mitchell, would be found guilty of conspiracy, perjury, and obstruction of justice and serve nineteen months in prison; with Jeb Magruder, Nixon’s deputy campaign director, who was charged with perjury and conspiracy to obstruct justice and spent seven months in prison; with Gail Magruder, Jeb’s wife, who said her husband’s prison sentence was an “anticlimax” after all they’d been through. Haldeman, too, went to prison and spent eighteen months behind bars, convicted of conspiracy and obstruction of justice.

  The pivotal figure in all this, of course, remained Richard Nixon, with whom I would continue to have a professional relationship. So I will now digress.

  After resigning the presidency, Nixon repaired to his house in San Clemente, California, taking with him his press secretary, Ron Ziegler, and his young assistant press secretary, Diane Sawyer. I had no contact with him during this period, though I wrote him often, hoping for an interview. When he finally did do his first interview in 1977, it was not with me but with the British television journalist David Frost.

  David, now Sir David and a good friend of mine, paid Nixon a reported $600,000 for the series of taped interviews over a twenty-four-hour period which were then boiled down into four ninety-minute programs. The most interesting, of course, was the section on Watergate. Because of the presidential pardon Nixon was granted by Gerald Ford, who replaced him as president, Nixon never had to stand trial for his role in Watergate, so no one had as yet heard his side of the story. Nixon had approval over the interview with David, which was taped and edited. There was such curiosity about the former president, and David was such a good interviewer, that the programs were syndicated and seen in seventy countries around the world. To this day, there is still curiosity. In 2007 the play Frost/Nixon, based on those interviews, opened on Broadway after playing in London. It was a huge success and was then made into a movie.

  Nixon came back into my life in 1980, three years after the Frost interviews. He approached the networks to promote a book he’d written about foreign policy and the ongoing cold war with the Soviet Union. It was titled The Real War. But Nixon set conditions for the potential interview. He would do it only if it was live and therefore without any editing. Nixon’s first choice was 60 Minutes on CBS, but Don Hewitt, the program’s producer, never allowed anything live and he turned Nixon down. It was Don’s loss and my gain.

  I was at ABC by then, and I sat down with Nixon on May 8 in our New York studio for a live one-hour interview. I had long since developed my own way of preparing for an interview. I wrote down on three-by-five cards as many questions as I could think of, then asked anyone who walked into the office, whether it was somebody delivering the mail, a production assistant, or a hairdresser, “If you could ask any question of [whomever], what would it be?” It was very productive. For this interview with Nixon I had so many questions that I could have done six hours with him. I must have written over a hundred questions on my cards, which, as was my custom, I cut down and cut down again and cut down yet again.

  This was my predicament: If I was too tough on the former president, people would feel sorry for him, and those who still had some admiration or affection for him would turn against me. On the other hand, if I was too soft on him, the criticism would be, “Why didn’t the news department choose somebody tougher to do the interview?” It was a delicate balancing act. I finally divided the questions into foreign and domestic policy segments, Watergate, and also a more personal segment. I wanted to give him the opportunity, if he wanted, to talk about such things as what faith meant to him, how his family had helped him get through the resignation and his subsequent health crisis with phlebitis. Even though he had resisted personal questions during my very first interview with him while he was president, I thought he might welcome them now. I saved these questions for near the end of the interview.

  But the final question was key: was he sorry he hadn’t burned the tapes that led to his resignation? For this last question, I told my director to give me a thirty-second cue at the end of the interview. I wanted to give Nixon very limited time to say yes or no, rather than skirt the issue.

  We met in the studio. Nixon was his usual awkward self, trying to be friendly to the crew by making a slightly off-color joke. We put makeup on him because he had a propensity to sweat. Some people felt this had cost him the election during a 1960 television debate with John F. Kennedy. (Those who heard the debate on radio thought Nixon had won, while those who saw Nixon sweating on television thought JFK had won.) Then we began the interview, live.

  Nixon was superb on foreign policy but reluctant to talk about Watergate. When I asked him whether he felt responsible for the distrust and cynicism Americans now felt toward their leaders, Nixon replied: “I think under the circumstances that with Watergate now six years past, we’re at a time when it is time to move forward to the future and not dwell on the past.”

  I pressed, but it was obvious he wasn’t going to talk further about Watergate. But he really stonewalled me toward the end of the interview when I got to the personal questions. When I asked him why “people who have written books about you, who worked for you, people who are close to you in one way or another, say that you are cold, remote, and that they are unable to reach you?” he replied, “Why are you interviewing me, then?” I answered by saying I was not talking about whether I found him cold and remote, I was quoting people like Henry Kissinger, to which Nixon curtly responded: “Why don’t we get serious.”

  I went on, saying that I was sorry that he found “these questions unserious” and reminded him that people “are interested in you, the man, and your feelings,” but he would have none of it. I next wanted to give him that chance to talk about how he got through the dark days. Was it his faith? Were there friends? I was trying to induce some sympathy for him, but he was not about to allow me to go there. When I asked him if, in the early days after Watergate, there were times “when you thought you might go under, emotionally,” Nixon bristled and said: “Not at all.” Period. Silence.

  There was nothing to do then but to go back to the foreign policy questions, the ones I hadn’t asked yet.

  But I couldn’t find the right cards.

  Even today, more than twenty-five years later, revisiting that moment makes my stomach tighten. I couldn’t frantically shuffle and reshuffle the cards on live television, so I had no recourse but to wing it. Fortunately, since I write my own questions and I’d written them one hundred times before the interview, I remembered them. We hurtled toward the last segment of the interview, talking about his case for increasing the military budget, the lack of congressional support for it, the upcoming presidential election (which would see Ronald Reagan defeat Jimmy Carter), the downfall of the shah of Iran, and finally—the thirty
-second cue.

  “In the few seconds we have left now, and there’s almost just time for a yes or no—are you sorry you didn’t burn the tapes?”

  Nixon replied that everyone he’d spoken to in Europe had said to him, “Why didn’t you burn the tapes?” “The answer is,” he said, “I probably should have.”

  “If you had to do it all over again, you’d burn them?” I pressed in the last seconds.

  “Yes, I think so,” Nixon said. “Because they were private conversations subject to misinterpretation, as we have all seen.”

  There. I’d gotten him to say what would make headlines the next day.

  “Thank you for being with us,” I said. And the interview was over.

  When we took off our microphones and I stood up to shake his hand, I realized I was ice cold from the strain of having done the last ten minutes of the interview without any written questions. There we stood, Nixon perspiring through his makeup, and me frigid. It was then, when I stood up, that I saw that damn pile of questions on my chair. I had put them under my fanny when I thought we were through with the foreign policy segment and had been sitting on them the whole time.

  NIXON EVIDENTLY DID NOT object to the interview, and we continued to have a good relationship. I did two other interviews with him, one in 1982 following the death of the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, another in 1985 after the publication of his fifth book, No More Vietnams. But then—silence. For a reason not of my making.

  Soon after Tom Murphy and Capital Cities bought ABC in 1986, the entertainment department bought Woodward and Bernstein’s second book about Watergate, The Final Days, to make into a television movie. Nixon did everything he could to prevent the movie from being made. He was protecting his wife, he said. Mrs. Nixon had had two strokes since her husband left office, and he was worried about her. “I, myself, speak about what I’ve been through, but you know, for a woman to suffer in silence during the difficult last days in the White House and the days thereafter, which were even worse, is much more difficult,” he had told me in our earlier interview about his book. He was afraid now that the ABC movie, which covered that exact time period, might cause his wife to have another stroke.