For generations, millions of Americans watched Barbara Walters interview presidents, heads of state, newsmakers and the hottest of Hollywood celebrities.
That group included Ann Compton, who was raised in Glencoe, graduated from New Trier High School on her way to becoming an ABC News White House correspondent from 1973 through 2014.
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Following Walters’ death on Dec. 30 at the age of 93, Compton reflected on the career of her colleague, particularly the way she prepared for and conducted interviews, which often made news.
“She would learn everything she possibly could about the person she was going to interview. No one at the network had the time and the resources to do that much research,” Compton recalled. “She was fearless. She would ask the uncomfortable, difficult and awkward questions on things that might have appeared for the rest of us journalists as inappropriate personal question to a presidential figure.”
Among the most famous of the Walters interviews aired in March 1999 — her conversation with Monica Lewinsky more than a year after her affair with President Bill Clinton became public, leading to Clinton’s impeachment.
“I was astonished how forthcoming this young woman was for something that had marked her for life,” Compton said. “Monica Lewinsky was able to express herself far better than I think I expected and she did that because she trusted Barbara Walters to give her a chance to talk.”
Compton said she first met the late journalist when Walters was the co-host of NBC’s Today show when they were both covering President Gerald Ford’s 1975 trip to China. The following year, after a strong courtship by then ABC News president Roone Arledge, Walters signed what was then a staggering $1 million a year contract to co-anchor the ABC flagship evening news broadcast with Harry Reasoner, along with other roles at the network.
Compton acknowledged there were some mixed feelings among the rank-and-file ABC News staffers about the signing and her large salary, but she thought it reaped some benefits.
“Globally, it gave Barbara Walters an international reputation,” Compton said. “That opened a lot of doors for her.”
However, the well-publicized partnership of Reasoner and Walters did not work out in a very public way.
“It did not really affect any of us who were doing reports that would air on the broadcast, but to watch the two of them clearly not have a collegiality at all, it was stunning,” Compton said.
After the partnership failed, Walters moved to other parts of the news operations at ABC including her prime-time specials and then co-anchoring the magazine show, 20/20.
In 1977, Walters was the first journalist to have a joint interview with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
“If she wasn’t making foreign policy, she was facilitating foreign policy,” Compton said. “That was huge.”
In 1978, Begin and Sadat met again with U.S. President Jimmy Carter in the Camp David Accords. Compton was at Camp David as well, but she marveled at Walter’s tenacity in getting people from all sides to talk to her.
“She was already doing the groundbreaking reporting because she already knew the cast of characters behind the scenes,” Compton said. “She knew more about what was going on than the rest of us put together.”
Moreover, Walters was a strong competitor, vying against high profile correspondents from other networks and sometimes within her own network.
“That is what made her so formidable and so respected,” Compton said. “You did not push her around.”
Compton wondered what would have revealed if Walters had interviewed with Queen Elizabeth or Princess Diana, “She had the potential to get inside the head of some really remarkable people such as leaders and newsmakers who had never really been pressed the way they would have been if Barbara been doing the interview.”
However, Walters received criticism for interviewing people who often were friends. Compton said it was not a concern for her.
“I was never bothered the fact that Barbara Walters, as a reporter, established good working relations with the people she was covering and — in fact — operated in their same social circles,” Compton said. “Barbara’s strength was that not only did she know these people she operated in the same social circles and that, if anything, gave her a deeper insight into the people she interviewed and she was never easy on any of them.”
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With Compton in Washington and Walters based in New York, Compton said they did not see each other frequently, but she does have many fond memories including a car trip in New York when Walters was being honored by a woman’s journalism group and wished the organizers eschewed the planned singer for entertainment.
“Wouldn’t it have been wonderful to have heard from a groundbreaking woman like Clare Boothe Luce,” Compton recalled Walters saying of the noted author, journalist and member of the U.S. Congress.
Both Compton and Walters had prominent roles in television in an era where that was uncommon for women. But Compton used the “trailblazer” moniker often placed on Walters in a different way.
“Barbara — through the strength of her reporting and her fierce determination to break good stories — that was her trailblazer role,” she said. “The networks gave her the tools with which to be a trailblazer.”
To demonstrate how Walters could be kind to her friends, when Compton went back to the Camp David Accords and Walters had to go back to New York for a couple of days, she gave Compton her hotel room in rural Maryland.
“This is what a woman does to help another woman,” Compton said. “I don’t know if male colleagues would have done that for each other. I thought it was an incredibly generous thing for Barbara to do.”
Compton also recalls receiving two laminated copies of a New York Times wedding announcement of Compton’s marriage and an infant’s tennis sweater two years later for her first born from an expensive Manhattan department store.
“She was an incredibly generous woman and that is why so many of us adored her,” Compton said.
As she reminisced about Walters’s career, Compton offers a sense of humor about her colleague.
“I can’t wait to see the interviews coming out of heaven,” Compton said. “When Barbara gets up there.”
Daniel I. Dorfman is a freelance reporter with Pioneer Press.