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Scenes From the Knives-Out Feud Between Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer

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1989

Barbara could pinpoint precisely when she first encountered Diane Sawyer.

Hanging on the wall of her Fifth Avenue apartment was a photograph showing the two of them on the trip where they met. On the last full day of President Richard Nixon’s tour of China in 1972, the eighty-seven reporters, photographers, and technicians in the traveling press corps lined up with a handful of staffers from the White House press and travel offices in the courtyard of the West Lake Guest House in Hangzhou for a picture to commemorate the historic journey.

The president is standing in the middle of the first row, a small smile on his face.

To his left side is his press secretary, Ron Ziegler, and then Helen Thomas, a correspondent for United Press International who would later become the dean of the White House press corps. Dan Rather of CBS is crouching at their feet. To Nixon’s right side, so close their shoulders are touching, is Barbara. Unlike most of the other journalists on the trip, she was neither a White House correspondent nor a TV anchor. She appeared on Today but was not yet the show’s co-host. Richard Wald, the network’s executive vice president, had taken a gamble by sending her. Three other NBC correspondents were on the trip and scattered in the photo, each with more experience and higher status than she had.

Still, Barbara managed to plant herself in pride of place, closest of all to the president. She is beaming. Standing behind her is Walter Cronkite. The third female journalist credentialed for the trip, Fay Gillis Wells, a pioneering foreign correspondent then working for Storer Broadcasting Company, is halfway down the row, bundled up in a coat with a fur collar.

“There’s Nixon,” Barbara said two decades later, pointing out the president to New York Times reporter Bill Carter, who was then working on a profile of her for the newspaper’s Sunday magazine. The photo was displayed in the long hallway that served as a gallery of her interactions with the biggest names in politics and entertainment. “Here I am, pushy cookie,” she told him, using the self-deprecating description of herself that she favored. “And way over here, that’s Diane,” tracing her finger to the border of the frame.

“She was an assistant press secretary,” Barbara said. “There were only two women on the trip who were reporters, Helen Thomas and me.” That wasn’t accurate. The slight to Fay Wells was presumably unintentional.

But the slight to Diane was unmistakably deliberate. Carter couldn’t quite believe she was making her disdain so clear. As a reporter on the television beat, he had covered the rivalry between Barbara and Diane, typically including their pro forma declarations of how much they respected one another. Now she seemed determined to pick at that scab, even while a reporter was taking notes. “Got herself in the middle—very acknowledging the truth there,” he told me, recalling the exchange. Then he mimicked her: “‘But look, way over here in the corner of the picture—look who it is, way over here.’ And she didn’t have to do that. I’m writing an article. Wouldn’t you resist that if you could?”

But she couldn’t. “No way could she resist that,” he said. She couldn’t resist the comparison, the competition, not from the very start. Not later, at the height of her career. Not ever.

Diane always had it easy. At least, that’s how Barbara saw it.

If Barbara’s early career was a case study in the long slog, Diane’s was a blueprint for how to soar. In 1978, after working for former president Nixon for four years as he wrote his memoir, she joined CBS News as a reporter. (Her prior media experience was a stint out of college as a weather girl at WLKY in Louisville.) Just three years later, she was named co-anchor of the CBS Morning News. In 1984, she became the first female correspondent on 60 Minutes, another prestigious post.

Then Roone Arledge called. A chapter of his memoir is titled “Landing Diane,” chronicling what he called “a clandestine courtship.” For a year and a half, they would meet privately for lunch or dinner every few weeks, unbeknownst to Barbara or almost anyone else. He convinced Diane to make the jump to ABC; he persuaded executives at ABC reluctant about hiring her that it was a good idea. He pitched a newsmagazine called Primetime Live that would pair her with the network’s boisterous White House correspondent, Sam Donaldson.

Roone saw it as a coup.

Barbara saw it as a betrayal.

“Roone Arledge, who was my savior, was also my nemesis because he brought Diane over from ‘60 Minutes’ and pitted us against each other,” she would say two decades later.

She had little warning that Diane’s hiring was in the works and no say in whether it would happen. A few days before the announcement, when rumors began to swirl, Peter Jennings had called Roone to make sure any deal wouldn’t affect his role as the sole anchor for the ABC Evening News. Then Roone called Barbara to give her a heads-up. “There’s a fairly good possibility that the Diane Sawyer thing may happen, maybe even this weekend,” he told her, using what he called his “softest soap,” his smoothest persuasion. “I’m calling so you won’t be taken by surprise if it does, number one, and number two, to assure you that, if it happens, it won’t affect you in any way.”

“That’s terrific,” she replied, though he noticed that her icy tone didn’t match her warm words. “I’d be delighted to have Diane here. I think she’s awfully good.”

Half an hour later, she called back. “Now that I’ve thought it over, I’m totally opposed to her,” she said, not even mentioning “her” name. This time, Barbara’s words did match her tone. “It has to affect me. How is someone of my stature supposed to divide up things with her? With all the things I do for ABC, bringing in such an obvious competitor like her is going to make it very tough…” He assumed the unspoken conclusion of that sentence was “for me to continue working at ABC.” He reassured her she was “foremost in my heart and would continue so everlastingly.” He told her he wouldn’t let her get hurt, that he would personally look after her interests.

When Diane’s move was announced days later, the news shook the TV world in the same way Barbara’s shift to ABC from NBC had. “The fact is that the people who run the network news divisions believe that Sawyer’s defection from CBS was one of the most important events in broadcast journalism—perhaps the most important—since Barbara Walters was lured to ABC 13 years ago for $1 million,” Edward Klein wrote in New York magazine. A close-up of a contemplative Diane was featured on the magazine’s cover. The move signaled that “no longer CBS but ABC was the dominant network in news.”

Both women were smart, ambitious, and extraordinarily hardworking. Neither had come up through journalism’s traditional path. Barbara grew up in the show business world of her father’s nightclubs in Miami and New York before moving into a hybrid of journalism and entertainment. Diane, the daughter of a Kentucky judge, had worked for the only American president ever to resign in disgrace, then managed the difficult maneuver of crossing over into the news media. The backgrounds of both were the subject of suspicion by some of their journalistic brethren.

In other ways, though, they could hardly have been more different. Diane was sixteen years younger, enough of an interval to benefit from gains that had been hard-won by Barbara and other groundbreakers. She was the most beautiful woman in TV news. As a teenager, she had been crowned America’s Junior Miss; as an adult, she could seem almost ethereal. If Diane was cool and aloof, Barbara was hot, intense, in your face. Diane glided. Barbara charged.

If someone had built to order the woman most likely to set off Barbara Walters, she would have looked a lot like Diane Sawyer. Their rivalry became the talk of the town, and the network.

“When I arrived, I’m sure it was confusing to her because interviews had been her sole terrain,” Diane told me. “I was always working on some long-form, delving into violence in schools or something that had really intrigued me. So I never felt that shows I was on, or my career, depended on interviews solely, but I understood what they meant to her.” The big interview was Barbara’s bread-and-butter. “When I started doing some interviews, I think it must have thrown her.”

Now Diane and her booker, Mark Robertson, were pursuing them, too; he was every bit as aggressive as Barbara, sometimes enabling Diane to stay above the fray. But to her surprise and dismay, Diane discovered ABC had no system to allocate prospective subjects, like the one that was used at 60 Minutes to maintain some order among the famously competitive correspondents there. At ABC, it was a free-for-all. Whoever could land a big guest got them.

L-R: in 1993, 1990, and 2014.L-R: by Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection/Getty Images; By Bettmann/Getty Images; by Noam Galai/WireImage/Getty Images.

Barbara welcomed Diane to ABC by trying to steal the first guest from her new show.

Thomas Root was at the center of a headline-grabbing mystery. On July 13, 1989, the communications lawyer took off from Washington National Airport in his Cessna 210 Centurion, flying to North Carolina to meet some clients. He radioed he was having trouble breathing; later, he would report he blacked out. The single-engine plane was tailed by military jets and helicopters as it headed down the Eastern Seaboard on autopilot for nearly four hours and eight hundred miles. When it ran out of fuel and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean near the Bahamas, Root bobbed to the surface and rescuers managed to pull him into a raft. Oh, and this: He had an unexplained gunshot wound in his stomach.

Primetime booker Maia Samuel persuaded Root to come to the New York studio for an exclusive, live interview with Diane for the first show. She checked him into a hotel on Central Park West and stationed herself in the lobby, on the lookout for mischief, presumably by some competitor at another network. Instead, it was an ABC colleague, Lynn Murray, an associate producer on 20 ⁄ 20, who showed up. She had been dispatched to convince Root to ditch Diane and be interviewed by Barbara instead.

“It was a complicated internal ABC situation,” Victor Neufeld, the executive producer of 20 ⁄ 20, told me, an understatement. “It was very competitive, and I was in the middle.” Working for Barbara was a privilege, journalistic “nirvana,” he said, but it “wasn’t for the faint-hearted.” He took the fall for the stunt, saying he was the one who had suggested Murray pursue Root; at the time Barbara insisted she had nothing to do with it. But Neufeld confirmed to me years later that it was Barbara’s doing. That’s what everyone had assumed from the start.

Her producers on the show were “thunderstruck” by the audacity of the move, Diane told me, although she said she was too consumed with the other complications of launching a new show to pay much attention.

“None of us could get over the fact that she would actually attempt to steal the name [that is, the most prominent guest] for the premier show,” Ira Rosen, a senior producer for Primetime, told me. “It was a sort of foreshadowing of what would be coming in the following months, years.”

Soon afterward, Barbara tried to upend another interview that Diane had landed, this time with Katharine Hepburn. The crew from Primetime was already in Hepburn’s New York apartment setting up the lights and cameras when Barbara called Hepburn, urging her to cancel Diane and talk to her instead, Roone biographer Marc Gunther reported. The famed actress declined.

Diane managed some payback for that one. When Barbara scheduled her own Hepburn interview a year later, Primetime rebroadcast Diane’s interview just ahead of it. (A “management mistake,” ABC’s spokeswoman said afterward, a benign explanation that convinced no one.)

“There were no rules,” Diane said. A year after she had arrived at ABC, she asked Roone to intervene, to set up some guardrails. To her frustration, he refused. “Roone felt that competition even in the family would be good,” she said. “I really felt that it would be impossible for me to be put in a situation where I would be calling and Barbara would be calling, too. That’s not what families do.”

It was a classic Roone tactic, to hire the biggest names with the biggest ambitions and have them compete for the biggest prizes, the highest ratings, the most acclaim. “Roone loved pitting people against each other,” producer Phyllis McGrady told me. “He thought it made everything rise to a new, different level.” That was true not only of Barbara and Diane but also of men in his employ, of Peter Jennings and Ted Koppel and others.

Diane and Rosen demanded a meeting with Roone after Barbara managed to steal an interview, this one with John Hinckley Jr., who was confined to a psychiatric hospital for the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan. “How is thievery an honorable position to take in this and allowing it to happen?” Rosen asked him.

Roone, on a speakerphone, didn’t share his outrage. “She outsmarted you,” he said.

Their relationship wasn’t simple; it had layers. “I know that nobody, maybe, will believe this,” Diane told me, “but we spent a lot of time laughing and forging a real friendship, and that was true even when I first arrived.” The two of them understood more than anyone else the trials they had faced, the prices they had paid. While they had differences, they could recognize something of themselves in the other. “I could share anything with her, and I know she shared things with me, things that were very close to the bone,” Diane said. She saw Barbara’s wistfulness about her loving marriage to Mike Nichols. Barbara envied it, a reminder that she had never managed to sustain such a union herself.

They were also the most intensive competitors, a stronger strand in their relationship.

Two years later came the most explosive showdown of all between Barbara and Diane, one never before reported. It put Barbara on the defensive and blew up, at least for a time, the relationship she valued most, the one with Roone.

In 1996, every network was seeking an interview with President Bill Clinton as he pursued a campaign for a second term. After disastrous midterm elections in 1994 had cost Democrats control of the House and Senate, he had made a remarkable political metamorphosis, partly in concert with his leading antagonist, Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich.

The ABC brass decided it was Diane’s turn to get the Clinton interview. “Roone Arledge made it very clear to me and told me specifically, and always on the phone with Joanna Bistany, who was his number two in managing the talent and all of that, that this one had to go to Diane, that I had to explain to the White House that ABC’s priority was to get the interview and our priority for the interview was Diane Sawyer,” Robin Sproul, the network’s Washington bureau chief, told me. “I did, in fact, communicate that to the White House very clearly that that’s what we wanted.”

Barbara, who had conducted a White House interview with First Lady Hillary Clinton about her new book in January, was supposed to stand down. That word reached everyone involved except, apparently, Barbara. To the bemusement of White House press secretary Mike McCurry, both Diane and Barbara were aggressively lobbying White House staffers for an interview with the president—not only explaining why they should get it but also why the other one shouldn’t.

Sproul had driven her two young daughters to the Eastern Shore for a spring weekend when the White House press office pinged her beeper; it was before the era of smartphones. She called back. “Well, I have good news and bad news,” McCurry told her. “You got the interview—and it’s going to Barbara.” He said he realized she would have “a hot one on her hands” with that. She called Roone and Joanna from the hotel. “Here’s the situation,” she told them. “We got the interview—yay!—but they’re giving it to Barbara.”

Roone was enraged. “How can they do that?” he demanded. She replied, “Look, they get to offer the interview to whoever they want to offer the interview to. That’s what they get to do.” “Well, you can tell them we don’t want their interview,” he replied angrily. “You call the White House and tell them we’re not doing the interview.”

Sproul, startled, warned that if ABC turned down a prized interview with the president because of a rivalry between two anchors, that would become the story, and a big one. “The White House knows that the two of them have been down there arguing it and fighting for this interview and if you turn it down, that will be leaked,” she said.

“Call the White House now and you tell them, we’re turning down the interview,” Roone repeated.

Click.

An hour and a half later, Sproul was still trying to figure out exactly how to deliver that message to the White House when Joanna called her back. “Hon, you know that thing Roone asked you to do? Did you do that?” she asked. No, Sproul replied, not yet. Joanna said, “Don’t do that. We’re delighted to do the interview with the White House. Couldn’t be happier. Thank you.”

That would not be the end of it. Roone was so angry and the blowback so blistering that Barbara wrote a three-page memo to him offering her account of what had happened and why she was not at fault for any of it. For someone who was accustomed to being on offense, to plowing ahead, she suddenly found herself on her back foot. She had always had sharp antennae. It was a sign of the trouble she was in that she would feel compelled to write such an explanation, convincing or not.

“I am troubled, as I am sure you are, by the events concerning the background to the interview with President Clinton,” she began in the memo typed on her 20 ⁄ 20 stationery, dated April 16, 1996. It was filed in the Roone Arledge archives at Columbia University. Joanna had never told her it was Diane’s interview, she insisted, and besides, she was the one who deserved it. “Indeed, the only top ABC correspondent never to have interviewed President Clinton is me, so if anything, we would have expected ABC News to have asked for us to have priority, were there to be one,” underlining words for emphasis.

She offered preemptive responses to whatever questions might be raised, in a word salad of explanation, finger-pointing, half-truths, random asides, and non sequiturs. The interview she recently had with Hillary was irrelevant, she wrote, and by the way only turned out to be newsworthy because of her acumen. She had never before met McCurry, so it was perfectly understandable that she went to see him, she said, and that she would request an interview with Clinton while she was in the press secretary’s office.

She mentioned her pitch, the one that apparently had proved to be so persuasive. She had recently interviewed Colin Powell, she noted. “‘Everyone knew what Powell’s character was,’ I said, ‘but they didn’t know how he stood on the issues until we asked,’” she told McCurry. “‘With the president,’ I suggested, ‘everyone knows how he stands on the issues, but his character is being questioned.’

“McCurry then told us, to our astonishment, that ABC News was pushing hard for Diane,” she wrote. “He thought we should know. We said, ‘Oh,’ and little more.” Barbara blamed her apparent cluelessness on Joanna’s failure to keep her informed. At one point, when they talked, Barbara wrote, “Joanna was ill and perhaps has forgotten some of the conversation.”

Now, she complained, Joanna had delivered her a disquieting message. “She told us that you had ‘washed your hands of the whole thing,’” Barbara wrote, and that “she, too, ‘washed her hands of the whole situation’ and that though she loved me as a ‘human being,’ from now on any discussions I had in the future should be with Alan Wurtzel.” Wurtzel was the network’s senior vice president for newsmagazine and long-form programming. Barbara was accustomed to having a clear channel to Roone, the boss at the top.

“I am also concerned about my relationship with Diane,” Barbara continued. “She and I have had a wonderful relationship, considering our programs are still so competitive, and I would hate for her to have the impression that I knew of ABC News’ position and deliberately undercut her.” (For the record, Diane told me she remembered other incidents when they had clashed but not this one.)

That “wonderful relationship,” and Barbara’s concern about it, would surely have been news to everyone who had been caught in the crossfire between the two of them. The idea that she was “astonished” to learn the interview had been designated for Diane was less than credible, too. So was the notion that, even if she acknowledged knowing, she would have been deterred from trying to get the interview herself.

Whether they believed her version of events or not, though, Barbara closed with a threat. She was then in the midst of contract negotiations, she noted, suggesting that perhaps she might be better off at some other network. “All this dismayed me, to put it mildly,” she wrote. “If this is what it is like before I sign a contract, I thought, what will the next years be like? How unhappy will I be?” She deployed, in effect, the nuclear option, that she would leave ABC.

That was a credible threat. Four years earlier, during the previous round of contract negotiations, CBS had pursued her. Howard Stringer, then president of the CBS Broadcast Group, and Laurence Tisch, the CEO and president of CBS, had offered her a staggering $10 million a year to anchor her own newsmagazine, promising a valuable time slot, 10 p.m. on Mondays. Anxious about having to prove herself yet again, she turned CBS down but let Bistany know about the rival’s bid.

This time, the risk that she might take a walk was apparently enough to avert a showdown.

Barbara sat down with Clinton for the interview. As promised, she focused on questions about his character. At that time, the president had begun a sexual relationship with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky, but neither Barbara nor almost anyone else realized that yet. “The American people have now had an adequate opportunity to judge me as president, to see my work, to make a judgment about whether I have the character to do this job, and they will do that,” Clinton told her.

After all that, the interview didn’t make news—nothing like the blockbuster interview she would have with Monica three years later. Barbara herself didn’t think much of the sit-down with Clinton. “He never sparkled with me,” she said dismissively. “Our conversation was not memorable to me.”

When Ben Sherwood became president of ABC News in 2010, he was determined to ease the internal competition and forge a more collaborative work ethic within the network—to focus their energy against competitors at CBS and NBC, not at their colleagues down the corridor. “For years, it seemed that there had been roving gangs of anchormen and women and correspondents and producers roaming the halls and sometimes shooting each other in broad daylight,” he told me. “We felt like we needed to restore law and order and bring the organization together peacefully. That was our goal.”

In 1989, Roone had staged a celebrated publicity campaign featuring the network’s biggest guns, informally dubbed “the Magnificent Seven”: Peter Jennings, Ted Koppel, Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, David Brinkley, Sam Donaldson, and Hugh Downs. Now Sherwood scheduled a photo session at the ABC studio at Chelsea Piers including a much larger group of twenty-two anchors. His message: “This group, we’ll win together, we’ll win the championship together, and that’s our mission together. It’s not every woman and man for himself anymore. It’s not me against you in the street: ‘I’ll kill you; I’ll get that interview.’ It’s ‘we’re going to do this together.’”

Everyone was instructed to wear black or navy—not a uniform, exactly, but the colors of a unified team. Just about everybody complied, more or less. The fourteen men were all in dark suits, David Muir and George Stephanopoulos among them. Katie Couric and Christiane Amanpour dressed in dark gray; Lara Spencer and Elizabeth Vargas in quiet\ shades of blue; Robin Roberts in a muted maroon. Diane Sawyer, on the front row and just off center, was wearing a black suit and crisp white blouse, with just a touch of color in her narrow red belt.

Barbara arrived last and late, just in time to perch on her designated stool in the front. She was wearing not black or navy or gray or a color that was even slightly muted. She was wearing a red jacket over a black turtleneck, a brilliant combination that had the intended effect. With that red jacket, Barbara stole the spotlight. If this was a photograph of a team, there would be no question, visually at least, who commanded its center.

Diane’s countenance in the photo is guarded, but she was furious. “See? It’s all about her,” she told others afterward. “She never follows the rules.” Sherwood understood the power play involved, but at that point there was nothing to be done about it. The photo was taken and used for publicity. “She won that round,” he told me with a rueful chuckle. “That was game-set-match.”

In the picture, Barbara is in pride of place, in the precise center of the front row. Her expression is triumphant, remarkably like the one in the photo taken nearly two decades earlier in the courtyard of the West Lake Guest House in Hangzhou, China, where she had managed to park herself right next to President Nixon.

She is beaming.

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27 KiB Raw Blame History Unescape Escape

Scenes From the Knives-Out Feud Between Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer

1989

27 KiB

Raw Blame History Unescape Escape