Barbara Walters has passed…

The Washington Post….

Ms. Walters, who died Dec. 30 at her home in New York, according to ABC, spent the following decades overcoming her mangled r’s and became one of television’s premier interrogators of the newsworthy. At NBC and later ABC News, she was tireless in her pursuit of “gets” — interviews with the hard-to-corner. She questioned presidents from Richard M. Nixon to Barack Obama, dictators from Fidel Castro to Bashar al-Assad, murderers and crooks, and stars of stage, screen and scandal.

The biggest get of all, she said, was the first televised interview with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky, whose affair with President Bill Clinton led to his impeachment.

“What will you tell your children when you have them?” Ms. Walters, then with ABC’s “20/20,” asked Lewinsky in March 1999, a month after Clinton was acquitted in the Senate of charges related to lying about his sexual encounter in the Oval Office.

“Mommy made a big mistake,” Lewinsky replied.

“And that,” Ms. Walters said, turning to the camera, “is the understatement of the year.”

The line was characteristic of her wry and intimate style that helped lure more than 70 million viewers to the Lewinsky segment…

…

Ms. Walters’s fans loved watching what often seemed like a private conversation in a cozy setting. Even her critics struggled to look away when a Barbara Walters “special” was on the air. Guests returned for sequels because she avoided Wallace-style confrontations and often persuaded them that she wanted to hear their side — that she cared.

In a 1980 interview on “20/20,” Nixon conceded, after Ms. Walters’s persistent coaxing, that he should have destroyed the Oval Office recordings that sealed his ouster.

“Are you sorry you didn’t burn the tapes?”

“The answer is, I probably should have,” he replied. “But mainly, I shouldn’t have even installed them.”

“If you had it to do all over again, you’d burn them?”

“Yes,” the former president said, “I think so, because they were private conversations subject to misinterpretation, as we have all seen.”…

More….

image…President Barack Obama with Ms. Walters in 2010…Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

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Barbara Walters has passed…

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