Harry Reasoner (left) and Barbara Walters.
The screen behind them shows Pope Paul VI.
October 4, 1976: ABC World News Tonight starts a new anchor team. Former anchor Howard K. Smith begins a semi-retirement, where he will only be doing a nightly commentary at the end of the broadcast. His former partner, Harry Reasoner, is joined by a new co-anchor: Barbara Walters. She is the 1st female anchor or co-anchor of a network news broadcast.
In hindsight, it might seem like putting pineapple on pizza: Two good things that didn't go well together. But that's not the case at all. It was more like oil and water: It simply didn't mix.
Harry was born in 1923 in Iowa, and was a farm boy before the family moved to Minneapolis. He started as a newspaperman, a career interrupted by serving in the U.S Army in World War II. In 1946, he published a novel titled Tell Me About Women, about a fading marriage. It should have been a red flag.
He moved to CBS radio in 1948, and television in 1956. On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and Walter Cronkite, then the anchorman, delivered the news over CBS. Reasoner and Cronkite then relieved each other over the next 4 days as it was the only story in the world, boosting both men's profiles. It was Reasoner who broke the news that Lee Harvey Oswald, arrested as JFK's assassin, had, himself, been shot.
In 1967, Reasoner hosted a CBS Reports documentary, The Hippie Temptation. While it rightly warned of the dangerous of running away from home and joining the hippies in New York or San Francisco, and the drugs that could be involved, it made all the hippies look like dirty, drugged-out sex maniacs, hypocritically bashing capitalism while begging for spare change.
In 1968, Reasoner and Mike Wallace became the co-anchors of the first "news magazine" show, 60 Minutes. Morley Safer and Andy Rooney, also correspondents on the show, both cited Reasoner's drinking, and Rooney, a writer by trade, called Reasoner "a lazy writer." And this was his friends talking. ABC signed him away in 1970, and paired him with Smith.
Barbara was born in 1929 in Boston, descended from Russian Jews who changed the family name from Waremwasser to Warmwater to Walters. Her father owned the Latin Quarter, one of the top nightclubs in Boston, and she was immersed in show business from the beginning. And she went to private schools in New York City. With all of that, and being a woman, her background was very different from Harry's.
She eventually married and divorced 3 different men, 1 of them twice, adopted a daughter, and, in between husbands, had, by her own later admission, a love-life that might have been terribly scandalous had she not been so discreet.
She worked for NBC's New York affiliate, now WNBC-Channel 4, wrote and produced for children's TV shows, wrote for Redbook magazine, and, in 1961, joined the staff of NBC's morning program, The Today Show, hosted by Hugh Downs. She became co-anchor in 1963, and remained so after 1971, when Downs left and Frank McGee took his place. Downs liked her; McGee did not. When her contract ran out in 1976, ABC jumped at the chance to get her as nightly news co-anchor.
Walters said that the tension because Reasoner did not want to work with a co-anchor, and also because he was unhappy at ABC, not because he disliked Walters personally. She may have taken the high road: Several women recalled Reasoner making misogynistic remarks to them off-camera.
The experiment didn't even last 2 years. CBS wanted Reasoner back, and gave him an offer he couldn't refuse, including a return to 60 Minutes. On July 10, 1978, ABC went with a three-anchor setup: Peter Jennings at the foreign desk in London, Max Robinson (the 1st black man to even be a partial anchor on a major network's nightly news show) at the national desk in Chicago, and Frank Reynolds at the main desk in Washington. This held until Reynolds died of cancer in 1983, by which point Robinson's health had also begun to fail, and Jennings became the single anchor for the next 21 years.
But ABC had invested heavily in Walters, and found ways to use her talents. The Barbara Walters Special was a periodic show that ran for over 20 years, and featured her interviewing major figures from international leaders to show business stars. In 1980, she had the first major-network interview with former President Richard Nixon following his resignation, and the syndicated interview with David Frost in 1977.
Her joint interview with Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel and President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, as they began the process that led to the Camp David Accord, was considered huge. So was her trip to Cuba, to interview dictator Fidel Castro, whose command of English was better than his command of his country.
In 1979, ABC started its own newsmagazine with a number in the title: 20/20. And it hired Downs and Walters as co-anchors, and they remained so until Downs' retirement in 1999. Walters continued to host it until 2004.
In 1981, on 20/20, Walters interviewed Reasoner, who had just published a memoir. They got along fine in this one-time-only meeting. Reasoner died in 1991, at the age of 68, while still with 60 Minutes. By that point, his reputation had recovered, but, from the rise of 20/20 onward, he was never again as big a news star as Walters.
In 1997, she began the daytime talk show The View, and she remained its main host and its executive producer in 2014, when her health began to fail. (UPDATE: She died on December 30, 2022, at 93.)
In 1997, Fox News made Catherine Crier, Walters' former ABC teammate, their nightly news anchor. But Fox has never been a respected news network. In 2001, Judy Woodruff became the main prime-time anchor on CNN.
Of the "Big Three" American networks, ABC tried again in 2005 with Elizabeth Vargas, CBS had their 1st female anchor in 2006 with Katie Couric, and NBC has still never had one. However, aside from Max Robinson as tri-anchor on ABC, NBC is the only one of the Big Three to have had a single black anchor, as Lester Holt has anchored The NBC Nightly News in 2015. In 2014, ABC replaced Diane Sawyer, after 5 years, with David Muir, who still anchors as of October 4, 2022. CBS has had Norah O'Donnell since 2019.
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October 4, 1976 was a Monday. Actress Alicia Silverstone and soccer star Mauro Camoranesi were born. And Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz resigned over a racist remark. I have a separate entry for that event.
Baseball was between the end of the regular season and the start of the Playoffs. The NBA, NHL and WHA seasons were about to start. On ABC Monday Night Football, the Minnesota Vikings beat the Pittsburgh Steelers, 17-6 at Metropolitan Stadium in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota.
