Susan Page - The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters - with Dana Bash

Watch author Susan Page's book talk and reading at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.
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Barbara Walters was a force from the time TV was exploding on the American scene in the 1960s to its waning dominance in a new world of competition from streaming services and social media half a century later. She was not just a groundbreaker for women (Oprah announced when she was seventeen that she wanted to be Barbara Walters), but also expanded the big TV interview and then dominated the genre. By the end of her career, she had interviewed more of the famous and infamous, from presidents to movie stars to criminals to despots, than any other journalist in history. Then at sixty-seven, past the age many female broadcasters found themselves involuntarily retired, she pioneered a new form of talk TV called The View. She is on the short list of those who have left the biggest imprints on television news and on our culture, male or female. So, who was the woman behind the legacy?
In The Rulebreaker, Susan Page conducts 150 interviews and extensive archival research to discover that Walters was driven to keep herself and her family afloat after her mercurial and famous impresario father attempted suicide. But she never lost the fear of an impending catastrophe, which is what led her to ask for things no woman had ever asked for before, to ignore the rules of misogynistic culture, to outcompete her most ferocious competitors, and to protect her complicated marriages and love life from scrutiny.
Page breaks news on every front--from the daring things Walters did to become the woman who reinvented the TV interview to the secrets she kept until her death. This is the eye-opening account of the woman who knew she had to break all the rules so she could break all the rules about what viewers deserved to know.
Susan Page, the Washington Bureau chief of USA Today, is an award-winning journalist and best-selling author. Her books include Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power and The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty, both New York Times bestsellers. Her biography of Barbara Walters, The Rulebreaker, is being published by Simon & Schuster in April 2024. Susan has covered eleven presidential elections, interviewed the past ten presidents, and reported from six continents. She has won every journalism award given specifically for White House coverage and served as president of the White House Correspondents Association and of the Gridiron Club, the oldest association of journalists in Washington. In 2020, she moderated the vice-presidential debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris. A native of Wichita, Kansas, she received a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern and a master’s from Columbia. She and husband Carl Leubsdorf have two sons, Ben and Will.
Page is in conversation with Dana Bash. Bash is CNN's chief political correspondent and co-anchor of State of the Union with Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, the network's Sunday morning newsmaker show. Bash is based in Washington, D.C., where she covers both campaigns and Congress and regularly serves as a moderator for CNN's political town hall specials.
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Founded by Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade in 1984, Politics and Prose Bookstore is Washington, D.C.'s premier independent bookstore and cultural hub, a gathering place for people interested in reading and discussing books. Politics and Prose offers superior service, unusual book choices, and a haven for book lovers in the store and online.