Silver Case

Kyle Smith eviscerates Barbara Walter’s biography in today’s Asian Wall Street Journal. Had me laughing out loud as I ate my salaryman dinner downstairs of the hotel.

Who is Barbara Walters? She is a journalist who cannot write (”Just before the ax fell, lightning struck and my life changed, never to be the same again”). She is the veteran of a major TV network’s news division who once wedged a piece on her own apartment into a prime-time broadcast. She is a celebrity who is most famous for her orbital relationship with other celebrities. Immensely rich and familiar to all, she has been around forever without anyone quite knowing why. And now she is a memoirist.

Behold history according to Barbara. “President Kennedy was lying in state in the rotunda. My job was to report on both the dignitaries and the long lines of everyday people arriving to pay their last respects. I found an old film clip from that day. I’m wearing a black coat. I have long dark hair.” On Indira Gandhi: “She and I had the same complaints. I also didn’t much like my kitchen.” After a couple of dutiful pages on 1973’s Yom Kippur War in the Mideast, she segues with: “In 1975 morning television was having its own little war.” Accompanying Nixon in China: “We also had big roomy bathtubs, no showers — and unexpected luxuries. One-day laundry service and one-hour pressing.”

“Audition” might have been 50 pages of cute stories about the great, the terrible and Monica Lewinsky, but Ms. Walters apparently felt the need to bulk things up, forcing the book covers ever wider to produce an epic of self-absorption unleavened by self-awareness.

We learn that Ms. Walters periodically went out with lawyer Roy Cohn in the 1960s — she didn’t know he was gay and though she found his role in McCarthyism “despicable,” she once considered marrying him (!) because he “bought a large town house,” one big enough to accommodate her parents and sister as well.

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