When Barbara Walters signs off from The View today, it will mark her farewell to television—at least as a regular—after a 50-year career. For a woman who started out hawking dog food on camera to one that reeled in the most viewers of any single news program ever (that would be the almost 50 million who watched her interview Monica Lewinsky in 1999), her career has been a long and remarkable one. As the New York Times puts it, "it's hard to imagine a single newscaster again holding so much sway over the culture"—which shows both Walters' pull as well as the changing media landscape. It may be goodbye, but we'll always have the interviews. Here are five of her more notable ones, courtesy of ABC News.
- Monica Lewinsky: The former White House intern broke her silence on her affair with President Bill Clinton in an interview that aired March 4, 1999.
- Fidel Castro: In an interview that aired June 9, 1977, Walters talked to Cuban President Fidel Castro as the pair crossed the Bay of Pigs.
- Vladimir Putin: Walters sat down with Putin in an interview airing November 7, 2001, marking the Russian president's first chat with an American journalist since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
- Tom Cruise: Everyone remembers Cruise's couch-jumping on The Oprah Winfrey Show, but he explained his bizarre behavior to Walters in 2005; he said he had no regrets.
- Bashar al-Assad: In 2011 Walters nabbed the Syrian president's first interview with a US journalist after the Syrian uprising began, in which he denied ordering a deadly crackdown on protesters.
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