But salvation arrived in the form of a new boss, ABC News president Roone Arledge, who moved her out of the co-anchor slot and into special projects for ABC News. Meanwhile, she found success with her quarterly primetime interview specials. She became a frequent contributor to ABC’s newsmagazine “20/20,”and in 1984, became co-host. A perennial favorite was her review of the year’s “10 Most Fascinating People.”
By 2004, when she stepped down from “20/20,” she had logged more than 700 interviews, ranging from Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Moammar Gadhafi, to Michael Jackson, Erik and Lyle Menendez and Elton John. Her two-hour talk with Monica Lewinsky in 1999, timed to the former White House intern’s memoir about her affair with President Bill Clinton, drew more than 70 million viewers and is among history’s highest-rated television interviews.
A special favorite for Walters was Katharine Hepburn, although a 1981 exchange led to one of her most ridiculed questions: “What kind of a tree are you?”