Barbara Walters was 78 years old when she finally spoke the name aloud. Sitting in Oprah Winfrey’s studio in Chicago on May 6, 2008, promoting her memoir, she confessed to a relationship she had guarded for 35 years: her affair with Senator Edward Brooke, a married man and the first Black American elected to the Senate by popular vote. The confession was a reversal for a woman who had built her career on getting others to surrender their secrets. For decades, Walters had lived in fear that this particular secret would destroy everything she had worked for.
The decision to reveal it herself, on her own terms, was the final act of a story that began long before she ever sat across from a president. Barbara Walters was born in Boston in 1929 into a world of nightclubs and theatrical glamour. Her father, Lou Walters, was an impresario who could make and lose fortunes quickly. He gambled heavily, and in 1958, after a business failure, he attempted suicide with sleeping pills.
The family told the world he had suffered a heart attack, hiding the crisis while absorbing the damage privately. Barbara watched both the disaster and the construction of its cover story, and it shaped her permanently. What she wanted was security, the safety of being indispensable. Edward Brooke’s early life ran on a different track.
Born in Washington, D. C. , in 1919, he grew up in a stable middle-class Black household in a segregated city. He served as a captain in a segregated regiment during World War II, earned a Bronze Star, and later graduated from Boston University’s law school.
In 1966, the voters of Massachusetts sent him to the U. S. Senate, making him the first African American in history elected to that body by popular vote. When he was escorted down the center aisle of the chamber by Senator Edward Kennedy, the other senators rose and applauded.
Brooke married an Italian woman he met in wartime, Remigia Ferrari Scacco, in 1947. They had two daughters. He also married Barbara intellectually and emotionally, beginning what biographer Susan Page called the most serious romantic affair of Walters’ life. Their first date in 1973 reportedly took place inside the Senate dining room, a strikingly public setting for what had to remain a secret.
The relationship was layered with danger: both were married, he was a sitting senator, she was a journalist covering national politics, and the relationship was interracial in an America still openly hostile to that. Walters was still legally married to theater producer Lee Guber when the affair began. They had adopted a daughter, Jacqueline, in 1968. The marriage had effectively ended by 1972, though the divorce was not finalized until 1976.
As Brooke’s feelings deepened, he introduced Walters to his mother and reportedly spent Thanksgiving with her. He asked his wife for a divorce. By Walters’ account, Remigia responded with fury, hiring private investigators and supplying information to someone connected to the National Enquirer. The threat of exposure became credible, and Walters’ advisers warned her bluntly that being known as a married senator’s lover could destroy her credibility.
The timing made the warning devastating. In 1976, ABC made Walters the first woman to co-anchor a network evening news broadcast, a historic milestone that came with intense public scrutiny. Her salary was attacked, her co-anchor Harry Reasoner made his hostility visible, and critics questioned her right to be there at all. She later said she felt as though she were drowning.
Brooke pushed toward the daylight, asking for a divorce and moving toward a public future. Walters recoiled, protecting her career above all else. Her formative experience had taught her not to gamble. Her response to danger was to make herself indispensable and retreat.
The relationship ended quietly, before Brooke’s unsuccessful 1978 re-election campaign. There was no final scene, no shared statement. Barbara chose the career. The feared scandal never came.
Brooke’s downfall came from a different direction. A deposition in his divorce proceedings contained an inaccurate account concerning the source of some money, and the discrepancy led to a Senate Ethics Committee inquiry. In November 1978, he lost his seat to Democrat Paul Tsongas. The Ethics Committee cleared him months later, but the political damage was done.
The affair with Walters was never part of the public scandal that ended his career. Walters’ career recovered and expanded. She joined 20/20, built a reputation as the most formidable interviewer in America, and created The View in 1997. She interviewed every president and first lady from Richard Nixon through Barack Obama, along with Fidel Castro and countless other world figures and celebrities.
She married television executive Merv Adelson twice, and divorced him twice, later saying plainly that the work had always come first. Brooke remarried in 1979, to Anne Fleming, and remained married until his death. After a breast cancer diagnosis in 2002, he went public about the disease to raise awareness of male breast cancer. In 2004, President George W.
Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in 2009, President Barack Obama presented him with the Congressional Gold Medal. He died in 2015 at age 95. Walters told Brooke before the memoir was published that his name would appear in it. He wrote back a gracious note, never publicly confirming the relationship himself.
When Walters’ memoir was published in 2008, the revelation made news but not scandal. The cultural conditions had changed, her active career was over, and she controlled the timing. What would have been a weapon in 1976 was received in 2008 as a poignant admission from a woman in her late seventies. Barbara Walters died in Manhattan on December 30, 2022, at age 93.
The relationship left almost nothing physical behind: no shared home, no archive of letters, no photograph. Its entire material legacy is a memoir, a gracious reply, and the gap between two celebrated public careers and the private life those careers were never allowed to show. Brooke and Walters were both pioneers who paid for their historic firsts in private.
The relationship threatened both of their carefully maintained public identities at once, and when the choice came, Walters chose the career that had held her family together and cleared a path for the women who came after her.