I don't know, maybe I'm a little odd for somebody over the age of 35, but I've never had much of an opinion about Barbara Walters, one way or the other. I don't watch "The View." I don't have any plans to read her new book. Still, I've been interested in the reaction to Barbara Walters on the release of her autobiography, called "The Audition," from pundits, other media types, bloggers, etc. In the June issue of The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan is especially tough of Walters. Her review is titled, "The Uses of Enchantment." And her blistering criticism of Walters is, in a sentence, that "Barbara Walters got the story by giving her subjects what they wanted." And what exactly is it that Walters gave them? According to Flanagan: Love.
Barbara Walters fell in love with the people she interviewed. She cared about them. She was interested in what they had to say. She assumed, in every case, no matter who they were or what they were accused of doing, that there was another side to the story...that there was their side.
And that made all the difference.
Walters got more people, from the most powerful offices on earth, to reveal the most intimate aspects of their lives, to share things they had never shared with anyone. In Flanagan's words:
Barbara Walters has known presidents and kings, famous call girls and genteel murderers, Nobel Prize winners and dumb blondes who have changed the world. She has floated on the Dead Sea by moonlight and interviewed Moshe Dayan in his backyard. She has been to the ancient city of Per sep olis to observe the 2,500-year anniversary of the Persian monarchy, where 50 yellow and blue tents had been erected by “Jansen of Paris, the hot interior decorator,” and filled with Limoges, Baccarat, Porthault linens, and two tons of Iranian caviar. She has chatted in a palace garden with Princess Grace, eaten prime rib and potatoes off TV-dinner trays with Katharine Hepburn, bounced around the Reagan ranch in Ronnie’s favorite Jeep, motorboated across the Bay of Pigs with Fidel Castro, risked a nighttime landing during a Baghdad blackout to interview Saddam Hussein, been admitted into Muammar Qaddafi’s desert tent (where she worried that her pink knit suit would clash with the general’s green-and-white mufti), brokered and conducted the first joint interview with Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin, pressed her body tight to Sylvester Stallone’s while his Harley roared between their legs.
Who didn't this woman talk to? Who would refuse to talk with her? People trusted her with their stories, their souls. And this, Flanagan says, is what should horrify us, make us indignant. Flanagan again:
Again and again throughout the volume, we are reminded that if there is one journalistic principle for which Barbara has no time at all, it is “conflict of interest.” Her closest friends seem to be the people whom she has interviewed and hopes to interview again. She nurtures them, she helps them, she loves them in the perfect and unconflicted way in which she was apparently never able to love her husbands or her only sibling. It was Barbara who stumbled upon a helplessly confused Julie Nixon Eisenhower at LaGuardia shortly after her father’s resignation and helped her manage the first commercial flight she took by herself, and it was Barbara who threw the book party for Alan Greenspan’s corker about the Fed. Once, on The View, when Michael Jackson was being tried for child molestation, the other ladies raged and cackled about the hell that would rain down on him if they ever got hold of him. But Barbara looked right into the camera, speaking neither to her colleagues nor to the viewers, but to an audience of one: “If I ever had the chance to talk to Michael,” she said—gently, kindly, the way all of us wish to be talked to when we are in serious trouble—“I would say to him, ‘Michael, what is your side of the story?’”
Egads!, we're supposed to think at the end of Flanagan's piece. What was Barbara thinking?! Well, I'll tell you what I was thinking: Way to go, Barbara. Thanks for reminding us that no amount of know how, academic credentials, or professional polish will make a difference if the people you're working with don't believe you care about them.
Nobody's going to let you lead 'em anywhere if they don't know you love them.
Look around at the people in your organization - and in your community - today.
How's your heart?
If it's not full of compassion for the people in your context, if you don't lose sleep thinking about what's happening in their lives, if they're not in your constant thoughts & prayers, if you haven't fallen madly in love with them...stop whatever it is you're doing...and go talk with them. Listen to them. Laugh with them. Eat with them. Drink with them. Look at them. See them as the real-live, colorful, multi-dimensional, gifted, passionate, hurting, hoping people they really are. Let your heart break for the love of them.
Let them love you back.
Then maybe, together, you can get some good work done.
- Kelly Fryer
Thank you Kelly for reminding us who we are and whose we are.
Posted by: Barb McClurg | May 30, 2008 at 10:34 AM