THE RULEBREAKER

The definitive biography of the most successful female broadcaster of all time - Barbara Walters - a woman whose personal demons fueled an ambition that broke all the rules and finally gave women a permanent place on the air, written by bestselling author Susan Page.

Barbara Walters was a force from the time TV was exploding in the 1960s to its waning dominance in a new world of competition from streaming services and social media half a century later. She was not just a groundbreaker for, but also expanded the big TV interview and then dominated the genre. By the end of her career, she had interviewed more of the famous and infamous, from presidents to movie stars to criminals to despots, than any other journalist in history. Then at sixty-seven, she pioneered a new form of talk TV called The View.

In The Rulebreaker, Susan Page conducts 150 interviews and extensive archival research to discover that Walters was driven to keep herself and her family afloat after her mercurial and famous impresario father attempted suicide. Page breaks news on every front-from the daring things Walters did to become the woman who reinvented the TV interview to the secrets she kept until her death. This is the eye-opening account of the woman who knew she had to break all the rules so she could break all the rules about what viewers deserved to know.

Susan Page is the award-winning Washington Bureau chief of USA TODAY, where she writes about politics and the White House. Susan has interviewed the past ten presidents and reported from six continents and dozens of foreign countries. Her previous books, The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty, and Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power, were both instant New York Times bestsellers.