Barbara Walters: Clean-Up Woman

2008-05-08
By Ronda Racha Penrice

Promos for Barbara Walters’ May 6, 2008 appearance on "Oprah" didn’t lie: we certainly saw “a side of Barbara we've never seen before.” Okay, we heard the reports nearly two weeks ago that Barbara Walters reveals in her memoir, Audition, had an affair with former Senator Edward Brooke. Now I did know that Edward Brooke, more precisely Edward William Brooke III, was the first Black U.S. senator to take office since Reconstruction but I didn’t connect the dots. I thought surely there was another senator with the same name. After all, Edward Brooke is hardly as unique as, say, Barack Obama who is only the fifth African American to serve as a U.S. senator in our nation’s entire history. Congressmen are a dime a dozen but a senator is like a rare coin.

But why didn’t I connect the dots? Okay, yes, Star Jones was among the inaugural crew for "The View," Barbara Walters’ long-running morning show tailored to women, and two Black women, the legendary Whoopi Goldberg and relative newcomer Sherri Shepherd, currently help hold down the fort as "The View" goes into its 12th season. Still, given that particular track record, I just didn’t believe that the married man Barbara Walters bedded was a brother. And, though Oprah chose to highlight the infidelity and not really get into the interracial aspects of the affair, I can’t ignore it.

Now, I must admit, to a lot of people, Mr. Brooke, especially today, at the age of 88, appears white. His first wife was actually Italian. In 1967, when he was elected as a Republican senator from Massachusetts, the first Black person to win the popular vote to become a U.S. senator and, to date, Massachusetts’ last Republican senator, his race was no secret. Perhaps it mattered little then in Massachusetts that Brooke was married to a white woman but a Black senator bedding down a female pioneer on "The Today Show" would have been an entirely different story, especially in the 1970s when much of the nation was experiencing busing and other programs that promoted and pushed integration. Revealing such a high profile and controversial union would have been disastrous I’m sure. The real question is: Why is Barbara Walters talking about it now?

Go ahead, call me a conspiracist but I do have one main theory. Maybe Barbara is trying to make herself seem more hip. These days, what’s cooler than getting with a brother? Blair Underwood has certainly proved that point this television season with his various interracial trysts. And getting with one in the 1970s had to be even cooler. The Associated Press’s Jon Hopwood, in his May 2 article, “Barbara Walters Admits to Interracial Affair with Former U.S. Senator Edward Brooke” observes that the revelation is a great selling tool. “With the rise of the African American Senator Barack Obama as a major political force,” he writes, “the added spice of Walters having had an "interracial" affair -- once strictly taboo in America -- also likely will help sell her book.” According to Hopwood, Brooke was very much like Barack Obama, an African American political star who defied the odds of his time to reach heights not then imagined.

Barbara Walters told Oprah she hears he is happily re-married and yet she still outed them. Mr. Brooke’s memoir, Bridging the Divide: My Life, came out two years ago and he didn’t feel the need to mention Barbara Walters. I’m quite sure that revelation would have garnered more publicity for his book. He won’t even comment on it now and I’m sure the press is being quite aggressive. It’s the timing of it all that bothers me the most. Maybe Barbara Walters really did reveal this detail of her life because it was a pivotal moment. Still, I bet she’s bedded more exciting personalities. They just aren’t as relevant at this moment in history.

As much as I hate to admit it, there could be a good side to all of this. Realistically, would we be talking about Mr. Brooke had Barbara Walters kept the affair a secret? In 2004, President Bush, and I use “President” grudgingly, awarded Mr. Brooke, a rare male breast cancer survivor, the Congressional Medal of Honor for his achievements as well as his work with cancer awareness and low-income housing. There’s even a courthouse in Boston bearing his name. The Republican Party also offers awards named in his honor. An active Alpha, Mr. Brooke chaired Alpha Phi Alpha’s World Policy Council to expand the fraternity’s political involvement.

So, while I certainly find Barbara Walters’ timing off, and her self-promotion a bit tacky, as odd as it seems, her dirty laundry is also doubling as an important Black history bulletin, focusing well-deserved attention on a man whose achievements we should all know.

Only in America.

Veteran freelance writer and self-diagnosed television junkie Ronda Racha Penrice is the author of African American History For Dummies.