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Barbara Walters tells Oprah about her affair with black senator
Staff Reporter | Posted May 6, 2008 9:57 AM"It's a side of Barbara we've never seen before," said the Oprah show web site, which also provided brief teaser video footage in which Walters talks about Star Jones, Rosie O'Donnell and her ABC television show "The View.
But it was the news of Walters's relationship with former U.S. Senator Ed Brooke that stole the headlines last week. To promote her new memoir, "Audition," Walters acknowledged last week that she had carried on an affair with Brooke, a Republican from Massachusetts, during the 1970s.
Walters was born in Boston, in her 40s at the time, and separated from her second husband. She was already a legendary journalist, having become a co-host of the "Today" show on NBC and then anchor of ABC News. Brooke was also making history, as the first African American popularly elected to the Senate. Born in Washington, D.C., Brooke was older than Walters and estranged from his wife at the time.
"Ed Brooke was simply the most attractive, sexiest, funniest, charming, and impossible man." How so? He used to joke that "I was the oldest woman he had ever been attracted to," Walters reportedly writes in the book. She said she was tempted to respond, "Oh yeah? Well, you are the blackest man I have ever been with," according to a published account in the Washington Post.
Walters said she "excited" about the relationship and wanted to marry him, but friends warned her about the "ethical" and "racial" issues involved, according to the Post account. The couple broke up before he lost his 1978 reelection.
Brooke, 88 and now remarried, did not respond to calls to his Florida home for comment.
But some critics weren't buying Walters's story of the "secret" affair. "When you're hyping a high-priced memoir on Oprah, you'd better come up with a deeply personal revelation," writes Lloyd Grove in New York magazine.
Grove says the story is "very old news." He says the romance was so well known that a Washington Post gossip columnist wrote about it in the 1970s. In fact, President Gerald Ford's White House photographer once confronted Walters on the issue on live TV on the "Today" show, Grove reports.
"When the time came for me to sit face-to-face with her on live television, she quickly unleashed the heavy artillery, asking me about all of the above," photographer David Hume Kennerly told Grove. "I waited until she finished the anticipated question and said, 'Well Barbara, I put those stories in the same category as those about you and Senator Ed Brooke, they are rumor and gossip.' The interview took an immediate turn in my favor."
Brooke's chief of staff also indicates that the story was not a secret. In an article in the Boston Globe, Brooke's former chief of staff said, "I heard stories of it." Naegele, who served Brooke from 1971 to 1973, told the Globe, "I don't have firsthand recollection of it, but it is my understanding it's true."
John Sears, described by the newspaper as a longtime Republican activist, calls Brooke "the Barack Obama of that day." He was a star in Massachusetts and national politics at the time.
Walters reportedly writes in the book that she has not spoken to Brooke in decades but wanted to write about their romance because "it was a very important one in my life."
Margery Eagan, writing in the Boston Herald, described her mixed reaction to the news. "My first reaction: Can't anybody shut up anymore? Keep private lives private? Is there no more honor among adulterers pushing books," she wrote.
But Eagan had a change of heart after a colleague reminded her that Brooke himself had released his own memoir in which he bragged about his various sexual exploits.
Sears also told the Globe that he doubts the former senator would want the story in the national spotlight. "I'm quite sure that Ed would be sad to have the matter trumpeted about," he said. But Eagan had a different perspective. Pointing out that Brooke is 88 and Walters is 10 years younger, Eagan writes: "He may even be thrilled."
Articles written by a Staff Reporter are unsigned reports from a member of the staff.
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