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Clarence Thomas’s wife says couple did not discuss challenges to Biden’s election victory, in testimony released by January 6 panel
Thomas, 65, recalled “an emotional time” in which her mood was lifted by her husband and Mark Meadows, then Donald Trump’s chief of staff, a transcript of her deposition with the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol showed.
Thomas has been a prominent backer of Trump’s lies that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.
At 74, her husband is the oldest and most conservative member of America’s highest court, which has played a crucial part in settling disputed elections.
The January 6 committee spent months seeking an interview with Ginni Thomas, who was known to have texted Meadows and contacted officials in Arizona and Wisconsin in the aftermath of Trump’s election defeat by Joe Biden. She was eventually interviewed behind closed doors on 29 September.
In opening remarks, Thomas said she entered Republican politics long before meeting Clarence Thomas in 1986. She said her husband had never spoken to her about court cases – “it’s an ironclad rule in our house” – and was “uninterested in politics”.
She added: “I am certain I never spoke with him about any of the challenges to the 2020 election, as I was not involved in those challenges in any way.”
Thomas also claimed the justice was unaware of texts she exchanged with Meadows and took a swipe at the committee for having “leaked them to the press while my husband was in a hospital bed fighting an infection”.
She scorned the idea that she could influence the legal decisions of her “independent and stubborn” spouse.
But during cross-examination by committee members, Thomas was confronted with the texts she sent to Meadows as Trump baselessly challenged his election defeat.
On 24 November 2020, Thomas wrote: “I can’t see Americans swallowing the obvious fraud. Just going with one more thing with no frickin’ consequences, the whole coup, and now this.”
Meadows responded: “This is a fight of good versus evil. Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues. I have staked my career on it. Well at least my time in DC on it.”
Thomas wrote back a few minutes later: “Thank you. Needed that, this plus a conversation with my best friend just now. I will try to keep holding on.”
The committee probed whom she meant by “best friend”.
Thomas admitted: “It looks like my husband.”
Asked if she remembered what she and Clarence Thomas talked about that made her feel better, Thomas replied: “I wish I could remember but I have no memory of the specifics. My husband often administers spousal support to the wife that’s upset. So I assume that’s what it was. I don’t have a specific memory of it.”
Thomas denied having any conversations with Clarence Thomas about the fact she was in contact with Meadows in the post-election period.
“He found out in March of this year when it hit the newspapers,” she said, reiterating that her husband “is not interested in politics”.
Thomas refused to back down from her view that widespread election fraud took place but declined to offer specific evidence. She admitted she had been “frustrated” that Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, did not talk more about “irregularities” in certain states.
But having initially expressed hope that lawyer Sidney Powell could overturn the election – “Release the Kraken and save us from the left taking America down,” she wrote – Thomas said Meadows “corrected” her view of the discredited attorney.
Thomas told the committee: “I worried that there was fraud and irregularities that distorted the election but it wasn’t uncovered in a timely manner, so we have President Biden.”
Regarding her texts with Meadows, she explained that “it was an emotional time” and she is “sorry these texts exist”.
She added: “I regret all of these texts.”
Critics have argued that given Thomas’s political activities and contacts with Meadows and other key Trump allies, Clarence Thomas should have recused himself from any case linked to the insurrection.
The January 6 committee report, published last week, ran to 845 pages but made no reference to Ginni Thomas.
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South Africans have been left furious following the alleged racist attack on two teenage boys. (photos: Twitter)
White Men Charged in Attack on Black Teenagers at Pool in South Africa
John Eligon, The New York Times
Eligon writes: "A violent attack by a group of white men on two Black teenagers at a resort pool in South Africa on Christmas Day has sparked widespread outrage, reviving images from the ugly days of apartheid and serving as a stinging reminder of the country's unresolved racial tensions."
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Russian president Vladimir Putin. (photo: Mikhail Metzel/Sputnik/AP)
A new gulf is emerging between the president and much of the country’s elite
As Putin approaches New Year’s Eve, the 23d anniversary of his appointment in 1999 as acting Russian president, he appears more isolated than ever.
More than 300 days of brutal war against Ukraine have blown up decades of Russia’s carefully cultivated economic relations with the West, turning the country into a pariah, while Kremlin efforts to replace those ties with closer cooperation with India and China appear to be faltering the longer the war grinds on.
Putin, who started his career as a Soviet KGB agent, has always kept his own counsel, relying on a close inner circle of old friends and confidants while seeming to never fully trust or confide in anyone. But now a new gulf is emerging between Putin and much of the country’s elite, according to interviews with Russian business leaders, officials and analysts.
Putin “feels the loss of his friends,” said one Russian state official with close ties to diplomatic circles, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “Lukashenko is the only one he can pay a serious visit to. All the rest see him only when necessary.”
Even though Putin gathered leaders of former Soviet republics for an informal summit in St. Petersburg this week, across the region the Kremlin’s authority is weakening. Putin spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping over video conference on Friday morning in Moscow in an effort to showcase the two countries’ ties. Although Xi said he was ready to improve strategic cooperation, he acknowledged the “complicated and quite controversial international situation.” In September, he’d made clear his “concerns” over the war.
India’s Narendra Modi this month wrote an article for Russia’s influential Kommersant daily calling for an end to “the epoch of war.” “We read all this and understand, and I think he [Putin] reads and understands too,” the state official said.
Even the Pope, who at the beginning of the war appeared to take care to accommodate Kremlin views, this month compared the war in Ukraine to the Nazi genocide of the Jews.
Among Russia’s elite, questions are growing over Putin’s tactics heading into 2023 following humiliating military retreats this autumn. A divide is emerging between those in the elite who want Putin to stop the military onslaught and those who believe he must escalate further, according to the state official and Tatyana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Despite a media blitz over the past 10 days, with Putin holding carefully choreographed televised meetings with military top brass and officials from the military-industrial complex, as well as a question-and-answer session with a selected pool of loyal journalists, members of the Russian elite interviewed by The Washington Post said they could not predict what might happen next year and said they doubted Putin himself knew how he might act.
“There is huge frustration among the people around him,” said one Russian billionaire who maintains contacts with top-ranking officials. “He clearly doesn’t know what to do.”
The Russian state official said Putin’s only plan appeared to lie in “constant attempts to force the West and Ukraine to begin [peace] talks” through airstrikes on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure and other threats. Putin repeated the tactic this week by declaring on Christmas Day that he was open to peace talks even as Russia launched another massive missile strike just days later on Thursday, taking out electricity supplies in several regions. “But,” the official said, Putin is willing to talk “only on his terms.”
The billionaire, the state official and several analysts pointed to the postponement of Putin’s annual State of the Nation address, when the Russian president generally lays out plans for the year ahead, and the cancellation of his annual marathon news conference as signs of Putin’s isolation and an effort to shield him from direct questions since he has no map for the road ahead.
The news conference, in particular, could have proved risky given that hundreds of journalists are typically brought to Moscow from Russia’s far-flung regions, which have been disproportionately affected by casualties and the recent partial mobilization.
“In the address, there should be a plan. But there is no plan. I think they just don’t know what to say,” the billionaire said. “He is in isolation, of course. He doesn’t like speaking with people anyway. He has a very narrow circle, and now it has gotten narrower still.”
In the question-and-answer session with the handful of journalists, Putin countered such assertions about the postponement of his speech to parliament. He said he had addressed key issues in recent public meetings, and it was “complicated for me, and the administration, to squeeze it all again into a formal address without repeating myself.”
But his comments on the war have been short on details. He has gone no further than saying conditions in the four Ukrainian territories that he claims to have annexed, illegally, are “extremely difficult,” and that his government would try to end the conflict “the faster, the better.”
Putin again sought to lay the blame on the United States and NATO for dragging out the war, in what seemed almost a tacit admission that he had lost control of the process. “How can he tell us everything is going to plan, when we are already in the 10th month of the war, and we were told it was only going to take a few days,” the state official said.
Putin appeared exhausted in his recent appearances, Stanovaya said. And even if he does have a secret plan of action, most of the Russian elite is losing faith in him, she said.
“He is a figure who in the eyes of the elite appears to be incapable of giving answers to questions,” she said. “The elite does not know what to believe, and they fear to think about tomorrow.”
“To a large degree, there is the feeling that there is no way out, that the situation is irreparable,” she continued, “that they are totally dependent on one person, and it is impossible to influence anything.”
Alexandra Prokopenko, a former adviser at Russia’s Central Bank who resigned and left Russia in the weeks after the start of the invasion, said in an interview that her former colleagues “try not see the war in terms of winners and losers. But they know there is no good exit for Russia right now.”
“There is a feeling that we cannot attain the political aims that were originally forwarded,” the state official said. “This is clear to all.” But no one knows how large a loss Russia can sustain before its leaders believe its existence is in jeopardy, he said.
Further underscoring the growing distance between the president and the business elite, Putin also canceled his annual New Year’s Eve meeting with the country’s billionaires, officially citing infection risks.
With such a huge question mark hanging over the year ahead, two camps have emerged within the elite: “The pragmatists who consider that Russia took on the burden of a war it can’t sustain and needs to stop,” and those who want to escalate, Stanovaya said.
Those in favor of escalation include Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the Putin ally who leads the Wagner Group of mercenaries and continues to publicly berate Russia’s military leadership.
The growing split presents Putin with yet another risk as he heads into 2023, the last year before presidential elections in 2024.
Even though recent polls show Putin retains the support of the vast majority of the population, who for now continue to accept Kremlin propaganda, the overwhelming perception among the elite is that next year, things could become more precarious.
“We don’t know what will happen in the future,” said a longtime member of Russian diplomatic circles, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “There might be another wave of mobilization. The economic situation in the next year will start to worsen more seriously.”
Sergei Markov, a hawkish former Kremlin adviser who is still in contact with Putin’s team, said it was clear Putin still did not have an answer to the principal question ahead of him. “There are two possible paths ahead,” Markov said. “One is that the army continues to fight while the rest of society lives a normal life — as it was this year. The second path is as it was when Russia went through World War II, when everything was for the front and for victory. There was such a mobilization of society and the economy.”
There are also inescapable questions about glaring weaknesses in the Russian military that have become apparent in recent months, including its evident inability to properly train and equip the 300,000 called up during the autumn mobilization.
“The fact is that these 300,000 mobilized do not have enough weapons,” Markov said. “When will they get the military technology? Putin also does not have the answer to this question.”
According to Markov, who supports escalation, India and China’s doubts have arisen because Putin did not win fast enough. “Privately they say, ‘Win quicker, but if you can’t win, we can’t build good relations with you,’” he said. “You should either win or admit your loss. We need most of all for the war to end as fast as possible.”
Others said the reason for the tepid relations with India and China’s leaders was because they were clearly more worried about further escalation. “We hear there is a worry about the prospect of escalation to the nuclear level,” the longtime member of Russian diplomatic circles said. “And here, it seems to me everyone spoke very clearly that this is extremely undesirable and dangerous.”
Inside Russia, every now and then, members of the liberal-leaning elite are voicing their growing concern.
In an interview last week with Russian daily RBK, Mikhail Zadornov, chairman of Otkritie, one of Russia’s biggest banks, who served as finance minister from 1997 to 1999, noted that Russia had lost markets in the West that it had been building since Soviet times. “For 50 years, a market, mutual economic connections, were being built. Now they are destroyed for decades to come,” Zadornov said.
On the whole, members of Russia’s economic elite “understand this isn’t going to end well,” the Russian billionaire said. Prokopenko, the former Central Bank official, said the Russian elite, including many under sanctions, are watching the situation in horror: “Everything they built collapsed for no reason.”
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Great egrets in a wetland. (photos: Zsolt Kudich/NatGeo)
The rule defines which "waters of the United States" are protected by the Clean Water Act. For decades, the term has been a flashpoint between environmental groups that want to broaden limits on pollution entering the nation's waters and farmers, builders and industry groups that say extending regulations too far is onerous for business.
The Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Army said the reworked rule is based on definitions that were in place prior to 2015. Federal officials said they wrote a "durable definition" of waterways to reduce uncertainty.
In recent years, however, there has been a lot of uncertainty. After the Obama administration sought to expand federal protections, the Trump administration rolled them back as part of its unwinding of hundreds of environmental and public health regulations. A federal judge rejected that effort. And a separate case is currently being considered by the Supreme Court that could yet upend the finalized rule.
"We have put forward a rule that's clear, it's durable, and it balances that protecting of our water resources with the needs of all water users, whether it's farmers, ranchers, industry, watershed organizations," EPA Assistant Administrator for Water Radhika Fox told The Associated Press.
The new rule is built on a pre-2015 definition, but is more streamlined and includes updates to reflect court opinions, scientific understanding and decades of experience, Fox said. The final rule will modestly increase protections for some streams, wetlands, lakes and ponds, she said.
The Trump-era rule, finalized in 2020, was long sought by builders, oil and gas developers, farmers and others who complained about federal overreach that they said stretched into gullies, creeks and ravines on farmland and other private property.
Environmental groups and public health advocates countered that the Trump rule allowed businesses to dump pollutants into unprotected waterways and fill in some wetlands, threatening public water supplies downstream and harming wildlife and habitat.
"Today, the Biden administration restored needed clean water protections so that our nation's waters are guarded against pollution for fishing, swimming, and as sources of drinking water," Kelly Moser, senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center's Clean Water Defense Initiative, said in a statement.
Jon Devine, director of federal water policy for the Natural Resources Defense Council, called repealing the Trump-era rule a "smart move" that "comes at a time when we're seeing unprecedented attacks on federal clean water protections by polluters and their allies."
But Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito called the rule "regulatory overreach" that will "unfairly burden America's farmers, ranchers, miners, infrastructure builders, and landowners."
Jerry Konter, chairman of the National Association of Home Builders, struck a similar note, saying the new rule makes it unclear if the federal government will regulate water in places such as roadside ditches and isolated ponds.
A 2021 review by the Biden administration found that the Trump rule allowed more than 300 projects to proceed without the federal permits required under the Obama-era rule, and that the Trump rule significantly curtailed clean water protections in states such as New Mexico and Arizona.
In August 2021, a federal judge threw out the Trump-era rule and put back in place a 1986 standard that was broader in scope than the Trump rule but narrower than Obama's. U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Marquez in Arizona, an Obama appointee, said the Trump-era EPA had ignored its own findings that small waterways can affect the well-being of the larger waterways they flow into.
Meanwhile, Supreme Court justices are considering arguments from an Idaho couple in their business-backed push to curtail the Clean Water Act. Chantell and Michael Sackett wanted to build a home near a lake, but the EPA stopped their work in 2007, finding wetlands on their property were federally regulated. The agency said the Sacketts needed a permit.
The case was heard in October and tests part of the rule the Biden administration carried over into its finalized version. Now-retired Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in 2006 that if wetlands "significantly affect the chemical, physical, and biological integrity" of nearby navigable waters like rivers, the Clean Water Act's protections apply. The EPA's rule includes this test. Four conservative justices in the 2006 case, however, said that federal regulation only applied if there was a continuous surface connection between wetlands and an obviously regulated body of water like a river.
Charles Yates, attorney for the libertarian group Pacific Legal Foundation, said the new rule shows the importance of the Supreme Court case since the definition for WOTUS "shifts with each new presidential administration."
"Absent definitive guidance from the Supreme Court, a lawful,workable, anddurable definition of 'navigable waters' will remain elusive," Yates said in a statement.
The Biden rule applies federal protections to wetlands, tributaries and other waters that have a significant connection to navigable waters or if wetlands are "relatively permanent." The rule sets no specific distance for when adjacent wetlands are protected, stating that several factors can determine if the wetland and the waterway can impact water quality and quantity on each other. It states that the impact "depends on regional variations in climate, landscape, and geomorphology."
For example, the rule notes that in the West, which typically gets less rain and has higher rates of evaporation, wetlands may need to be close to a waterway to be considered adjacent. In places where the waterway is wide and the topography flat, "wetlands are likely to be determined to be reasonably close where they are a few hundred feet from the tributary ...," the rule states.
Fox said the rule wasn't written to stop development or prevent farming.
"It is about making sure we have development happening, that we're growing food and fuel for our country but doing it in a way that also protects our nation's water," she said.
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Barbara Walters, right, chats with co-host Jim Hartz during her final "Today" show broadcast on Thursday, June 3, 1976, from New York. (photos: Dave Pickoff/AP)
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Wielding a bemused and intimate style, she became one of television’s premier interrogators of the newsworthy
Ms. Walters, who died Dec. 30 at her home in New York, according to ABC, spent the following decades overcoming her mangled r’s and became one of television’s premier interrogators of the newsworthy. At NBC and later ABC News, she was tireless in her pursuit of “gets” — interviews with the hard-to-corner. She questioned presidents from Richard M. Nixon to Barack Obama, dictators from Fidel Castro to Bashar al-Assad, murderers and crooks, and stars of stage, screen and scandal.
The biggest get of all, she said, was the first televised interview with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky, whose affair with President Bill Clinton led to his impeachment.
“What will you tell your children when you have them?” Ms. Walters, then with ABC’s “20/20,” asked Lewinsky in March 1999, a month after Clinton was acquitted in the Senate of charges related to lying about his sexual encounter in the Oval Office.
“Mommy made a big mistake,” Lewinsky replied.
“And that,” Ms. Walters said, turning to the camera, “is the understatement of the year.”
The line was characteristic of her wry and intimate style that helped lure more than 70 million viewers to the Lewinsky segment.
Ms. Walters repeatedly enjoyed the last guffaw over doubters and detractors during a career spanning five decades. She shattered glass ceilings, sending shards into many male egos. She became the most durable and versatile TV host of her era, as well as a celebrity more controversial than many of the ones she covered.
Analysts debated whether she had helped push network news down the slide toward sensation and trivia or merely rode the inevitable flow. Traditionalists said she became too involved in events she covered. Her face adorned magazine covers. Oprah Winfrey called her a personal role model. Tabloids tracked her romances, real and rumored.
Her 2008 memoir, “Audition,” provided a dramatic personal narrative much like the ones she extracted from interview subjects. She described a difficult childhood, losing her virginity, painful shyness, three failed marriages, affairs with prominent men, and heartache over her daughter’s substance-abuse problems. Like some in the elite Washington, New York and Hollywood crowds she frequented, she played coy about her age.
A statement by Bob Iger, chief executive of ABC parent company Disney, confirmed the death but gave no cause.
Ms. Walters’s ascent was fueled by grit rather than raw talent. “Pushy cookie,” she called herself. Her hard-won female “firsts” — co-host of “Today” from 1974 to 1976 and co-anchor of ABC’s evening news show from 1976 to 1978 — opened the field to younger women. In 1976, she became the first TV news personality of either gender to get a $1 million contract, prompting pay spikes for male competitors.
Unlike her TV pantheon peers, such as Mike Wallace, Johnny Carson and Winfrey, Ms. Walters mastered diverse time slots and genres. She straddled entertainment and hard news.
Periodic “specials” attracted huge audiences. For extended periods, Ms. Walters starred on two programs. While doing “Today,” she presided over “Not for Women Only.” In 1997, while a mainstay on “20/20,” she helped create “The View,” a frothy talkfest also featuring panelists such as Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg, Star Jones, Meredith Vieira, Rosie O’Donnell, Lisa Ling and Elisabeth Hasselbeck.
In whatever setting, she displayed a distinctive knack for building a rapport with audiences. “She invented intimacy on television,” Ene Riisna, an ABC producer, was quoted as saying in Nichola Gutgold’s book “Seen and Heard: The Women of Television News.” “No one had done it before.”
Ms. Walters’s fans loved watching what often seemed like a private conversation in a cozy setting. Even her critics struggled to look away when a Barbara Walters “special” was on the air. Guests returned for sequels because she avoided Wallace-style confrontations and often persuaded them that she wanted to hear their side — that she cared.
In a 1980 interview on “20/20,” Nixon conceded, after Ms. Walters’s persistent coaxing, that he should have destroyed the Oval Office recordings that sealed his ouster.
“Are you sorry you didn’t burn the tapes?”
“The answer is, I probably should have,” he replied. “But mainly, I shouldn’t have even installed them.”
“If you had it to do all over again, you’d burn them?”
“Yes,” the former president said, “I think so, because they were private conversations subject to misinterpretation, as we have all seen.”
Ms. Walters spent two years trying to arrange an interview with Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Her efforts came through in 1977.
“You allow no dissent,” she told him in what is often regarded as one of her most memorable broadcasts. “Your newspapers, radio, television, motion pictures are under state control.”
“Barbara,” Castro replied, “our concept of freedom of the press is not like yours.”
In 1993, she got the first post-prison interview with Jean Harris, the former headmistress of a McLean private school who was convicted in 1981 of killing her paramour, Herman Tarnower, a doctor who wrote the best-selling Scarsdale Diet book. The story became a national sensation amid revelations of Tarnower’s psychological cruelty and rampant womanizing.
“You did become the symbol of the woman wronged,” Ms. Walters said in the broadcast.
“No, I think I’m the woman who let herself be wronged,” Harris replied.
Ms. Walters said she regretted her handling of a much-watched 1981 interview with Oscar-winning actress Katharine Hepburn. The conversation stumbled into bizarre territory when Hepburn said she was a strong person — “like a tree or something.”
“What kind of tree are you, if you think you are a tree?” Ms. Walters asked, in one of the oddest follow-ups in TV history.
Hepburn, flummoxed, said she’d probably be an oak. Ms. Walters received years of taunting for the question, but she said it was not as terrible as her worst interview ever, with actor Warren Beatty.
“I asked him ‘How are you?’ ” she recalled years later. “There was interminable dead silence. Finally he said, ‘Fine.’ ”
Four years after Ms. Walters scored the two-hour Lewinsky coup, knowing that the interview had angered the Clintons, ABC executives told her not to compete for another major “get” — Hillary Clinton, who was preparing to promote her memoir “Living History.”
Ms. Walters stood aside for a colleague, and was astonished when then-Sen. Clinton (D-N.Y.) invited her in anyway. Clinton knew that her husband’s philandering would come up but may not have expected so direct a query: “What if he does it again?” Ms. Walters inquired.
Clinton parried: “That will be between us, and that will be the zone of privacy I believe in.”
Writing in The Washington Post, television critic Tom Shales described the interview as an “hour-long book plug masquerading as a news special.” Ms. Walters, he added, “seemed now and then to get Clinton to spill a bean or three more than she wanted to, or at least to be more intimately revealing than she maybe planned on being. It was by no means an hour chock-full of surprises, but neither was it ever a bore.”
Ms. Walters frequently focused on her subjects’ formative years. “I like difficult childhoods,” she once observed. Her own qualified.
‘I was never young’
Barbara Jill Walters was born in Boston on Sept. 25, 1929. Her father, Lou, a vaudeville agent aspiring to be an impresario, and her mother, the former Dena Selett, who yearned for stability, had suffered grief. Their son died in infancy. Their daughter Jacqueline was mentally disabled.
Lou Walters eventually operated successful Latin Quarter night clubs in Boston, New York and Miami. A better showman than businessman, Lou gyrated between wealth and penury. His family shuttled between penthouses and cramped flats. Barbara changed schools frequently.
Whatever the venue, Lou was rarely present. Worries about money and her older daughter preoccupied Dena. From an early age, Ms. Walters wrote in “Audition” that she knew she would be responsible for Jacqueline, if not the whole family. “I realize I was never young,” she wrote.
At Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., theater classes and acting fascinated her, but she lacked the nerve to pursue a stage career. Lou arranged auditions; Barbara didn’t show up.
As the Class of 1951 dispersed, she found a job as an ad agency stenographer. Then, by chance, she found work in the publicity department of WNBT (now WNBC), a television station in New York.
The manager wanted all staffers to learn the rudiments of production, and Ms. Walters was an avid pupil. She had an affair with the executive, whom she recalled as “balding and short, with a bit of a belly.” She had decided “it was time” to part with virginity. He lost his temper when she dated someone else, and she lost the job.
Then she tried marriage. Bob Katz was a handsome businessman from a family that produced children’s bonnets. She called him Katz Hats behind his back and tried to break the engagement because he bored her. But Lou Walters had rented a Plaza Hotel ballroom. Besides, he said, all brides suffer nerves.
When she married in 1955, she wrote, “My heart never felt so heavy. But . . . my heart would be heavy every time I married.” She divorced Katz in 1957. With her second husband, Lee Guber, a theater owner, she adopted a daughter, Jacqueline, after suffering three miscarriages. That union also ended in divorce. Her third partner in marriage and divorce was Merv Adelson, a television producer.
A turning point
Unhappy as Mrs. Katz, the housewife, she became a booker on CBS’s floundering morning show. When it folded, she went into public relations, finding valuable contacts but no satisfaction. In 1961, a surprise offer proved a turning point. “Today” needed a temporary producer-writer for a daily segment targeting women.
The initial assignment died just as a slot for a regular staff writer opened, and Ms. Walters got it. The program in that period had a succession of “Today girls,” usually decorative former models or actresses who flanked the male host but had limited aptitude for live give-and-take. When another “girl” flunked in 1964, managers decided to give the diligent, serious Ms. Walters a tryout.
She gradually expanded the female turf to include hard-news interviews, particularly after Nixon won the presidency in 1968. She had called the charisma-challenged candidate “sexy” and done a friendly piece on the new president’s daughter Tricia.
He reciprocated by telling national security adviser Henry Kissinger and Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman to grant Ms. Walters their first on-camera interviews. During a royal visit in 1969, Nixon even brokered a Walters session with Prince Philip, who had long declined such requests.
Might Queen Elizabeth abdicate, Ms. Walters asked, in favor of Prince Charles? “Who knows,” Philip responded. “Anything can happen.” In Britain, their repartee became the sensation du jour.
Nixon, she wrote later, “turned out to be one of my greatest champions.” While Ms. Walters never displayed partisanship, and chatter on “The View” decades later tilted liberal, she had particularly close relationships with prominent Republicans. Kissinger and Roy Cohn, the notorious former aide to redbaiting Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.), were good friends for decades.
Among numerous lovers, the three she labeled “special men” were also Republicans: Alan Greenspan, while chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers; John Warner, after he headed the Navy Department; and Edward Brooke, the first African American popularly elected U.S. senator.
She never let romance trump work. By 1971, Ms. Walters was “Today’s” untitled co-host. When Frank McGee took over as host and demanded that she revert to “girlie” material only, she eked out a crumb of compromise. She would be able to participate in some major interviews — after McGee asked the first three questions.
McGee’s diktat did not apply to pieces done outside the “Today” studio, so Ms. Walters accelerated her pursuit of “gets” in Washington. Her standing with the White House got her a seat on the press plane accompanying Nixon to China in 1972. She was the only female network correspondent.
Meanwhile, she wrangled a contract clause ensuring her promotion to co-host in the event that McGee left “Today” — a circumstance NBC thought would be many years off. But his sudden death in 1974 activated the provision. Newsweek’s cover story dubbed her “queen of the morning” and noted her workaholic ways. It quoted her father: “I think a halo of fear affected Barbara and affects her today, [fear] that she might not be able to get a job tomorrow.”
That apprehension, and the realization that NBC would keep her on dawn patrol indefinitely, made her receptive to ABC’s courtship in 1976. As the also-ran network, ABC sought star power and innovation. She would co-anchor the evening news with Harry Reasoner and do four entertainment specials annually. Salary: an unprecedented $1 million.
Playing to her strengths
Her coup immediately soured. Walter Cronkite of CBS, dean of anchors, echoed other prominent naysayers when he reported feeling “sickened” at the mixing of news and show business. Gilda Radner, a comic on “Saturday Night Live,” invented a new caricature: Baba Wawa, a funny-talking ditz.
And it became generally known that Reasoner wanted no co-pilot — certainly not a female derided as the “million dollar baby.” On air, their chemistry curdled. “Harry and I were mismatched, misguided and so painfully uncomfortable together,” Ms. Walters later said.
Their program remained in third place. Then Ms. Walters’s first special got mixed reviews. “I felt very wounded,” she told the New York Times in 1992. “I had a mother, a father, a retarded sister and a daughter I was supporting. And my career [seemed] finished.”
But the new head of ABC News, Roone Arledge, knew that changes would be necessary and enabled Ms. Walters to play to her strengths — major interviews and big events.
In 1977, she was one of four journalists on the plane carrying Egyptian President Anwar Sadat on his historic flight to Israel, where he would meet Prime Minister Menachem Begin. She had earlier interviewed — and charmed — both leaders.
In flight, Sadat kidded her about her salary; his was only $12,000. “But you have fringe benefits, like palaces,” she replied.
Passing notes while Cronkite and NBC’s John Chancellor weren’t looking, she got Sadat to agree to an interview. But he balked at a joint conversation with Begin. Once on the ground, however, she sold the idea to Begin, who told Sadat: “Let’s do a favor for our friend Barbara.”
The conversation was more important for its atmospherics than its content but was a notable scoop nonetheless. ABC’s tapes were en route to New York when Cronkite learned he had been skunked. He pleaded for, and got, his own joint interview. His final words were caught on a mic he thought dead: “Did Barbara get anything I didn’t get?”
The incident strengthened her news credentials. Arledge soon revamped the evening news format, Reasoner left the network, and Ms. Walters became a roving correspondent while continuing the entertainment specials. She found a firm base at “20/20” in 1979 and did most of her serious work there over the next 25 years.
CBS, once home to her sternest critics, in 1991 offered a $10 million annual contract and stewardship of her own news magazine program. Ms. Walters declined, explaining later that she wanted to avoid further professional upheaval.
Critics continued to carp, even as she neared retirement. Echoing Cronkite’s complaint in 1976, the cultural historian Neal Gabler wrote in the Times decades later that she “tore down the wall separating news from entertainment, the serious from the frivolous.”
But by the end of her career, she increasingly seemed a creature of an industry that followed the money by increasingly emphasizing entertainment and sensation. She tacitly acknowledged that reality in explaining why she left “20/20” in 2004, of her own volition, essentially turning in her press pass. Competition for “gets” was fiercer than ever, and wearying.
More important, she wrote in “Audition,” the networks’ appetite for segments on major issues and world leaders was declining dramatically. Public affairs turned off many younger viewers. Meanwhile, her fascination with entertainers and criminals had ebbed.
In her final days at “20/20,” the White House offered her an interview with President George W. Bush. It would have been a classy farewell. But there was competition for that time slot: a female teacher convicted of having sex with an underage boy.
ABC chose the child molester. Barbara Walters, the woman blamed for trivializing TV news, commented: “I rest my case.”
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Demonstrators scuffle with riot police, during a protest following the death of Mahsa Amini. (photo: Reuters)
Anti-government protests in Iran, launched in September following the death of Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini in the custody of Iran’s morality police, have passed their 100th day, even as demonstrators have been met with widespread arrests, brutal violence by police and executions. The Human Rights Activists News Agency reports thousands of protesters have been arrested and more than 500 protesters have been killed so far, including 69 children. At least 26 more demonstrators are facing execution. As calls grow for the United States and the international community to respond to Iran’s brutal crackdown, President Biden has hinted attempts to restore the Iran nuclear deal may be dead. We’re joined by Hadi Ghaemi, executive director and founder of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, and Nahid Siamdoust, a former journalist who is now Middle East and media studies professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
The protests began in September under the slogan “Woman, life, freedom,” following the death of the 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini in the custody of Iran’s so-called morality police, after she was detained for what they called inappropriate attire.
As calls grow for the United States and the international community to respond to Iran’s brutal crackdown, President Biden has hinted attempts to restore the Iran nuclear deal may be dead.
For more, we’re joined by two guests. Hadi Ghaemi is the executive director and founder of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, which recently issued a series of recommendations on how Congress can play a vital role in supporting the protesters in Iran. And Nahid Siamdoust is a former journalist who’s reported across the Middle East, including in Iran, and is now Middle East and media studies professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
We welcome you both back to Democracy Now! Thank you so much for joining us. Let’s begin with Professor Siamdoust in Austin. Can you talk about the significance of these protests and why, unlike previous ones which were extremely serious across Iran, these have lasted so long, and if you expect them to continue and grow, Professor Siamdoust?
NAHID SIAMDOUST: Sure. Thank you for having me, Amy.
These protests have been ongoing because they’re not a single-issue protest. So, they were caused by the death of Mahsa Zhina Amini, but they have been sort of brewing for many, many years and decades, and they’re rooted both in a corrupt state, a state with impunity, who, as we know, you know, with the protesters whom it has put on the death row, assigns them lawyers who, in part, will even speak against their own clients — and the impunity, the lack of justice, the fact that the Islamic Republic has been imposing a kind of lifestyle on Iranians at large, that people, especially the young ones, who have been on the streets, completely reject.
So, these protests are ongoing because — also because Iranians for several decades played along with this, you know, pretense of the Islamic Republic that the system could be reformed from within through various processes such as elections. And so there’s now been a reckoning, a nationwide reckoning, that that is no longer a possibility, that that will not be happening. The most recent elections of Ebrahim Raisi, of course, were the most engineered, where Iranians showed up in the sort of lowest numbers ever in the postrevolutionary history.
And so, it’s really a point at which many of these strands are coming together, and there’s a reckoning that this system is no longer a system that people at large want to maintain. And, you know, the deep cultural roots of it are visible in all the artistic productions that are going on, in all the creativity that’s there in the slogans.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Nahid, could you comment, in fact, precisely on why it is that so many figures from the Iranian cultural world have been targeted, from film directors, award-winning film directors, actors, musicians? If you could explain what the significance of that is? And this phenomenon seems to be spreading.
NAHID SIAMDOUST: Sure. Precisely because of the process that the Islamic Republic has pursued over the last few decades, which has shut down any kind of political, internal, organized opposition to it or alternatives to it, celebrities and filmmakers and musicians have, because of that crisis of representation, really become the spokespeople of the people. And so, they are the ones who have the kind of following on social media that allows them to speak for the people and to represent them. And that is precisely why also the state has been targeting them.
You know, some of the most powerful videos that we’ve seen or statements that we’ve seen recently have come either from rappers — Toomaj Salehi, who is also sitting on death row right now — and Mani Haghighi, the filmmaker, who spoke out very strongly against the minister of culture, who asked filmmakers and musicians and artists to come out again into the fray and produce their work, to which Mani Haghighi said, “I’m sorry, but we’re too busy mourning the people you’re killing to come out and dance for you.”
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Hadi Ghaemi, could you comment on the enduring protests? And your organization has been documenting human rights abuses. Could you explain what those abuses are, Hadi Ghaemi?
HADI GHAEMI: Yeah. Good morning. And thank you for having me.
The human right violations are very widespread. They’re happening all over the country. And if you just look at the numbers, they speak very loudly. We have had over 500 people killed, and that is a minimum. I really believe it’s twice that, because I’m aware of many families who have been forced to not publicize the death of their children on the streets or family members. So, over 500, possibly 1,000, people are dead on the streets. Nearly 20,000 people have been taken into prison, and at least over 10,000 of them remain as political prisoners. We have 69 children, people under the age of 18, killed on the streets, and many more detained and taken to unknown locations.
So, to basically sum it up, with the executions happening right now, we are seeing very widespread growth and serious violations, and most serious one also includes sexual assault. We’re starting to get reports of rape of young girls and women in prisons, and sexual assault from the time they are picked up in the street 'til they're taken to interrogations and during the interrogations, and even death in custody as the result of very severe sexual assault. So, unfortunately, the situation in Iran in terms of human rights metrics is a complete disaster and is the worst I have ever seen it with my own eyes.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Hadi Ghaemi, talk about what women face, the sexual abuse. Nicholas Kristof wrote a piece —
HADI GHAEMI: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: — in The New York Times recently, “Iran Uses Rape to Enforce Women’s Modesty,” quoting — well, talking about a 14-year-old girl. Explain what happened.
HADI GHAEMI: Indeed, it’s a very heartbreaking story, and it came to us from very much on the ground, from people who were engaged and witness to every stage of it. This was a 14-year-old girl living in a neighborhood that, ironically, is populated by many people who work for the regime as security forces, actually for its special forces on the streets and their armed men on the street. Many of them, we were told, live in that neighborhood. And yet, the high school, the girls’ high school in that neighborhood, became a hub of protest and activity in late September, early October. And Masooumeh, the 14-year-old girl, had joined the protest in her school. The school cameras identified her. She was picked up, taken away for three days.
And when she came back after three days, she was completely mentally and physically destroyed. She had suffered serious sexual assault, including gang rape and violence, and had serious injuries to her body as a result and psychologically had completely lost it, and going around her apartment complex and telling everyone what had happened to her.
Her mother decided to publicize this and was in the process of documenting it and bringing it out to the open. But given the neighborhood, a security force who lived in the building and was actually a friend of the mother, became aware and alerted the authorities, who came again that night and took both the mother and daughter away.
After a few days, the neighbors had to pool together all their resources to go and post bail, a very heavy bail, for the mother. And the daughter’s body was turned to them in a mental hospital, in a psychiatric hospital. She had died. They had taken there. We don’t know what happened then, but her body was turned in. Again, our sources were involved in burying her. And then, the mother was so frightened, she took her other child and disappeared.
So, we’re very confident this happened, and we’re worried many more have happened. It’s starting to seep out from inside prisons and other families. We’re encouraging families to preserve the evidence, the medical evidence especially, 'til they're safe and secure to publicize it.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Professor Siamdoust, if you could also comment on this phenomenon, the truth of which is only just coming out, the sexual violence against protesters, and also the way in which the protesters are taking on new methods? There is now a lot of video circulating with turban tossing, protesters going after clerics and tipping over their turbans before running away. Professor Siamdoust?
NAHID SIAMDOUST: Yes. You know, these protests have been fought on many, many fronts. And we have had, as Hadi Ghaemi just mentioned, these horrible, horrible reports of torture, of sexual abuse coming out from the prisons. And, you know, the tipping off the turbans, that one of the youths who had done that and who had been imprisoned for that and released from prison, three days after his release, committed suicide. So, you know, we know, based on both these reports, but also the number of people who — very young people who come out of — you know, the person who committed suicide was 16 — the young people who come out of prison and are no longer themselves or commit suicide, that clearly horrible things are happening once these children and adults are arrested and taken in.
AMY GOODMAN: Axios has a new report on President Biden saying, in newly surfaced video, that the Iran nuclear deal is dead. Axios reports Biden made the remark in a short conversation with a woman who attended an election rally in Oceanside, California. The woman asked Biden to announce that the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as the Iran deal is formally known, is dead. Biden responded he would not, for a lot of reasons, but then added, “It’s dead, but we’re not going to announce it.” You can listen closely.
SUDI FAROKHNIA: President Biden, could you please announce that JCPOA is dead? Can you just announce that?
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: No.
SUDI FAROKHNIA: No? Why not?
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: No. A lot of reasons. It is dead, but we’re not going to announce it.
AMY GOODMAN: Hadi Ghaemi, if you can talk about the significance of this happening now with the —
HADI GHAEMI: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: — protests taking place? You are a former CUNY professor of physics, as well.
HADI GHAEMI: Yes. Yeah, so, look, before these protests, the JCPOA negotiations were going nowhere. The Iranian government had missed a lot of opportunities to come back to the deal, and it was throwing a lot of obstacles in the path of it. Then these protests happened, and the situation is completely different.
Let me tell you what I hear from inside Iran. The Iranian people, at least the ones I talk to, and the analysts are saying that, “Look, we are a party to this deal, too.” Especially the economic benefits that would flow to the regime at this moment is absolutely not justified, and let alone the fact that there can be no trust that they will follow up with their nuclear commitments if they sign a new deal. So, they’re saying that, for example, the blocked money in the banks that could come back to the Iranian government is really belonging to the Iranian people. It is the oil sales proceeds, and the Iranian people have no role in these negotiations, and their interests should be protected. So, they are especially pointing out that it shouldn’t — any economic benefit should only be tied not just to the nuclear activity, but to the crimes being committed. They want a moratorium on executions. They want a release of all political prisoners. They want the freedom to assemble as their Constitution guarantees.
So, the situation has changed a lot, but the Iranian government is sending a lot of signals that it is willing to come back to negotiations, because it obviously wants the economic benefits that will beef up its repressive machinery, which is under a lot of stress. But I hope President Biden really meant it, and especially Europe and U.S. are not trying to strike a backroom deal of thinking this way they can put the nuclear issue in check. I think it would be a disaster to move forward with the old deal. We really need to construct a new package that represents the interests of Iranian people, who are not at the table.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Hadi, can you explain what the punitive measures now in place, the sanctions against Iran, what effects those are having, whether they have been in any sense weakening the regime or the economy? And if so, in what ways?
HADI GHAEMI: Well, the new sanctions, not really. They’re targeted against the individual and institutions mostly involved in human right violations or carrying out the violence. None of these people really have assets or activity abroad that we can know that is substantial. But it is a minimum that should have been done.
I think a lot more has to be done to send a strong message to Iran. The U.S. does not have diplomatic relations, so it somewhat doesn’t have many tools in its toolbox. But Europe does. EU, we have been recommending, should be pulling its ambassadors in tandem, in protest. And this doesn’t mean — they argue that we need diplomatic representation, and it’s more important to have eyes on the ground. And I agree with them. We’re not saying to sever all diplomatic relations. But the ambassadors are mostly doing a symbolic role inside Iran. They’re not needed. And it would be much more impactful.
And then, the Security Council has obligated itself, since 2017, to have a session and attention to instances of sexual violence in conflict. And this usually happens in February, March. So, I believe the Security Council should take that up.
And, of course, Iran’s work with Russia and the support it’s getting from Russia and China makes it much more essential for international community to come up with solutions to address the crisis, which also involves Iran’s destructive role in the Ukraine war.
So, I think the international community, especially U.S., Europe, Japan, like-minded countries, and Global South, should be coming together and exerting much more diplomatic, political isolation of the Iranian government, given the way it has behaved. And only then the Iranian people will feel like the international community is doing something substantial.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me put this question to Professor Siamdoust. Do you feel the same way as Hadi Ghaemi around the issue of the nuclear deal? And also, the significance of Israel’s new government, the most far-right government in its history, now coming into power, with Benjamin Netanyahu appointing his longtime political ally Tzachi Hanegbi as head of the National Security Council? He is known as the hawk on Iran.
NAHID SIAMDOUST: Yeah, that’s right. Yes, I think Iranians, at large, and the activists on the ground, for sure, they are seeking the solidarity of the international community, and especially its leaders. They are not looking for the international community and these foreign governments to make new deals with the Islamic Republic. They are asking for them to really highlight, you know, the executions that are going on, the repression that is going on, and not to make deals with a state that is repressing and killing its own people. That has been the demand of the protesters.
As far as Israel is concerned, and its new national security head, who recently commented that its pilots should get ready because in two or three years’ time, they might be bombing Iran, certainly, the geopolitical situation in the region is volatile, and not having a deal with Iran and Iran being able to develop its nuclear energy, of course, has always raised concerns about nuclear arms, even though Iran does say that it is not pursuing them. And so, it’s a volatile situation that Western governments and other foreign governments are trying to balance. But that has to be — you know, that has to be balanced against the kinds of demands that foreign governments will make of the state in Iran, and fundamental things have to change before any talk of that could proceed. And many protesters and most protesters and activists would say that they are not looking for that. They are not looking for a deal with the Islamic Republic, because they are trying to unseat the Islamic Republic.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Nahid, could you explain, just before we end, whether there are any governments, in Europe or elsewhere, that have been taking measures in solidarity with the protesters in Iran?
NAHID SIAMDOUST: I mean, most recently, the foreign minister of Germany has said that they will not be entering nuclear negotiations with Iran. She has stated — the spokesperson for the minister has stated that Germany is on the side of the protesters, and their focus and their attention is toward the repression that is ongoing and to the people’s fight for freedom and justice, and that they are not interested in starting negotiations. So, that was really circulated on social media. It was embraced by Iranian activists and Iranians at large. And that is kind of the approach that Iranians are looking for.
AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you both for being with us. Nahid Siamdoust is Middle East and media studies professor at University of Texas, Austin, former journalist —
NAHID SIAMDOUST: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: — who’s reported across the Middle East, including in Iran. And Hadi Ghaemi, the executive director and founder of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, years ago was a professor of physics at CUNY, the City University of New York, and worked at Human Rights Watch, as well, where he particularly exposed the plight of migrant workers in Dubai.
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A polar bear navigates the Arctic climes of Greenland. (photo: Keith Ladzinski/NatGeo)
Scientists are getting a better handle on how fast Greenland's ice is flowing out to sea. Old models that used Antarctica as a baseline were way off the mark.
The new mathematical representation of glacial melt factors in the latest observations of how ice gets eaten away from the stark vertical faces at the ends of glaciers in Greenland. Previously, scientists used models developed in Antarctica, where glacial tongues float on top of seawater — a very different arrangement.
"For years, people took the melt rate model for Antarctic floating glaciers and applied it to Greenland's vertical glacier fronts," lead author Kirstin Schulz, a research associate in the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at University of Texas at Austin, said in a statement. "But there is more and more evidence that the traditional approach produces too low melt rates at Greenland's vertical glacier fronts."
The researchers published their findings in September in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Researchers already knew their Antarctica-based understanding of Arctic glaciers was not a perfect match. But it's hard to get close to the edges of Greenland's glaciers, because they're situated at the ends of fjords — long, narrow inlets of seawater flanked by high cliffs — where warm water undercuts the ice. This leads to dramatic calving events where chunks of ice the size of buildings crumble into the water with little warning, creating mini-tsunamis, according to the researchers.
Researchers led by physical oceanographer Rebecca Jackson of Rutgers University have been using robotic boats to get close to these dangerous ice cliffs and take measurements. They've done this at Alaska's LeConte Glacier as well as Greenland's Kangerlussuup Sermia. (An upcoming mission led by scientists at the University of Texas at Austin will send robotic subs to the faces of three west Greenland glaciers.) Jackon's measurements suggest that the Antarctica-based models massively underestimate Arctic glacial melt. LeConte, for example, is disappearing 100 times faster than models predicted.
The mixture of cold fresh water from the glaciers and warmer seawater drives ocean circulation near the glaciers and farther out in the ocean, meaning the melt has far-reaching implications. The Greenland ice sheet is also important for sea-level rise; Greenland ice holds enough water to raise sea levels by 20 feet (6 meters).
The new model uses the latest data from near-glacial missions along with a more realistic understanding of how the steep, cliff-like faces of the glaciers impact ice loss. The results are consistent with Jackson's findings, showing 100 times more melt than the old models predicted.
"Ocean climate model results are highly relevant for humankind to predict trends associated with climate change, so you really want to get them right," Schulz said. "This was a very important step for making climate models better."
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