Answering questions

Barbara Walters has had one of the longest and most distinguished careers in television news.

She has sat down with every president and first lady since the Nixon administration. She has asked infamous murders why they kill. And she has listened to a litany of celebrity confessions.

So the doyenne of TV news has some advice for aspiring journalists.

“My claim to fame, the reason for my success,” Walters said last week during an interview at her ABC office, “is that I do not perspire and I rarely have to go to the bathroom.”

Walters has been doing TV for more than 40 years, beginning at NBC’s “Today” show with Hugh Downs. In 1975, she became the first woman to anchor a network news program, when she shared the ABC desk with Harry Reasoner. She reunited with Downs 25 years ago on “20/20.”

Now, after 744 interviews, Walters is leaving her regular gig.

On Friday at 9 p.m., ABC’s “25 on 20/20” offers a retrospective of Walters’ time there. But Walters isn’t leaving TV altogether. She will still do an occasional guest stint on “20/20,” as well as her prime-time specials and her perennial Oscar-night celebrity cavalcade.

Seriously, Walters’ claim to fame is asking the questions everyone wants answered but is afraid to ask.

“I look at some of those questions and think, ‘How did I ask them?’ ” she said. “But when I do that, I’m in a different place in my own mind. I’m a journalist. I have to ask the questions that have to be asked.”

The newswoman said one of her “strangest” interviews was a chilling prison exchange with Mark David Chapman during which she asked coolly: “Why did you kill John Lennon?”

“But I think it’s tougher to say to Boris Yeltsin, ‘Do you drink too much?’ Or Vladimir Putin, who was in the KGB before he became president of Russia, ‘Did you ever kill anyone?’ Or Moammar Khadafy: ‘People think you’re crazy.’ Or Richard Nixon: ‘Are you sorry you didn’t burn the tapes?”’

Indeed, Walters has ways of making people talk.

“My questions, I had hoped, would be probing but not attacking,” she said. “And I had certain tricks. I would say, ‘What’s the biggest misconception about you?’ or, ‘You know what the rumors are.’

“I will also frame (the questions),” she continued. “I will say, ‘I have to ask you a tough question.’ So I’ve sort of given them 10 seconds to gulp. But when I look at (the interviews) I think, ‘Why didn’t they tell me, as Mrs. (Teresa) Heinz Kerry would say, to shove it?’ “

So Barbara, you know the rumors that you and your ABC News colleague Diane Sawyer fight like alley cats?

“Oh, we’re sick of that,” said Walters. “And good, because now it can stop. We’re both competitive. We’re both hardworking. I think she’s terrific. We laugh together.

“We are the only network with two women doing prime-time magazine shows,” she went on. “I’ve had opportunities since I’ve been here to go to other networks, so if I wanted to get away from this, I would have gone.”

OK, then what is the biggest misconception about Barbara Walters?

There is a long pause, then Walters arches an eyebrow: “People think that I am 6-foot-3 and enormously sexy.

“That’s a major misconception,” she laughed. “I’m happy to hear it, but it’s a misconception.”