A 1977 tape of her interviewing Dolly Parton is everywhere this week. What she asked, how Dolly answered, and the career that made Walters the interview.
After Dolly Parton's death at 80, her ABC sit-down with Walters resurfaced across social feeds. Millions are watching it for the first time, and taking sides.
Walters asked whether, where she came from, she would have called Parton a hillbilly. Viewers watching it back in 2026 have called the framing condescending.
"You don't have to look like this," Walters told her. "You're very beautiful, you don't have to wear the blonde wigs, you don't have to wear the extreme clothes."
"I would never stoop so low as to be fashionable," Parton replied. "That's the easiest thing in the world to do." The look, she said, was a deliberate choice.
Asked if she felt people saw her as a joke, Parton said they had it backwards: "I know exactly what I'm doing, and I can change it at any time."
A year before the Dolly special, Walters became the first woman to co-anchor a US network evening newscast, joining ABC on a then-unheard-of $1 million salary.
On 20 November 1977 she got Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin into one room at the Knesset, days into the peace process. No other interviewer came close.
She interviewed all of them, and most of their first ladies. This one was filmed at Ronald Reagan's California ranch, over a Thanksgiving trip.
Her 1999 Monica Lewinsky interview drew about 74 million viewers, still the biggest audience a US news programme has ever pulled on a single network.
Parton settled it herself in her 1994 memoir: once Walters realised she was real, and not as phony as her outsides, "she got completely into it."