Walters attended Sarah Lawrence College during a notably turbulent time in American politics, the era of communist witch hunts, the Hollywood 10 and the Army-McCarthy hearings. Although she wasn't particularly political at the time, she knew enough to detest McCarthy's henchman, the wily, cold-blooded Roy Cohn. A few years later, her father introduced her to Cohn, telling him his daughter always wanted to meet him. Walters shook his hand, but said to Cohn's face that she never wanted to meet him.
And yet, they became and remained friends until the day Cohn died of AIDS in 1986. Many of Walters' other friends were horrified that she would even talk to Cohn, but what Walters reveals for the first time in "Audition" is that Cohn somehow got a warrant for her father's arrest dismissed. He had failed to show up for a New York court date because the family was in Las Vegas at the time.
Cohn liked to hint that they were more than friends "because I was his claim to heterosexuality," Walters says. "He never said that he was gay, he never admitted to me that he had AIDS. He was a very complicated man. He died, alone, up to his ears in debt. He had been disbarred and he was hated. And I might have thought the same way, but he did something when my father was in trouble, [and] I never forgot that."
https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/This-time-it-s-Barbara-Walters-turn-to-speak-3214829.php
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