For Barbara Walters, hindsight is ‘20/20’

Barbara Walters’ travel for work has far surpassed her travel for pleasure, but that’s about to change.

The much-honored TV journalist is planning her first trip to South Africa in October, with her daughter, and the timing wouldn’t work if she were still committed to her co-anchor role on “20/20.”

The much-honored TV journalist is planning her first trip to South Africa in October, with her daughter, and the timing wouldn’t work if she were still committed to her co-anchor role on “20/20.” Although she’ll officially be at the desk for an extra week to help launch the ABC newsmagazine’s 26th season, the Friday edition is a two-hour farewell salute to Walters’ 25 years on the program.

The show is packed with highlights from her career as one of the medium’s foremost interviewers. Not only has Walters conducted chats with every president and first lady since Richard and Pat Nixon, she has been in the company of many other world leaders -- including Cuban President Fidel Castro, with whom she had a return visit last season -- and virtually every entertainment superstar since 1979.

“I have ... mixed feelings,” Walters said via cellphone during a late-summer vacation in Italy, “but I know it’s the right thing for me to do ... to leave it while I still love it and while the program is still very successful and in good hands.”

Walters joined “20/20” as an anchor and reporter in a hasty makeover after the program’s debut in the summer of 1978. The initial anchors had been fired, and Hugh Downs brought in the second week.

“He did maybe the first year alone” as host, Walters recalls, “then Roone [Arledge, then-president of ABC News] felt as good as Hugh was, it would be better with two people. Hugh resisted at first, and told me so, but we’re very compatible.”

Walters was formally named the show’s co-host in 1984.

After Downs left “20/20” in 1999, Walters was paired with John Miller (now Los Angeles’ counter-terrorism chief), then with consumer reporter John Stossel. “I’m always happier with a partner,” she notes. “You don’t have the whole burden of a show.”

Walters had been formulating her “20/20” exit for some time.

“I really didn’t ask a lot of people their advice before I talked to [current ABC News President] David Westin about it. I just felt there was nothing else on the program that I wanted to do,” she said. “When my friend Beverly Sills left the Metropolitan Opera, her husband gave her a ring, which she gave to me years later. I still have it, and the inscription says, ‘I did that already.’ ”

Still, Walters isn’t leaving TV entirely. She deems “The View,” the weekday ABC program she produces and co-hosts, “separate from everything else, and I’ll continue to do that. For me, that’s the whipped cream.... Then I have to do a minimum of four to five specials a year for ABC. Two of them are programs we’ve been doing for yearsyears. One is ‘The 10 Most Fascinating People,’ which is on in December, and the other is our Academy Awards-night special.”

Elizabeth Vargas will assume Walters’ “20/20” seat Oct. 1, but Walters expects to return from time to time. “Occasionally, there will be a story I will do for the show,” she said. “It’s not as if I’m never going to touch it again. It’s just that I don’t have to do it every week.”

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‘20/20’

When: 9 to 11 p.m. Friday

Where: ABC

Rating: TV14-L (may be unsuitable for children under 14, with an advisory for coarse language)

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Jay Bobbin writes for Tribune Media Services.