All About Barbara Walters’ Daughter Jacqueline Dena Guber

Barbara Walters made history as the first female news anchor in the United States, but she also had a busy home life.

Walters, who died in December 2022 at the age of 93, was the mother of one daughter: Jacqueline Dena Guber. The TV personality adopted Jacqueline with her ex-husband Lee Guber in 1968, shortly after she was born on June 14 of that year.

“[My mother] said that some mothers give birth from the stomach, and some from the heart. And you came from my heart,” Jacqueline told NBC in 2002.

Walters doubled down on the sentiment, saying her love for her daughter is undeniable.

“There is no question about our love for each other. None,” Walters told NBC in 2002. “And that’s one of the reasons she never particularly wanted to find her biological mother. It’s not, ‘Who is my mother?’ I am her mother.”

Barbara Walters’ motherhood journey in her own words: How she hoped her daughter would remember her

Jacqueline also spoke about her relationship with her mother in their union Glamour interview.

“We came to appreciate each other’s quirks,” she said. “If my mom wasn’t my mom, I’d still want to be her friend. That says a lot. We believe in each other 100 percent and I think that’s what love is.”

Years before her death, the former journalist expressed her hopes for her legacy in her 2014 retirement special. Barbara Walters: Her Storysaying, “I want my daughter to remember me as a good, loving mother.”

Here’s everything you need to know about Barbara Walters’ daughter Jacqueline Dena Guber.

Walters adopted Jacqueline as a newborn

Barbara Walters with her daughter Jacqueline Guber when she was 13 in New York.

Nancy Barr Brandon/Mediapunch/Shutterstock

Although Walters wanted to have a child, she struggled to have a viable pregnancy. “I had three miscarriages and finally my husband Lee Guber and I adopted a girl,” she said in Barbara Walters: Her Story.

According to the media mogul, she adopted her daughter in an unconventional way.

“One night we had dinner with a couple we rarely saw,” Walters said in a 2014 interview with Oprah Winfrey. “The woman said she had a girl… and they wanted to adopt a boy… They didn’t want a girl. And we said: ‘We will take the girl!’ ”

Walters, however, kept the adoption a secret. She told NBC in 2002 that the decision was “partly because I really didn’t want the birth mother to know that we adopted Jackie.”

According to Walters, people weren’t always respectful of her journey to motherhood either.​​

When you have an adopted child, people don’t realize it’s yours, she said. “I said [she’s] born in my heart. Maybe not in my womb, but in my heart.”

Jacqueline was named after her mother’s older sister

Barbara Walters and her sister Jacqueline as children. Courtesy of Barbara Walters

As Walters explained in her retirement special in 2014, she named her daughter after her older sister, Jacqueline.

“My sister was very beautiful and very sweet. She was what we would probably call ‘developmentally disabled’ today,” she once told PEOPLE, adding, “I loved her very much.”

The news anchor was motivated to name her daughter after Jacqueline, who died in 1985 of ovarian cancer, as a way to give her sibling something she couldn’t have.

“I knew my sister was never going to get married and have a child, and I wanted her to have some of the joy that I had,” Walters said in her 2014 special. “And so I named my daughter Jacqueline after my sister.”

He has two brothers and sisters

Before adopting Jacqueline with Walters, Lee had two children from his previous marriage to Edna Shanis: Zev and Carol.

Jacqueline’s father died of brain cancer in 1988.

Helped mom “lighten up”

Barbara Walters and her daughter Jacqueline Guber at Michael Douglas’ 55th birthday party on September 25, 1999 at Club 151 in New York City.

Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection/Getty

In an interview with The Television Academy Foundation in 2009, Walters revealed that her daughter helped her see the humor in SNL star Gilda Radner’s impression of her. Famous mimicry involved Radner exaggerating the former View star speech and calls himself “Baba Wawa”.

“I hated Gilda Radner’s ‘Baba Wawa’ until I walked into my daughter’s room one night. She was awake looking at him. . . . I said, ‘What are you doing awake?’ and she said, ‘I’m watching Baba Wawa,'” Walters told The Television Academy Foundation.

When she protested, Jacqueline allegedly told her to “lighten up.” Walters said, “And then I did.”

Jacqueline spent three years in an intervention program

Barbara Walters and her daughter Jacqueline Guber visit the American Museum of the Moving Image Salute to Barbara Walters on March 19, 1992 in New York.

Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection/Getty

In the summer of 1984, Jacqueline escaped for a month, traveling 800 miles across the Southwest.

“I was a runaway,” she told NBC in 2002. “I loved to run. I thought running would solve all my problems.” Walters eventually got a phone call from the man Jacqueline was hitchhiking with, who told her how to find her daughter.

After the incident, Walters sent an ex-soldier to pick up her daughter and take her to a school for troubled teens in Idaho, where she stayed for the next three years. Jacqueline later said that this institution saved her life.

While there, the couple began writing letters to each other “where we could really listen to each other,” Jacqueline said Glamour in 2008.

Walters also supported her daughter on her healing journey, visiting her often and meeting with staff whenever she was asked to. “You feel such support,” Jacqueline said of her mother.

She ran a wilderness retreat for troubled teenagers for seven years

In 1999, Jacqueline moved from Oregon to Maine and later opened a therapy program for troubled teens called New Horizons.

“I’ve always thought that if everyone else can do it, so can I,” she told NBC. “I sat back and thought, what would be the best business I could run? … It’s one of those things where I jump in with both feet. And I ask a lot of questions.”

The therapy program was closed in 2008 due to financial difficulties.

In an open letter announcing the closings, Jacqueline wrote: “As we all know, our economy is struggling and the families we provide these necessary services are being affected. From the end of August, our receptions stopped and our phones stopped ringing. New horizons for young women cannot be sustained during this economic crisis.”

Jacqueline stays away from the limelight

Barbara Walters and her daughter Jacqueline Guber at the 6th Annual Television Academy Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony on January 7, 1990 in Century City, California.

Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection/Getty

Unlike her famous mom, Jacqueline prefers to live out of the limelight.

“It’s been difficult for Jackie her whole life because she wants to be anonymous, she just doesn’t like being a celebrity,” Walters said in her retirement special in 2014. “She’s maybe the only one in the world who doesn’t like being a celebrity.”

Jacqueline has stayed out of the public eye since her mother’s death.

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