In Barbara Walters, we see a woman who refuses to imagine what the end of her career might look like. Which is why she felt perfectly comfortable hitting up Oprah, to plug her book Audition: A Memoir, to reveal she carried on an affair with Massachusetts’ married republican senator, Edward W. Brooke, in the 1970s, after meeting in a New York restaurant. She wouldn’t want to go out on this note, would she?

The affair ended when Washington Post gossip Maxine Cheshire started running items about the twosome; Walters says that’s when she ended the relationship, though that’s also when Brooke asked his wife for a divorce. But for the good of their careers, they stopped seeing each other.

“Ed Brooke was simply the most attractive, sexiest, funniest, charming, and impossible man,” writes Walters. “I was excited, fascinated, intrigued, and infatuated.”

Every reporter’s attempt to get comment from Brooke, who is now 88, have failed, which, uh, might suggest he has no interest in discussing his decades-old tryst. Kudos to Walters, then, for throwing him under the bus to move copies of the book.