Connie Chung’s memoirs reveal the highs and lows of a prestigious journalism career
While writing her memoirs, Connie Chung discovered an unexpected legacy.
Even after her groundbreaking television career – she was the second woman and first Asian to co-anchor a network evening newscast – she wasn’t fully convinced how successful she had been, or how much it had meant. “I could never bring myself to call myself successful,” she tells USA TODAY. She imitated male colleagues who puffed themselves up and clumsily declared, “I’m very impressive!”
“How can they say that?” she asked. Even in her book, “Connie,” out Tuesday from Grand Central, she worried about how much credit she could claim.
Then, out of the blue, an email came from a young Asian American woman telling us how she came to be named Connie.
Connie Wang, who sent the email, chose the name herself. When her family emigrated from China, her parents asked Xiaokang to choose an English name. The toddler suggested the names of two friendly faces she had seen on television: Connie or Elmo.
It was only when she left Minnesota to attend the University of California, Berkeley, with its large Asian student population, that she met other Connie namesakes and realized there was “a sisterhood of Connies.”
Over the course of a quarter century, immigrants from China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan and Vietnam had named their daughters Connie, sometimes even adding the middle name “Chung” to convey that they would be as fearless and remarkable in their lives as she had been in hers.
“It took me three decades to fully understand how much Connie Chung shaped my experience as a woman, as an Asian American, and as a minority in journalism,” says Connie Wang, now a 36-year-old writer and editor on maternity leave. “And as I grew up and began to forge my own path as a first-generation immigrant, I never felt entirely alone; of course Connie had done it first, and with such courage and style.”
When Chung heard the honors from Wang and the other “Connies,” she was “stunned.”
Does she feel successful now? “Well, sort of,” she says, laughing. At 78, she’s still not entirely comfortable with this boasting.
“Speaks too quietly”
The original Connie Chung was named after her by her four sisters, who leafed through a film magazine and finally decided on Constance Moore, an actress and singer with a long list of forgettable achievements.
Constance Yu-hwa Chung was the tenth of ten children, the only one born in America, and so shy as a child that an elementary school teacher wrote disapprovingly on a report card: “Speaks too softly.”
She found her voice and her calling when she got a part-time job as a runner in the newsroom at WTTG-TV, the local Metromedia station in her hometown of Washington, DC. Two years later, after dropping out of the University of Maryland to study biology, she worked in CBS’s Washington bureau. At age 25, she was assigned to cover George McGovern’s presidential campaign.
“Connie Chung, the pretty Chinese CBS correspondent,” is what author Timothy Crouse called her in his classic book about that campaign, “The Boys on the Bus.” He described her as “wide awake and alert” and tireless. She was the only female reporter to regularly travel on the bus and the first Asian correspondent to hold such a prominent on-air role on network television.
Journalism “intoxicated” her, she said in an interview. “When I decided to do this, I was driven, incredibly driven.”
A photograph taken two years later, during the 1974 impeachment hearings of President Richard Nixon, shows Chung standing amid a sea of white male reporters jostling to speak to the congressmen at the podium, a Sony recorder slung over her arm and a look of weary determination on her face.
She soon got along with the cocky men around her by imitating them, cultivating bravado and absorbing their vocabulary of foul language. She brushed aside sexual harassment as if she were swatting away a pesky fly – when McGovern tried to kiss her in a dark hallway, for example, or when Jimmy Carter pressed his leg against hers at a dinner party. “And then he looked at me and smiled,” she said.
“I was an aardvark,” she says, the odd one out, not like the others. “Not only did I wear a skirt, but I had this little ‘lotus flower’ look.” She theatrically holds her tilted face in her hands and smiles slightly like a geisha. “That made her… look at me sideways. ‘What are we going to do with her?'”
She was sexually harassed and subjected to racist remarks. “I didn’t know what they expected from me in response, but I just went ahead and asked my question,” she recalls.
In her private life she remained an obedient Chinese daughter.
In China, her parents’ marriage had been arranged in the traditional way, not for love. Her father had worked in his family’s jewelry business, then become a spy for the pre-communist government of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, then maneuvered his way to the United States, where he accompanied Chinese Air Force cadets receiving flight training. Her mother and her four surviving children had followed him on a harrowing journey during the war.
When the communist government took over China, he worked as an accountant for a UN agency and a government agency until he suffered a heart attack and retired.
“My four older sisters had married and were living the American way,” she says. “I was doing it the Chinese way.” She became the breadwinner, supporting her parents. She would continue to do this role for the rest of her life, even after she married talk show host Maury Povich at 38.
“I was doubly dutiful,” she says. “Not just a woman, but a Chinese woman.”
Walter Cronkite’s seat, or at least half of it
In prominent positions at the CBS affiliate in Los Angeles, at NBC News and then again at CBS, Chung became known as a confident anchor and adept interviewer. She landed the first and only nationally televised interview with the captain of the Exxon Valdez after the ship was involved in an environmental disaster and the first interview with basketball superstar Magic Johnson after he announced he was HIV-positive.
In 1993, she got the job of her dreams: Walter Cronkite’s chair – or at least half of it – at the “CBS Evening News”.
“I really thought, ‘I’ve reached the top,'” she says. She had grown up sitting with her parents every night while Cronkite anchored the news. “Walter was my idol. I wanted to be Walter Cronkite, and I got to be half of Walter Cronkite,” as co-anchor, if not anchor. “It was exciting.”
At the time, ABC’s Barbara Walters was the only woman to co-anchor the evening news, 15 years after she was fired from the job after two years of friction with her partner, Harry Reasoner.
This time, like before, the other moderator was anything but welcoming.
Dan Rather was “unwilling” to share the anchor position with anyone, Chung says. “I guess even if they had used a dog, a cat or a plant” as his co-host, “it wouldn’t have made a difference. I just happened to be the recipient of his fertilizer being sprayed all over me.”
At one point, Rather invited her for coffee and instructed her to stay in the studio. “I’ll cover the stories out there and you read the teleprompter,” he told her. She was too stunned to respond. When she informed the president of CBS News, he sided with Rather.
Looking back, she wonders why she didn’t push back more strongly and more often. She wishes she had insisted that CBS support her when her interview with the mother of House Speaker Newt Gingrich caused an uproar. “I think that was one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in my career,” she says. “I was still the dutiful employee.”
After two years on the air, she was unceremoniously fired from “CBS Evening News.”
That was on a Thursday. On Saturday, she and Povich got a call that the adoption they had been trying to arrange for two years was finally through. Their son, Matthew, would soon be born and their lives would take a new turn. “When I look back, I think I was very lucky to have two men in my life, M and M, Maury and Matthew,” she says. “They loved me and I love them too, and I don’t think a job can love you like Maury and Matthew do.”
Sisterhood is powerful? Not always
But she wasn’t ready to retire yet. Two years later, she joined ABC News as co-anchor and correspondent on the prime-time news magazine “20/20,” where she worked alongside her colleagues Diane Sawyer and Walters.
“I thought the women were fighting against the men, we were quite a triumvirate,” she says. “But Diane and Barbara saw it differently. They were fighting alone against each other. And I thought: ‘What was I thinking?’ I had no idea. I was really stupid.” She had “jumped into a minefield.” The rivalry was bitter, the working atmosphere poisoned.
Her sympathies in this fight were with Walters. “Barbara deserved her diva status,” she says. “If Barbara wanted something, she should get it because she worked hard and literally paved the way for us.” As she puts it in her book, “The first one through the door is the one who gets wounded by the heaviest gunfire.”
Of course, that’s exactly what some Asian women say about Chung.
