Connie Chung was 23 when she landed her first job in TV news. At 47, she was named coanchor of CBS Evening News, becoming the show’s first female host and the first Asian news anchor in the U.S. With her memoir, Connie (Grand Central), publishing in September, PW talked with the trailblazing journalist about breaking glass ceilings, confronting powerful men, and inadvertently becoming an inspiration to a generation of Asian American women.
When you began your career, television journalism was overwhelmingly dominated by white men. How did you break in?
When I entered the news business in the late 1960s, women’s groups were loudly demanding equality in the workplace. That drumbeat helped me get my foot in the door. But I was also focused, driven, and determined to break into the television news business—and stay in it. My first job was in local news in Washington, D.C., which I got after I barged into a station and cheerfully admitted that though I lacked experience, I had a desire to learn quickly. I was hired as a “copyboy” two nights a week during my last semester of college. It turned into a full-time job as a newsroom secretary. I aggressively pushed my way on to becoming a writer, then an on-air reporter.
For that local station, I covered a story about unsanitary conditions at a tony French restaurant where my next boss was lunching. He was so impressed with my charging into the restaurant with a camera crew to interview the owner unannounced that he gave me his card and hired me as a CBS News reporter covering Washington, including the White House, Capitol Hill, the State Department, Pentagon, presidential campaigns, and much more. I found myself reporting on CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, my idol! I was at the Tiffany network, the crème de la crème, and was on my way to a long career!
You grew up in a Chinese American family, and you were raised to be polite and quiet. Then, as a young reporter, you were chasing down Nixon administration officials during the Watergate hearings. How did you make that leap and become such a tough, tenacious journalist?
I quickly realized I could not survive in the news business if I remained a quiet, polite good girl. As I looked around me, all I saw was a sea of white men. So I decided I would consider myself just another white guy. If they were tough, I was tough. If they were pushy, I was pushy. If they were crass, why couldn’t I be, too?
A lot of younger women might be surprised to learn that although you experienced a lot of sexism and harassment that made you quite angry, you also frequently made bawdy jokes with your male colleagues. Would you explain the distinction?
My modus operandi was to “get” the sexist or racist fellow before he “got” me! It was a preemptive attack the dude did not expect. That would throw him off balance. I appeared demure but audaciously lobbed a hardball at the fellow. He would be immediately taken aback. I found it terribly amusing. Soon the men knew I could get to the dark side faster and funnier than they could. What a silly game it was. I do not advise it. It was just something I did to survive.
You speak very candidly about many of the high-profile politicians and journalists you’ve encountered in your career—including some very powerful men you have sparred with. How did you decide what to put in the book and what to leave out?
Ah, that was quite a challenge—what to put in and what to leave out. My editor told me each chapter needed to tell a story and have an arc. So I had to be selective. Also, it was important to me that I did not have a vengeful tone of getting even. I tried to do what Katharine Graham achieved in her memoir, Personal History. She was never woe is me. I found myself rooting for her until the last page of her book.
Even when you were a network news anchor, you had to fight to get assigned hard news stories, rather than stories about first ladies or pop psychology. Would you explain why that was so important to you, both in terms of your personal interests and your career trajectory?
I had a burning desire to be treated just like the men in television news. I did not want to be pigeonholed with gender stories. It simply made no sense to me. I know other women in the news business felt the same way. We knew we could tackle any serious story thrown our way. Yet, a dinosaur mentality persisted. I found it difficult to shake some sense out of the male executives who were trapped in their antiquated ways.
You’ve had to make a lot of tough choices in your career, and you note many of the times you think you made the wrong call. What is the most important lesson you learned from those mistakes? Is there anything you’d do differently?
Oh, there are so many forks in my road I felt I should have taken differently. I will readily admit I am a shoulda, coulda, woulda person, and that is not even close to a good thing. The only thing I’ve learned is that I probably should not berate myself for all the things I think I did wrong. I thrive on self-flagellation! I must stop. Please!!
In 2019, you learned that during the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, many Asian American parents named their daughters Connie after you. What has it meant for you to be such an important role model? How did that square with your own idea of yourself and your career?
Truly, I was overwhelmed with the Connie generation phenomenon. There was a movie, Crimes of the Heart, with Sissy Spacek in which she played Babe Magrath. Babe’s sister says, “Why’d you do it, Babe? Why’d you stick your head in the oven?” Sissy Spacek, in her delightful southern drawl, says, “I don’t know. I’m having a ba-yed day.” So many days in my work life ended with my dear husband, Maury Povich, talking me off the ledge. Well, I wondered how I would end my book—and along came this incredible story from a journalist named Connie Wang. She not only gave me a tailor-made ending to my book but transformed what I thought I could never declare a “successful” career into one I could embrace and humbly say about, yes, maybe I was successful. What I do know without any doubt is that my husband and I raised our wonderful son, Matthew, with a lot of love. My job did not love me back as much as my son has.
