Connie Chung, pictured here in 2023, says it’s painful to watch a bad interview: “I want to throw my shoe at (the television) if someone doesn’t ask the question … that I would ask.”

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Veteran TV news anchor Connie Chung jokes that part of her success can be attributed to booze and crude humor. That’s because when she first started out, she was often the only woman in an all-male newsroom.

On her way to cover the 1972 presidential campaign, Chung would often retreat to her hotel room at night. She thought she was being responsible by preparing for the next day. Then she noticed that the male reporters were getting scoops that she had missed.

“All of a sudden I realized they were just praising the campaign manager and everyone who worked for the candidate and letting them do what they wanted,” Chung said.

Chung started going to bars in the evenings, where she says she broke into the “boys’ club” of the press through drinking and joking.

“Therein lies a great way to learn how to be a reporter,” she says. “I absolutely do not recommend it. But at that point, I just had to find a way.”

In her new memoir, ConnieChung opens up about her decades of covering the news, her marriage to tabloid host Maury Povich and the prominent figures who behaved inappropriately toward her, including President Jimmy Carter, who, she says, suggestively pressed his knee against hers at a gala dinner.

In 1993, when Chung was appointed co-anchor of CBS Evening Newsshe became the first Asian American — and second woman — to hold the position. She says it was “pretty clear” that veteran newsman Dan Rather didn’t want her there.

“I don’t blame him entirely, because he had Walter Cronkite’s chair for years and had to move a few inches to make room for me,” she says. “And I do believe that if I had been a different man, if I had been an animal, if I had been a plant … he would not have wanted anyone else sharing that chair with him.”

Throughout her career, Chung has often been one of the few Asian American news anchors on television. In 2020, Chung realized the impact she’d had on the community when a writer named Connie Wong reached out to her and told her about a generation of immigrants who named their baby girls after her.

“There were these … babies that were actually named ‘Connie Chung’ and then their last name,” Chung says. “I honestly can’t comprehend how huge it is. It’s profound.”

Interview highlights

Connie

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On Covering the OJ Simpson Trial Even Though She Didn’t Want To

The men couldn’t be pushed in that direction. CBS News, Dan Rather, who was my co-anchor, wouldn’t go along with it. And 60 minutesThey were all men at that point and they didn’t want to touch it. So they didn’t want anything to do with OJ Simpson. And frankly, neither did I. But management came to me and said, “Barbara Walters gets X, Diane Sawyer gets Y, and Katie Couric gets Z. You’ve got to do this for the team.” I said, “I don’t want to do it, I don’t see the value in it. It’s tabloid.”

I have a lot of regrets, but that’s one of the biggest, of being the good girl, … being told what to do. Resisting, but never being able to put my foot down and say, “I’m not doing it. Go find someone else.”

On Learning How to Delimit a Story by Barbara Walters

She picked up the phone herself. She wrote a letter. She faxed. She called. She pushed. She said, “Let’s have lunch.” And I called it, “Being Barbara’d.”

Barbara and I had a lot in common. She was obviously the pioneer and paved our way. But she was the breadwinner in her family because her father’s nightclubs were going bankrupt and she had to take care of her mother and her father, support her mother and her father and her disabled sister. I was also the breadwinner in my family for my mother and father. I supported them until the day they died. From about age 25, I was their parent. We were both co-anchors with someone who despised us, a man. We were both fired after two years. We both adopted a child. We both married nice Jewish boys — although I think Barbara married maybe two or three. But I admired Barbara for paving our way.

About her marriage to Maury Povich

I still wonder how it is that we are such a perfect match, because we are so different. But the public personas obscure what is really behind our doors. … He is a very down-to-earth, realistic guy. What his public persona obscures is that he is a real reader. He is a politics buff. He is a history buff. He could run circles around these pseudo-intellectuals who do interviews with important people. And I always say to him, “Why don’t you do a serious talk show? … You are so smart and people would know how smart you are.” And he says, “As long as you know that, it’s fine.” And I thought, My God! What a guy.

About being antisocial

Maury and I stay home all the time. We’re so boring. If someone asks us to go out to dinner, we have to think about it for a couple of months. … I’m the one who’s more antisocial in the sense that. I want to wash my face and take my makeup off and look scary. And I don’t want anyone else to see that I look scary.

On the state of affairs in today’s TV news

When I see (a bad) interview on TV, I want to throw my shoe at it if someone doesn’t ask the question, the next question I was going to ask. … I miss that — the interviews and the ability to dig deeper, but I also miss the joy of chasing a story that’s worth pursuing. And I know it sounds very old-fashioned, but if I can change a government mistake or an attitude toward societal ills or whatever, something like that, I find that very satisfying.

On why she wrote her memoirs

I came across a letter from my father, and he had written it when I had already started in the news business. … My parents were born in 1909 (and) 1911, in ancient China, pre-Communist China. They were raised by very traditional parents. My mother’s feet were bound. Their marriage was arranged when she was only 12 and he was 14. They were married when they were 17 and 19. … They had 10 — if you can believe it — children. I was the 10th, the only one born in the United States. They had nine children in China, five of whom died as infants. Three of those babies who died were boys. …

So they raised five very daring women. And I have to say, they all could have been CEOs or lived different lives if they had grown up in a different era. But … my father gave me this mission. He said, “Maybe you can carry on the Chung name. Tell everyone how we got to the United States,” meaning him, my four older sisters, and my mother.

Sam Briger and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz and Molly Seavy-Nesper edited it for the web.