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    • Connie Chung memoir shows highs and lows of prestigious journalistic career
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    Connie Chung memoir shows highs and lows of prestigious journalistic career

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    While writing her memoir, Connie Chung discovered an unexpected legacy.

    Even after a groundbreaking TV career—she was the second woman and the first Asian to co-anchor a network evening newscast—she wasn’t entirely convinced how successful she’d been, or how important it was. “I could never call myself successful,” she tells USA TODAY. She imitated male colleagues who she’d seen puff themselves up and pompously declare, “I’m very impressive!”

    “What makes them say that?” she asked. Even in her book, “Connie,” which opens Tuesday at Grand Central, she worried about how much credit she could claim.

    Then out of the blue I got an email from a young Asian-American woman sharing her story of how she came up with the name Connie.

    Connie Wang, who sent the email, had chosen the name herself. When she was 3, after 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 TV: Connie or Elmo.

    It wasn’t until she left Minnesota to attend the University of California, Berkeley, where many Asian students attend, that she met other Connie namesakes and realized there was “a sisterhood of Connies.”

    Immigrants from China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan and Vietnam had been calling their daughters Connie for more than 25 years. Sometimes they even added the middle name “Chung.” They hoped that in their lifetimes they would be as fearless and striking as she had been in hers.

    “It took me three decades to fully appreciate how much Connie Chung shaped my experience as a woman, an Asian American, and a minority in journalism,” says Connie Wang, now 36 and a 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 completely alone; of course, Connie had done it first, so courageously and with such style.”

    When Chung heard the tributes from Wang and the other “Connies,” she was “stunned.”

    Does she feel successful now? “Well, a little,” she says with a laugh, still not entirely comfortable bragging at 78.

    ‘Speak too softly’

    The original Connie Chung got her name from her four sisters, who first flipped through a film magazine before deciding on Constance Moore, an actress and singer with a long list of forgettable roles to her name.

    Constance Yu-hwa Chung was the tenth of ten children, the only one born in America. As a child, she was so shy that an elementary school teacher wrote disapprovingly on a transcript, “Speak too softly.”

    She found her voice and her calling when she took a part-time job as a news messenger in the newsroom of WTTG-TV, the local Metromedia station in her hometown of Washington, D.C. Two years later, after dropping out of her biology studies at the University of Maryland, she worked at the CBS Washington Bureau. At 25, she was assigned to cover George McGovern’s presidential campaign.

    “Connie Chung, the beautiful Chinese CBS correspondent,” author Timothy Crouse called her in his classic “The Boys on the Bus” about that campaign. He described her as “smart and alert” and tireless. She was the only female reporter to ride the bus regularly, and the first Asian correspondent to have such a prominent role on the network.

    Journalism “intoxicated” her, she said in an interview. “Once I decided that’s what I wanted to do, I was driven, incredibly driven.”

    A photo taken two years later, during President Richard Nixon’s 1974 impeachment hearings, shows Chung amid a sea of ​​white male reporters rushing to talk to congressmen onstage. She has a Sony recorder slung over her arm and a look of weary determination on her face.

    She quickly coped with the swaggering men around her by mimicking them, cultivating bravado and matching their swear words. She brushed off sexual harassment as if she were swatting away a pesky fly — when McGovern tried to kiss her in a dark hallway, for example, and 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 also had a little bit of a ‘lotus blossom’ look.” She holds her tilted face theatrically in her hands, with a small smile like a geisha. “That made them… look at me sideways. ‘What are we going to do with her?'”

    She faced sexual harassment and racist comments. She recalls, “I didn’t know what they expected me to do in response, but I just went ahead and asked my question.”

    In her private life she remained an obedient Chinese daughter.

    In China, her parents’ marriage had been arranged, in the traditional sense, not for love. Her father had worked in his family’s jewelry store, then become a spy for the pre-communist government of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, and then maneuvered to the United States with Chinese air force cadets training to fly. Her mother and their four surviving children had followed him on a harrowing journey during the war.

    When the communist government took over in China, he worked as an accountant for a UN agency and a government institution until he suffered a heart attack and retired.

    “My four older sisters were married, and they did it the American way,” she says. “I did it the Chinese way.” She became the breadwinner responsible for supporting her parents, a role she would fill for the rest of their lives, even after she married talk show host Maury Povich at age 38.

    “I had a double dose of dutifulness,” she says. “Not just a woman, but Chinese.”

    Walter Cronkite’s seat, or at least half of it

    In prominent roles at CBS’s Los Angeles affiliate, NBC News, and later CBS again, Chung became known as a confident anchor and a skilled interviewer, securing the first and only national TV 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, on the CBS Evening News.

    “I really thought, ‘I’ve reached the top of the mountain,'” she says. She had grown up with her parents as Cronkite broadcast the news every night. “Walter was my idol. I wanted to be Walter Cronkite, and I got to be half of Walter Cronkite,” as co-host, if not host. “It was exciting.”

    At the time, Barbara Walters was the only woman ever to co-anchor the evening news for ABC. It had been 15 years since she had been fired from that job after a two-year feud with her partner Harry Reasoner.

    This time, as then, the other presenter was not exactly hospitable.

    Dan Rather was “reluctant” to share the anchor post with anyone, Chung says. “I think even if they had put a dog or a cat or a plant” as his co-anchor, “it wouldn’t have made a difference. I was just the recipient of, uh, his fertilizer being sprayed on me.”

    At one point, Rather invited her in for coffee and instructed her to stay in the studio. “I’ll cover the stories out there in the field and you read the teleprompter,” he told her. She was too surprised to respond. When she informed the president of CBS News, he sided with Rather.

    With hindsight, she wonders why she didn’t push back harder and more often. She wishes she had pushed for CBS to back her when her interview with House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s mother caused a stir. “I think that was one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made in my career,” she says. “I was still the dutiful employee.”

    After two years on radio, 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 had finally come to fruition. Their son, Matthew, would soon be born, and her life would take a different turn. “Looking back, I think to myself how lucky I was to have two men in my life, M and M, Maury and Matthew,” she says. “They loved me and I love them, and I don’t think a job can love you the way Maury and Matthew can.”

    Sisterhood is powerful? Not always

    But she wasn’t ready to retire. Two years later, she joined ABC News as a co-anchor and correspondent on the prime-time newsmagazine “20/20,” along with colleagues Diane Sawyer and Walters.

    “I thought the women would be fighting the men; we’d be a pretty triumvirate,” she says. “But Diane and Barbara saw it differently. They were just going at it against each other. And I thought, ‘What was I thinking?’ I had no idea. I was really stupid.” She had “parachuted into a minefield.” The rivalry was fierce, the workplace toxic.

    For the record, her sympathies in that struggle were with Walters. “Barbara earned her divadom,” she says. “If Barbara wanted something, she had to get it, because she worked hard and she literally paved our way.” In her book, she puts it this way: “The first one through the door is wounded by the heaviest gunfire.”

    Of course, that’s also what some Asian women say about Chung.

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