Connie Chung on Her Remarkable Life and Career

My guest today truly needs no introduction. Ladies and gentlemen, we are fortunate enough today to have the one, the only Connie Chung here with us to chat about her memoir, Connie, out September 17. Definitely stick around for the surprise Maury Povich pop in midway through the conversation—Maury, of course, is Connie’s husband of 40 years. Where to even start with Connie Chung and what an inspiration she is to female journalists like me? Connie is the youngest of five sisters, and she writes in her memoir she was a kid “who had no voice at home, never uttered a peep at school, never raised a hand to answer a teacher’s question,” and morphed “into someone who was fearless, ambitious, driven, full of chutzpah and moxie, who spoke up to get what she wanted.” She writes that her family was shocked when she pursued a profession that required speaking in front of millions of viewers. Connie, of course, is a legendary broadcast journalist. She also writes, “the truth is, being a reporter fit perfectly with my personality. I preferred to observe, watching what unfolded before me, never expressing my opinion.” As the fifth daughter, Connie was very aware that her parents kept trying for a son. She then went on to break into a very male-dominated business at the time where the white man was the ideal. In fact, she writes in the book about striving to be like a white man early in her career. She was told at one point “you’ll never make it in this business,” but guess what? She did! And actually, her dream of working at CBS, as she writes, “came true because of timing, a connection, and who I was—a woman and a minority.” And that was all thanks to the Civil Rights Act President Lyndon Baines Johnson passed in 1964. Connie is a legend in the broadcast journalism space. She has worked for CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, MSNBC—truly remarkable. When she joined Dan Rather as the co-anchor spot of the CBS Evening News, there had been 17 long years from the time Barbara Walters co-anchored a network evening news program to Connie taking over the co-anchor spot with Dan Rather. Through this appointment, Connie became the first woman to co-anchor the CBS Evening News and the first Asian to anchor any news program in the U.S. Though a mountaintop moment this certainly was, she writes “Still, the feeling of always having to prove myself weighed heavily on my mind.” She was let go from the CBS Evening News just two years later, and she writes “For two years, I had held what I’d thought was an equal seat at the table with three white men. But now I saw clearly that was never true. Losing all that was gut-wrenching, breaking my rock-solid confidence.” We talk about all of this and so much more in today’s episode, and I can’t wait for you to hear our conversation. Take a listen!

Connie: A Memoir by Connie Chung