Connie Chung had a meeting with her bosses at CBS News. She wasn’t sure what they were going to discuss, but she wasn’t worried. Things had been going well since she had rejoined the network four years earlier as the weekend news anchor. She also hosted a magazine program, Face to Face with Connie Chung. Her popularity and ratings were rising – 1993 had been a good year.

Connie Chung (Phil Konstantin)

The CBS execs had called the meeting to present Connie with a plan. The ratings of the network’s flagship news program, CBS Evening News, were falling. They wanted Connie to co-anchor the CBS Nightly News with Dan Rather. Connie’s dream for years had been to be the female Walter Cronkite – the legendary CBS anchorman who had been a role model and mentor to her early in her career. She said yes, excited to have the chance to carry on Cronkite’s legacy.

Dan Rather had been hosting the News by himself for 12 years, since Cronkite retired. He wasn’t thrilled with the new setup and Connie understood why. Anchoring primetime national news was the highest height a broadcast journalist could achieve. He now had to share the anchor chair with someone else, and he hadn’t had much experience with the give and take of a newscast with multiple anchors. Even with the tension, Connie relished the opportunities that came with her new position. She covered some of the most important stories in the world, including Middle East peace treaties, President Nixon’s funeral, the domestic terrorist attack on the Oklahoma City federal building, and an interview with Chinese Premier Li Peng on the fifth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Connie with CBS Evening News Co-Anchor Dan Rather (CBS/Connie Chung)

With her promotion, Connie’s magazine news program was renamed “Eye to Eye with Connie Chung” and given a more high profile spot in primetime. Connie’s interview style was simply to be herself – a good listener genuinely interested in other people. She was able to get people to relax into the conversation and share information they maybe wouldn’t have with another journalist. As her show’s popularity grew, it was easier and easier to convince people to sit down with Connie. And the tension she had with CBS over her desire to cover serious important stories and them assigning her more tabloid sensational stories started to develop.

Although Connie preferred the assignments that came with her anchor chair because she wanted to cover hard daily news, she was able to score interviews some of the biggest names of the era for Eye to Eye. She interviewed Bill Gates as Microsoft was on the ascent (he walked out on her after she asked him a tough question!) and NBA superstar Magic Johnson after he was diagnosed with HIV. Olympic figure skater Tonya Harding appeared on Connie’s show to tell her side of the story after her estranged husband attacked Nancy Kerrigan, her #1 skating rival. And while NFL star OJ Simpson was on trial for killing his wife Nicole, Connie interviewed his mom, his lawyer, and Nicole’s best friend.

But with her celebrity interviews, Connie’s two CBS worlds started colliding, and Connie found herself dealing with media criticism that she wasn’t serious enough to be a primetime news anchor. Plus, while having two anchors during a 30 minute newscast might have seemed like a good idea on paper, it didn’t as well in real life. The ratings had improved, but the transitions from Dan to Connie were often awkward – Connie felt like they were playing a strange game of ping pong.

Eventually, the co-anchor issues, plus some controversy over a couple of Connie’s interviews, created enough tension that CBS decided to end the experiment. They told Connie that they were taking her off the evening news. They offered her a position on the morning show – and she said no. Her last broadcast was on a Friday evening and the next day she and her husband go a call they had been waiting for since they had submitted their application to be adoptive parents.  There was a baby boy who needed a home! Connie decided that the timing was meant to be, and stayed home for a few years with her new son.

The Power of the Wand

Connie was the first national nightly news anchor of Asian heritage, and only the second woman. Connie benefited from mentors throughout her career and paid that forward by mentoring many others, including reporter Kyung Yoon. Connie opened Kyung to the possibilities of a career in broadcast journalism – something she had never considered she would be able to do. Watch Kyung talk about what her mentoring relationship meant to her here.

Her Yellow Brick Road

Connie as a young reporter with President Nixon (Connie Chung)

One of Connie’s college professors advised his journalism students to get real world experience during their final semester. So Connie went to all of the local stations in Washington D.C. to ask for a job. WTTG hired her to work on their copy desk two nights a week, pulling news off the wire and writing it up for the anchors. When she graduated that June, the station offered her a job as the newsroom secretary. She didn’t want that job – she wanted to be a reporter! But she accepted it to get her foot in the door and looked for every opportunity to do reporting work too.

Connie came up with enough stories to support her request for a promotion to be the weekday writer for the anchorman. Her boss said yes, provided that she could find someone else to hire as secretary. She accepted the challenge and recruited the bank teller across the street. Connie then set a new goal – to be an on-air correspondent – and reached it after a year. And the following year, in 1971, she got a call from CBS. Media companies were coming under fire for the lack of women and minorities in their ranks and CBS News was looking to deflect that criticism. They hired 4 women reporters and Connie was one of them.

Big newsrooms were notoriously tough places where new hires were hazed. In addition to the usual hard time given young reporters, Connie also encountered a lot of casual sexism and racism aimed at her Chinese heritage – a common joke was that she was engaged in “yellow journalism” or “slanted news.” She used humor as her strategy to deal with it, refusing to waste emotional energy on other people’s biases. Instead, she put that energy into her work.

Although she was hired to write stories for other reporters and anchors, Connie got on the air the first week she was at CBS. She had been assigned to cover a Friday evening Capitol Hill hearing. It was supposed to be boring – the assignment editor typically gave the women the worst beats. It ended up newsworthy and Connie made her first appearance on the CBS Evening News.

Connie and husband Maury as co-anchors at KNXT in L.A. in 1977 (Connie Chung)

Connie worked three main beats for CBS – the McGovern 1972 Presidential campaign, Watergate, and post- Watergate Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. Connie became a subject matter expert in all three. She capitalized on her diligent study habits and persistence to become a regular correspondent. She also got to go overseas with the press team for President Nixon’s diplomatic trips to the Soviet Union and Middle East.

Connie had many mentors at CBS, among them legendary anchorman Walter Cronkite. She tried very hard to live up to his best piece of advice: “just be yourself.” She struggled with that one, because she felt like she should act very serious and somber when delivering news – and her actual personality was more curious and enthusiastic. But she figured out that being herself worked. One day, she walked into the White House for a story and crossed paths with President Nixon. She said hello and asked if he would be willing to talk for a few minutes. She didn’t take out her pen and notepad and her relaxed approach encouraged Nixon to stay and speak with her on the record. That night, she reported her exclusive conversation with the President on air. It put her on the map as a correspondent.

Connie with her colleagues at NBC News (NBC/Connie Chung)

She became so well known that a local CBS station in Los Angeles offered Connie a position anchoring its evening news. Connie’s boss offered her a position as an anchor for CBS’s national morning show. Connie said no – she was 29 years old, had never lived away from home, and wanted an adventure. She learned how to be an effective news anchor in L.A. Her mentors there helped her take Cronkite’s advice to be herself. She felt more free to let her personality show through and learned to take her job seriously while not taking herself too seriously.

After 7 years in L.A., Connie was ready to get back to national stories. In 1983, she was recruited by NBC to anchor NBC News at Sunrise, a 30 minute weekday newscast that aired before the Today Show, and the Saturday edition of the NBC Nightly News. She moved to New York City and started her new schedule: up at 3:00am every day, home to nap mid-afternoon, and back to the studio to host 5 minute “News Digest” segments at 9 and 10pm.

Connie interviewing President Clinton in 1993 (CBS/Connie Chung)

.Connie loved working for NBC, but when a new owner started cost cutting just as her contract was up for renewal, she decided to explore other options. CBS asked her to “come home” to anchor the CBS Sunday Evening News and host a Saturday night magazine program they named Face to Face with Connie Chung.

Brains, Heart & Courage 

Connie was the first of her parents’ 10 children to be born in the United States. Her parents were from China, where five of their nine children died young due to the hardships of war. Connie’s dad was an intelligence officer and managed to find a way out. The family escaped to India and then her dad continued on to Washington, D.C. He was able to send for Connie’s mom and 4 older sisters some months later.

Connie was born in Washington, D.C. the following year and her parents told her older sisters, 16 and 15 at the time, that they could name her. They decided to open one of their favorite movie magazines and name her after the first actress they saw. Constance Moore was the actress, and Constance Yu-Hwa Chung had her name.

Connie with her mom, dad, and sisters (Connie Chung)

Connie was a quiet kid in a loud family. Her sisters did most of her talking for her. Her dad, who had learned English in China, became a government accountant. As a result, he was very up to date on politics and current events and shared his passion with Connie. Connie’s mom didn’t speak English and was used to an upper middle class lifestyle in China with lots of household help. It was very hard on her when the family was required to cut off all family ties in Communist China to become American citizens. Connie recognized and sympathized with her mom’s difficulties and would bring her books home from school to teach her mom how to read English.

Connie’s family didn’t have much money, so she never got the ballet lessons she desperately wanted. But her house was never boring. The Chung girls spent their time playing paper dolls, roller skating in their basement, having picnics in the park, and learning to dance at her parents’ ballroom dance parties. Connie also spent a lot of time on her schoolwork because she wanted to do well, but it didn’t come easily to her.

Connie with her husband Maury and son Matthew (Connie Chung)

Eventually the Chungs moved out of the city and into a Maryland suburb. Connie applied to the University of Maryland to take advantage of in-state tuition. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do, and changed her major several times in her first three years. She tried biology but got bored in the lab. She tried accounting but just didn’t understand it. She finally found her calling during an internship on Capitol Hill for the summer after her junior year. The Congressman she worked for had been in journalism before he got into politics. He taught Connie how to write press releases and news copy. As she watched reporters coming and going from Capitol Hill, she decided she wanted to do that too. She liked that the news changed every day -– it would never be boring! She also believed she could use journalism to make a difference in the world.

When Connie returned to school, she declared the major that would stick – journalism. She decided to specialize in broadcast instead of print because television news was a growing field while newspapers were in decline. It took her an extra year of college to get it done, but in 1969 she was a University of Maryland graduate ready to join the reporter ranks.

Glinda’s Gallery

Just the Facts

• Connie started dating talk show host Maury Povich when she was 31. They married when she was 38. Connie and Maury adopted their son Matthew in June 1995 when he was one day old. She also has two stepchildren from Maury’s previous marriage.
• Connie was a frequent guest on the David Letterman show while she worked at NBC in the 1980s. She got off work as he was taping so he often asked her to come in if a guest cancelled at the last minute.
• In 1995, after the Republicans won the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years, Connie secured an interview with Kathleen Gingrich, mom to Congressman Newt Gingrich and new Speaker of the House. Throughout the interview, Kathleen used whispers when saying anything negative. When Connie asked what Newt thought of President Clinton, Kathleen said that she didn’t know, but that she knew what he thought of First Lady Hillary Clinton, so Connie told her to whisper it just between you and me. When her negative comment aired, Kathleen claimed she didn’t know she was being recorded, Connie said the lights and cameras were on and Kathleen had been using whispers throughout the interview. Connie was harshly criticized and has said it was one of the toughest times in her career. Once the entire interview was shown in context, Connie was vindicated, but the negative impression lingered.
• After staying home with her son for a few years, Connie did a Kennedy School of Government fellowship at Harvard to transition back into the workplace.  In 1997, ABC offered her a job hosting a magazine program. She said she would do it on condition that she and her producer would have significant say in the topics covered because she wanted to tackle serious issues. One of her most rewarding experiences was covering the plight of Bangladeshi women who were disfigured by acid when taking a stand against arranged marriage and spousal abuse.
• In 2002, Connie accepted an offer from CNN to host her own news show, Connie Chung Tonight. It was canceled after a year.
• Connie and Maury co-hosted a show together, called Weekends with Maury and Connie, for MSNBC in 2006.  
• Among other honors, Connie has won three Emmy Awards (including two for Best Interview/Interviewer), the Edward R. Murrow Award, and the Peabody Award.

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