Making Headlines

Connie Chung reflects on her barrier-breaking broadcast career

July 1, 2024

News anchor Connie Chung speaks at the American Library Association's 2024 Annual Conference and Exhibition in San Diego on June 29.Photo: EPNAC

When award-winning anchor Connie Chung started out in broadcast news in the late 1960s, the medium was almost exclusively white and male.

“They all wore staid suits and wing-tip shoes, they … all had this bravado and ability to walk into a room and command it,” Chung told the crowd at the American Library Association’s 2024 Annual Conference and Exhibition in San Diego on June 29. “And I thought, I’ll be just like them.”

“I convinced myself that I was just another white guy … so much so that I was shocked to see a Chinese woman staring back at me,” Chung continued. “The men couldn’t seem to understand I was them. They couldn’t get used to the idea I was their equal.”

Chung’s reflections on breaking barriers in journalism—as the first woman to coanchor the CBS Evening News and the first Asian American to anchor any news program in the US—are at the center of her forthcoming memoir, Connie (Grand Central Publishing, September). She appeared at the United for Libraries President’s Program at Annual to discuss her book, her love for libraries, and the “sisterhood of Connies” that has become her legacy.

Chung said she was a quiet kid growing up in Washington, D.C. (“my sisters were hormonal, chatty, screaming—I couldn’t get a word in edgewise”), but showed signs of her future vocation while doing chores. “I would take the hose of the vacuum cleaner and I would interview people with it. ‘What’s your name, what do you do?’”

By the early 1970s, Chung was interviewing politicians in Congress and the Oval Office. She showed the audience a photo of what her life looked like back then, when she started in the industry: “I call it the Sea of Men, and I look like I’ve had it.”

Not all of the men she encountered in her career suffered from big-shot-itis, Chung said. She had kind words for broadcast luminary Walter Cronkite (“self-effacing, humble”) and her husband of nearly 40 years, TV host Maury Povich.

“[Maury has] been determining the paternity of every child in America,” Chung quipped to uproarious laughter. “I can assure you he has a wider vocabulary than ‘You are the father.’”

In fact, it was Povich who recommended newspaper publisher Katharine Graham’s memoir, Personal History, to Chung when she was planning to write a memoir of her own. “When I read her book, I found myself noticing she was never ‘woe is me,’” Chung said. “She would look at whatever situation was facing her, and she faced it.”

Chung’s memoir starts with her parents and sisters fleeing China in the 1940s; she was the lone family member born in the US. Since they didn’t have much money, Chung and her sisters would beg whoever was around—sometimes a neighbor who drove a cab and ate her mother’s leftover wontons—to drive them to DC Public Library’s Petworth branch. She checked out books on ballet and practiced the five basic positions.

“I actually taught my mother how to read,” Chung said. Her mother did not know how to read or write Chinese or English, so Chung read her library books in a comfy chair when was 8 or 9 years old. “[My mother] learned a lot from television.”

Many other Asian American parents saw Chung on their television sets in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and unbeknownst to her, many of them decided to name their own daughters “Connie.”

“I couldn’t declare success for myself,” Chung said, “[but] these parents thought that I had broken the race barrier.”

In a storied career spanning beats and headlines such as Watergate, Nelson Rockefeller’s vice presidency, and the Oklahoma City bombing, what is Chung’s proudest accomplishment?

“I know I wasn’t the best and I wasn’t the smartest. I realize that the first one through the door gets the heaviest gunfire,” she said. “[Maury says] ‘You were the Jackie Robinson of television news.’ … I’m finally proud enough to say that I won’t strive for perfection anymore, and I won’t try to do everything.”

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