Book Review: ‘Connie: A Memoir,’ by Connie Chung

Book Review: ‘Connie: A Memoir,’ by Connie Chung - The New York Times

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Connie Chung Signed Off, but She Isn’t Done Talking

In a frank and entertaining new memoir, the TV newscaster recounts how sexism, and Dan Rather, sidelined her groundbreaking career.

Margaret Sullivan is executive director of the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia Journalism School and the author of “Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) From an Ink-Stained Life.”

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CONNIE: A Memoir, by Connie Chung

The day she was named co-anchor of the “ CBS Evening News” alongside Dan Rather, Connie Chung felt that she had reached the pinnacle of broadcast journalism.

“Thursday, May 14, 1993, was the best day of my professional life. … I had my dream job,” she writes in an entertaining and revealing memoir that traces the triumphs and disappointments of her prominent career.

The anchor appointment meant even more because she was a Chinese American woman, brought up by strict parents; in accordance with tradition, she lived with them until she was nearly 30, even as she was climbing the ladder — often wearing stiletto heels.

In “Connie,” Chung writes breezily and with irreverent humor about the scoops, the internal politics and the pure hustle that eventually got her to the top. She worked the Watergate beat for CBS in Washington in the 1970s and moved to Los Angeles to anchor the CBS-owned local station before her big break came — and big, it certainly was.

In her era, network newscasts ruled the airwaves, cable news was just beginning its rise and news flooding in via smartphone was more than a decade away. The evening anchors were household names.

Rather had been named the immediate successor to the revered Walter Cronkite at what was nicknamed the Tiffany Network, so the promotion of an Asian American woman to work alongside him was quite a breakthrough.

But Chung’s seat at the anchor’s desk would be short-lived.

In a chapter titled “The Ax,” she describes the life-changing, if not entirely unexpected, call from her agent just as she was about to go on the air one evening. That telecast, only two years after her appointment, would be her last on the “CBS Evening News With Dan Rather and Connie Chung.”

Rather again would anchor solo. Years later, he too would famously be ousted from the anchor chair, and eventually from CBS altogether, after his involvement in a controversial story about George W. Bush’s Vietnam-era service in the National Guard.

As Chung persuasively maintains, sexism shadowed her career.

“Many men in television news, especially those who became anchormen, contracted a disease: big-shot-itis,” she writes. “It was characterized by a swelling of the head, an inability to stop talking, self-aggrandizing behavior, narcissistic tendencies, unrelenting hubris, delusions of grandeur and fantasies of sexual prowess.”

Network bosses stuck her with frothy reporting assignments. Instead of covering wars like the guys, she was relegated to stories like the ice-skating scandal involving Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan.

Worse, though, was the network’s handling of her 1995 interview with Newt Gingrich’s mother, an incident that would become known in TV circles as “Bitchgate.” During a face-to-face exchange, the new House speaker’s mother confided to Chung, in a whisper, that her son had called Hillary Clinton a derogatory name; when CBS released a brief, out-of-context clip of the recorded interview, it gave the false impression that Chung had tricked her.

But it’s Rather who is most directly in Chung’s cross hairs. She portrays him as controlling, unwilling to share the spotlight and even as the perpetrator of a stealth campaign to TV critics and colleagues about how her journalism didn’t measure up.

After she was dumped from the evening newscast, CBS offered Chung various less prestigious roles. As she struggled with whether to accept, fate intervened. Over the years, Chung had suffered several miscarriages, and she and her husband, the well-known talk show host Maury Povich, had been trying to adopt. Only two days after she tumbled from the journalistic heights, word came that a baby boy had been born and would come to them as adoptive parents.

Approaching 50, Chung walked away from CBS News, and into life as a mother. She describes the happiness that her long marriage and new baby brought, and brings candor and vulnerability to her later efforts to revive her career.

“I succeeded in having it all, although at different stages of my life,” she reflects. “First a career, then a baby. … Surely, the topsy-turvy order is not for all.”

What sweetens the memories is that another consolation prize would come along. In 2019, she writes, a young reporter named Connie Wang got in touch. As it turned out (and was later documented in a 2023 New York Times Opinion piece, “Generation Connie”), a remarkable number of Asian American parents had proudly named their baby daughters after her.

For Chung, who felt great pressure to bring honor to the family name — she sometimes wished she were a man and thus better able to do so — this discovery had great meaning. “I had always perceived my career as rocky,” she writes. “Dare I rethink my life’s work was worthy after all?”

Chung’s heartbreaking career was also groundbreaking — not only in the moment and on the air, but in the “sisterhood of Connies” who form a living legacy.

CONNIE: A Memoir | By Connie Chung | Grand Central Publishing | 336 pp. | $32.50
Dan Rather

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