Shortly after meeting journalist Connie Chung and her husband, television host Maury Povich, I was sitting at home brainstorming interesting career women to reach out to for this new How She Got There series…at which point I realized that just hours ago, I’d been chatting with a woman whose career has landed her on more hours of television than I’ve probably ever watched.
Lucky for me, Chung agreed to get back on the phone and open up about her career path, starting with her run as a nearly-flunking University of Maryland biology major busy discovering makeup and beer. Now a three-time Emmy-award winning journalist who has interviewed a handful of U.S. presidents, Chung shares her thoughts on college, journalism, women in the workplace—and about how she went from switching majors more times than she can count to being the country’s second major female co-anchor and covering Watergate from the White House.
Name: Connie Chung
Age: 64
Job Title and Description: Retired Television News Reporter/Anchorwoman
- Reporter at WTTG-TV Metromedia (now Fox)
- National correspondent for the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite
- Anchor at the CBS-owned station KNXT-TV (now KCBS)
- Correspondent and anchor at NBC News
- Anchor and correspondent of Saturday Night with Connie Chung and later, co-anchor of the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather and Connie Chung and anchor and correspondent on Eye to Eye with Connie Chung” as well as a CBS News floor reporter
- Harvard fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
- Co-anchor and correspondent on ABC’s 20/20
- Anchor on CNN’s Connie Chung Tonight
- Co-host of NBC’s Weekends with Maury and Connie
College/major: University of Maryland, College Park; Journalism
Her Campus: Most of us who’ve turned on a television in the last few decades have an idea of who you are, but rewinding a bit, I’d love to hear more about how and why you got to be who you are—maybe starting with your time at the University of Maryland, what you were like there and how it shaped you.
CC: I went to the University of Maryland at a time in the ‘60s when it wasn’t a lauded school that everyone was dying to get into. Basically, if you lived in the state and had a heartbeat, they’d take you.
The tuition was very low. My family didn’t have any money, so I was just very lucky to be able to go there. I started out in biology because that was what I thought I wanted to do. I really loved biology, but once I began taking the courses and spending a lot of time in the lab, I thought to myself, ‘I can’t do this for the rest of my life.’ So I began, I think like a typical college student, jumping around from major to major. I don’t know how many majors I had until the summer between by junior year and senior year…I got a job interning for a congressman who was a former newspaperman. And he just got me interested in writing. I wrote press releases for him, and I saw how reporters were doing their job on Capitol Hill. And it just really seemed exciting, so when I went back in the fall for my last year, I realized I wanted to go into journalism.
HC: How’d you decide on television?
CC: I picked television because at the time, television was just a baby. Newspapers were already beginning to die. The afternoon Washington, D.C. newspaper, The Evening Star, was just folding, and I decided that television was new enough to sort of allow women into the industry.
And off I went. It became quite a passion. It became my vocation, my love. Every waking moment was dedicated to my career. And it was a steady climb from being a local news reporter in Washington to a network news correspondent for CBS news covering the best stories you can imagine. The beats were the White House and the Pentagon and the State Department and Capitol Hill, so I would rotate around basically covering political news, and then presidential elections.
And I ended up getting the job that I never thought I would ever have. Walter Cronkite was my idol, so I became his follower throughout my career. He was my mentor. He was really wonderful to me. And I got half of his job. Dan Rather was anchoring the news at CBS News, and I became a co-anchor sitting next to him. So I was sitting in half of Walter Cronkite’s chair. It was a dream job.
HC: I can imagine. And as a woman at the time beat to it only by Barbara Walters, that must have felt pretty nice.
CC: That’s right. A few years earlier, she was the first woman co-anchor. I was the second. But I was the first woman at CBS to co-anchor the news. However, in the process I forgot to get married, I forgot to have a baby.
HC: Whoops.
CC: Well, while I was at NBC, I ended up getting married. I married Maury Povich, who was also in the television-news business at the time, and he switched from news to talk shows. But forgetting to have a baby was more problematic, you know? And that led to our deciding to adopt.
HC: How would you say you went about striking a balance between your career and family life?
CC: My sense is that juggling a career and personal life is very, very difficult. However, more and more women who are much younger than I will ever be have learned how to juggle a little better than I did. I think because I was one of the first women to break into television news, we really couldn’t take that time for our personal lives. We had to keep working away. Otherwise we would have lost ground.
HC: So really, you cleared the path for the rest of us in a lot of ways.
CC: I like to think that we did. But we were just doing our jobs. We were hard-nosed and determined to get there, and nothing was going to stop us.
HC: As for Her Campus readers, we’ve got a whole lot of college girls who are balancing their social and academic aspirations and lives. When you were our age and figuring out what you wanted to study, how might a friend have described you?
CC: I know this isn’t your question, but before I forget, one of the things that I think is so important for women to know is that unfortunately we are capable of being multi-taskers. Men, I don’t know this for sure, but their gender seems to have a very difficult time multitasking.
HC: Tell me about it.
CC: Bless their hearts. Some of them think they do. And indeed they often do—they’ll listen to music and do work and be on Facebook and text at the same time. But they’re really not as good as we are. One of the things that occurs to women is that if they do try to have a personal life in addition to a career, they are constantly stressed between the two and suffer great guilt thinking that they’re not giving either one enough attention. And I think it’s one of the reasons why women feel perpetually frustrated, whereas the men are able to compartmentalize their Wall Street jobs and their children and their marriage…For some reason, we still haven’t made the kind of progress that women want, which is complete equality in the workplace and at home. So the bottom line is that I hope we as women relax about thinking we need to do everything 100 percent perfectly in the workplace and in the home, professionally and personally…The goal is to not want to do everything perfectly, but instead just do everything well while you’re doing it, and when you leave that part of it, go do the personal thing really well while you’re doing it and forget about the other thing.
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HC: Is that a balance you strived to strike back in college?
CC: Back to me in college. College was a real awakening for me because in high school I looked like a pencil. I was so skinny and little, like a capital L. But when I got to college, I discovered not only makeup, but beer! And I started filling out. Not that I’m Sofia Vergara from Modern Family…but I certainly had curves, and then, this was a wonderful thing. I began having more fun that I’d ever had in my life in college.
My first year I almost flunked out, and my second year, I think I was struggling mightily. And after changing majors and changing majors and changing majors, it wasn’t until I decided what I was going to do for a living and how I was going to earn my keep in this world, I was focused, driven and you couldn’t stop me. I really put my nose to the grindstone.
So I think college is supposed to be that time of discovery. I was totally a late bloomer, so I didn’t really blossom until college. I’m sure a lot of students now at [your university,] Penn are past that, and they could very well be focused by their sophomore year. Or it could just be a continuation of the fun that they had in high school.
HC: Don’t give us too much credit.
CC: [laughs] I think that the world is so different now with the Internet, with computers, with cell phones. I would imagine not only the social dynamic, but the academic dynamic is really different. At the time I went to the University of Maryland, it was nothing like the University of Pennsylvania is today. I think my husband, when he went to the University of Pennsylvania, it was a party school. Well, actually…not really, but as far as he was concerned it was.
HC: We like to say we work hard and we play hard.
CC: I think that’s good. I hope that you do. Because I don’t think college is meant to be a completely academic experience—forgive me. Though I do regret a lot of studying I didn’t do, because as a newsperson I needed to know everything, and I kicked myself for not paying more attention. Because as each news story came along, I’d have to really do my due diligence and study to prepare for interviews and stories and give myself the proper background. I’m sure I could have done better if I had paid more attention in college. But I had a wonderful time.
HC: It seems like you managed to pull it off in the end, landing some pretty high-profile interviews with everyone from Magic Johnson to Gary Condit. What would you say is the most afraid you’ve ever been for an interview?
CC: I think interviewing any president is very daunting, challenging and a little bit heart-stopping because no matter what you think of the current president, whoever it is, the office holds an aura that is overwhelming. And regardless of how disparaging you can be of a president behind his back, once you walk up and shake his hand, you’re shaking the hand of the leader of the free world. So it’s a little bit more than you think you can handle.
HC: And how many United States presidents have you interviewed to date?
CC: Let’s see, starting with Nixon, excluding Carter, and I interviewed George W. when he was governor, I think I’ve done them all. Nixon, Ford, Clinton, Reagan…I think the most exciting story was Watergate.
HC: What was covering Watergate like?
CC: I was actually a youngish reporter that time. I was in my late twenties, still at the beginning of my career. I was working for CBS News, and they wouldn’t trust a cub reporter as much for this important story. We would gather information and give it to an experienced correspondent, which made us very unhappy because here we did all the work and we had to turn it over to someone else. But many times we were able to report ourselves. I think of the two most exciting days, one was when I was in a House Judiciary committee hearing on the impeachment of Richard Nixon. I was responsible for covering it for CBS Radio, and the television correspondent was a more experienced reporter. He was reporting it for Walter Cronkite, and if the other correspondent was run over by a truck, then I would get to do it.
HC: So you were like the Vice President of Coverage then?
CC: Yes, exactly. I was waving down trucks right and left to throw the others into traffic, but it just wasn’t going to happen!
But it was a very breathtaking moment when the 38 members of the House Judiciary Committee began voting one by one on the first article of impeachment. You know, it was ‘yay,’ ‘nay,’ that kind of thing, and when they passed it, there were these noticeable gasps in the hearing room. It was really quite the story of that decade. And to be a witness to history is very exciting because it’s one thing to watch it on television, to read about it the newspaper, to be in Washington on a big news day. On the other hand, there are very few people who are actually witnesses to the event as it’s unfolding, and it was very, very mind-boggling to me. And the next night was when Nixon actually resigned, and I was at the White House, and there was a celebration out on Pennsylvania Avenue where the antiwar demonstrators were cheering like it was Mardi Gras and on the inside of the White House it felt very much like a funeral.
HC: And do you and Maury ever watch yourselves on TV? Any sort of family viewing traditions?
CC: No, Maury hates to watch himself, and he never does. I used to watch myself to self-evaluate and try to improve. It’s so anal. You just look and go, “Oh, I should remember don’t do this. Do that. Oh, that was stupid. Shoulda, coulda, woulda” But Maury never does.
HC: Going back into your life always in pursuit of stories, if you could interview one person, dead or alive, who would you most enjoy having a conversation with?
CC: I always find that so hard to answer. For me, because I’ve always been hot on breaking news, it’s whoever everybody wants to hear from at that moment…Usually there isn’t someone I think is so fascinating at this moment unless they’re right on the edge of the news. And whoever that is, I want to talk to them. Somebody that nobody can get, and I got that person. Someone like Osama Bin Laden. Do you know what I mean?
[Writer’s note: While Connie is most certainly ambitious, this interview was conducted prior to Bin Laden’s death]
HC: Sure—that impossible story that everyone wants to break and you get there first.
CC: Exactly. It’s sort of like when Christiane Amanpour got Mubarak when everything was breaking. It was great. Interview envy.
HC: If someone had said to you back in college that you were going to turn on the television and see you on the news, both interviewing and getting interviewed, what would your response to that have been?
CC: When you say that, I think, ‘Who’s she talking about?’ So no, I never thought this would happen, but at the same time, you know yourself, and you know if you want something, you go get it. No one is going to hand it to you. And that’s what I did… No one was going to be able to stop me from going forward.
HC: When you’re looking to hire a 20-something year old, is it that same determination that you’re looking for? Any advice to someone who wants to be you?
CC: I would look for someone who I think will work hard. I think that my generation was perpetually afraid of being fired, and we would work ourselves to death with no sleep and gnarled fingers to make sure that we would succeed and keep our jobs. I recoil at anyone says, ‘OK, fire me.’ Unless you’re older and say you’re not going to take it anymore, that’s different. But when you’re young, you’re hungry and you’re trying to create a career for yourself, I think I would look for the person who is willing to take lumps here and there, willing to work 24-7, willing to pitch in and help out, willing to stand up and speak up and not be shy, willing to take criticism and not be offended, who gets tougher as the years go on, grows and has passion. For this profession, it’s someone who has passion and love of the job and the written word, appreciates writing and the English language, relationships. And last of all, and this I think is so important: someone who’s nice. My son, when he was little, if we went…shopping for toys and the salesperson was very helpful or something, he’d say to me, ‘He’s nice, mom. She’s nice, Mom.’ Just be nice.