Pod Insights Pablo Torre Finds Out The News Anchor America Needed About this episode Turning on the news right now feels utterly surreal. But it didn’t always have to be this way. Because Connie Chung — tenacious TV broadcaster and author of a new memoir — set a gold standard in the pre-internet era. For being unafraid of powerful men. For getting scoops at the bar. For trash-talking. For calling out Donald Trump’s childishness to his face. For withstanding the boorish behavior of Bobby Knight and unearthing the inner pain of Michael Jordan. And, yes, for shutting down the richest man on Earth... even after he jumped over a chair.
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2:00 Pablo Torre? Two slices of cheese and a star, and two pickles side by side. So every bite gets both. And every time one's ordered, a cowbell sound rings in the kitchen. That's the grill master's cue to put a fresh patty on the grill. My move? QPC, fries and a drink after a long day of recording. That is my happy place. The Quarter Pounder with Cheese with Fries and a Drink, now $8 for a limited time only, only at McDonald's. For a limited time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California. And for delivery, fresh beef not available in Alaska and Hawaii. Offer not valid for delivery. Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.
2:45 Pablo Torre? I am Pablo Torre and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.
2:49 Speaker 02 Do you really feel like a philanthropic person?
2:52 Speaker 03 I feel very philanthropic.
2:53 Speaker 02 Do you?
2:54 Speaker 03 And I'm a young guy.
2:55 Speaker 02 You know, people don't believe that.
2:58 Pablo Torre? Right after this ad.
3:01 Speaker 04 You're listening to Giraffe Kings Network.
3:16 Pablo Torre? To be on the internet with you, having truly like grown up watching you.
3:22 Speaker 02 Really?
3:22 Pablo Torre? Yes, of cour- what do you mean really?
3:24 Speaker 02 No, seriously.
3:25 Pablo Torre? I am one of the millions upon millions of Americans who trusted Connie Chung with telling us what the [bleep] is happening in our world.
3:36 Speaker 02 Wowzer.
3:37 Pablo Torre? You were the person inside my television.
3:40 Speaker 02 Oh my gosh, I can't believe it.
3:43 Pablo Torre? It's something that I've meaning to talk to you about specifically because what this book did was reveal things about you that I could not get by watching you on television.
3:53 Speaker 02 Right.
3:54 Pablo Torre? Like what you actually felt.
3:56 Speaker 02 Well, you know what? That was a gigantic challenge. When I wrote what is commonly known as the [bleep] first draft, when I submitted it to my publisher, she said, "You're just telling the facts." And I said, "Well, that's what I do."
4:11 Pablo Torre? You're reporting.
4:12 Speaker 02 Yeah. And she said, "No, you can't. You've got to tell how you feel." And I thought, "Oh gosh, give me a break. If I had known that, I wouldn't have written the darn thing."
4:27 Pablo Torre? Connie Chung was a television star in ways that young people today cannot possibly appreciate. Because when I was growing up in the early 90s, back in my day, there was no internet, there were no cell phones, no social media, no YouTube, obviously. And so, watching the news meant turning on your television by pressing a button after dinner. At which point, almost inevitably, this person would crackle into view.
4:57 Speaker 05 This is the CBS Evening News. With Dan Rather and Connie Chung.
5:06 Speaker 02 Good evening. Dan is off tonight. The FBI put out a warning today that organized crime from Russia is now the greatest long-term threat to the security of the United States.
5:17 Pablo Torre? Today, Connie Chung is a tireless 78-year-old, who insisted, by the way, on standing up for our entire in-person interview here, because it had been a long book tour, understandably, and she'd been sitting too much. And at this very moment in American political history, there are few people I wanted to stand up and talk to me more than Connie Chung. She wasn't only the first woman to co-anchor the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, the man who had succeeded Walter Cronkite, who had hired Connie as a correspondent. Connie was also the first-ever Asian Network News anchor, and the reporter responsible for the first federal prosecution of a civil rights-era murder case, and also, as you'll
6:01 Pablo Torre? see in a bit here, simply one of the toughest television interviewers of all time. And I've been thinking about Connie ever since her husband, Maury Povich, yes, daytime television icon, Maury Povich, casually mentioned her memoirs to us in studio a year ago.
6:22 Speaker 06 I'll call her, though, if you want me to.
6:23 Pablo Torre? Well, we might need to...
6:24 Speaker 06 And she's not writing her memoirs.
6:26 Pablo Torre? I was gonna say.
6:27 Speaker 06 She's not writing her memoirs.
6:29 Pablo Torre? You will not be surprised to learn that Connie Chung and Maury Povich, this paragon of journalism and this paragon of the alleged opposite, are in fact opposites themselves.
6:44 Pablo Torre? But it's not in the way that you'd expect.
6:48 Speaker 02 He is the stable, able stalwart traditionalist. And I am the crazy one. And he has to curb my enthusiasm all the time. Because you know what he says to me? You can't do that. And I say, why? You do a crazy program every day. You're determining the paternity of every child in America. Who's the daddy and who's not the daddy? You are not.
7:21 Speaker 02 Now, come on. I can do it. And he says, no, you have a reputation to uphold.
7:29 Pablo Torre? But it's clear now that, and you write this in the book, that this whole time, you write, "I looked like a lotus blossom, but I talked like a sailor with a raw sense of humor."
7:42 Speaker 02 Yep.
7:43 Pablo Torre? That is just not merely a personality trait, but a learned skill of sorts.
7:48 Speaker 02 I was a trash talker. And I, it was really because I wanted to be one of the guys. And at that time, there were so many guys in the newsroom. I mean, in fact, all, everybody in the newsroom at CBS was a man. All my competitors were men. Everybody I covered were men. You know, Capitol Hill and the White House and Pentagon and State Department. All men, and white for that matter. I had decided that the only way I could be one of the boys is to literally talk like them, you know, act like them. And it was not a conscious decision.
8:31 Speaker 02 It's just something I acquired through osmosis because they would make such sexual innuendos at me. So I would do it to them. And it was really disconcerting. And they didn't know what to do about it. So they would kind of just stand down.
8:49 Pablo Torre? You were preemptive at times.
8:51 Speaker 02 Yes, yes. I would lob something at them before they could lob it at me.
8:56 Pablo Torre? There's a part of your book, you write about a guy at Channel 5 in DC, and it's page 73. Could you read this part?
9:03 Speaker 02 Uh oh.
9:04 Pablo Torre? Would you mind? Is that possible?
9:05 Speaker 02 No, sure.
9:06 Pablo Torre? It's the bracketed part.
9:07 Speaker 02 Okay.
9:08 Pablo Torre? From your missilet.
9:09 Speaker 02 Okay. "Bill gave me the look. I could see the sperm swimming in the whites of his eyes. His long nose was pointing at me like a golden retriever's. His thin body shaking as dogs do when they're determined to chase a bird." You want me to go on?
9:27 Pablo Torre? I think the gist that I wanted to establish...
9:29 Speaker 02 Mm-hmm. Is that I could see the sperm swimming in the whites of their eyes?
9:33 Pablo Torre? Yeah, that's what I found out today. We did it in five minutes. That you had this ability to diagnose from up close and from afar, it seems.
9:41 Speaker 02 Well, it...
9:41 Pablo Torre? The intent of these people, who were both colleagues but predators, and also for you in the end, a form of prey as well, as you were not some shrinking, you know, violet.
9:53 Speaker 02 Violet?
9:54 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
9:54 Speaker 02 Well, but I mean, I think every woman has seen the sperm, you know, swimming, swimming through the whites of their eyes. It's like a, you know, you can see it.
10:07 Pablo Torre? Yeah, yeah. That was a good dance. Scotty Jung just did a sperm motility dance.
10:11 Speaker 02 There you go.
10:29 Pablo Torre? This is hard for me to even say aloud, because it's a mad lib of a sentence. What was it like when Henry Kissinger flirted with you?
10:35 Speaker 02 It was so gross. I mean, really gross. I, you know, because he had this belief that he was a sex symbol, frankly. So he thought that he was some kind of a hot person.
10:52 Speaker 02 Just because of his brain. It was so creepy. I mean, I wouldn't even have helped him cross the street if he had asked me to. I don't know. And there were a lot of creepy old men.
11:07 Pablo Torre? Just to run through some of the list here, and this is before my time, but again, as an attempted student of history. When I learned that it's not just Henry Kissinger.
11:16 Speaker 02 Oh, no, you're a Harvard guy. You know.
11:18 Pablo Torre? In my history class, I didn't learn that at a dinner Jimmy Carter pressed his leg up against yours and sort of just was hoping some magic would happen.
11:29 Speaker 02 I don't know what he was thinking. But he had just given that interview with Playboy magazine that said, "He lusted in his heart." And I saw this look on his face after he pressed his knee against mine. And I thought, really?
11:48 Pablo Torre? These are only a couple of examples among many, but in 1972, just to be very clear here, you're a reporter who is aggressive and principled and unrelenting, and you're covering the George McGovern presidential campaign.
12:01 Speaker 02 Yeah.
12:02 Pablo Torre? And so this is against Richard Nixon. The point being that you wind up as Connie Chung, young hotshot, rising star reporter, on St. Michael's Island off Maryland. And it's just, again, this is a Mad Lib, Connie, because it's who? Who is there at the island?
12:16 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, it's crazy. Warren Beatty and his girlfriend Julie Christie, both major stars, movie stars at the time, certainly. And McGovern asked me if I wanted to join them for dinner. And he said his wife Eleanor was not going to be there. And I thought, oh, this is not cool. But I thought, well, maybe I'll find out something. Maybe he'll tell me something that everybody else doesn't know. So we have dinner. I excuse myself to go to the ladies room bathroom or whatever. And on my way back, he tries to kiss me. And I...
13:01 Pablo Torre? In the middle of a presidential campaign.
13:03 Speaker 02 Yeah.
13:04 Pablo Torre? And you're the reporter who every, I mean, again, it's just.
13:10 Speaker 02 Bizarre.
13:11 Pablo Torre? Bizarre. Um, did you have a diagnosis as to what had, what was that moment?
13:15 Speaker 02 I was clueless. But you know what? When I was on this book tour, a woman told me that she had also encountered McGovern at one point and that he propositioned her. And basically she said, why did you go to a prostitute?
13:34 Speaker 02 So I thought she was pretty darn ballsy.
13:36 Pablo Torre? Let's be solutions oriented here.
13:37 Speaker 02 Yeah, or get a dog.
13:38 Pablo Torre? What about a dog?
13:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly.
13:42 Pablo Torre? But the, the point here that I bring it up to make is also that this is across the political spectrum. Right? McGovern is, is, is a lion of liberalism. Carter too, right? It's not just Kissinger. It's, it's men.
13:55 Speaker 02 Yes.
13:55 Pablo Torre? It is men and Washington and there you are being called, at the same time, just to get the full scorecard here. You know, alternately dragon lady, uh, yellow journalist, O S E. Could you explain O S E?
14:09 Speaker 02 Old Slant Eyes, which was, uh, like old blue eyes. Frank Sinatra was old blue eyes. And I, someone said to me, you're O S E, old slant eyes.
14:21 Pablo Torre? You did do it your way. It turned out.
14:25 Speaker 02 I did. But it was kind of crazy. I mean, but, but it was rampant. I think every woman who was alive then experienced the same thing. I was not unusual. Really. Not, not a, by any means unusual. It was just all over the place. It was constant. It was daily. And, um, I don't know. I think all the women in, in my era just plain put up with it.
14:56 Pablo Torre? It, it's clear to me in this book, and even just our conversation now, that you were not collapsing onto fainting couches.
15:02 Speaker 02 Oh, no, no.
15:02 Pablo Torre? When this happened.
15:03 Speaker 02 No.
15:04 Pablo Torre? You were in, again, the boys on the bus. It was the boys on the bus and Connie. You could hang. You, you were, you learned to go to the bar.
15:13 Speaker 02 Yes.
15:14 Pablo Torre? Because that's what it meant to report.
15:16 Speaker 02 Apparently, I didn't know that. I was tucked in bed early until I realized that the guys were getting scoops. And the way they were getting scoops was drinking at the bar every night with the McGovern people. And they would get them to spill the beans. So I thought, oh, forget about going to bed early. I'm going down to the bar, too. You know, I learned how to drink in college, so why not? Why not apply what I learned in college?
15:47 Pablo Torre? Absolutely.
15:48 Speaker 02 Yeah.
15:49 Pablo Torre? You know, I do want to point out that while a lot of this was happening, you were living with your parents.
15:58 Speaker 02 Can you imagine? How embarrassing.
16:00 Pablo Torre? I mean, just paint the picture, though. You're in DC, your family's there. And as all this is happening, you go home.
16:06 Speaker 02 You go home to mommy and daddy. It really is embarrassing. Yeah, but you know, that's how incredibly Chinese I am. And the whole Asian thing of filial piety. I was such a good daughter. I was the last of their five daughters. They expected me to hang in there. My excuse is that I was on such a rigorous schedule of hopping all over the country with McGovern campaign and then covering Watergate day and night, covering Nelson Rockefeller when he was vice president,
16:43 Speaker 02 that it made it easy for me to just live at home because I would plop home and just be able to sleep. You know, I was embarrassed to write that in the book, but it was the truth. And I have to tell the truth.
16:56 Pablo Torre? One of the most relatable parts.
16:58 Speaker 02 Really?
16:58 Pablo Torre? Oh, yeah, I lived at home for several years after college.
17:02 Speaker 02 You did?
17:03 Pablo Torre? Both for filial piety reasons and also broke reasons.
17:07 Speaker 02 Yes.
17:08 Pablo Torre? I was a fact checker, you know? And it wasn't... My cousins in the Philippines still, you know, so many of them live at home. So many people in Asia do. It's not weird over there, but in America, Connie, I want to point this out, too. We're both first generation Americans. We're both the first members of our family born in these United States.
17:26 Speaker 02 Yes.
17:27 Pablo Torre? The place in your book where I was sort of thinking deeply about that is the part where your dad...
17:35 Pablo Torre? Is this force of ancestral weight, and in this case, pressure, insofar as he gave you a mission?
17:44 Speaker 02 He did. He did, indeed.
17:46 Pablo Torre? How would you explain the mission?
17:48 Speaker 02 He was very proud of the fact that he was able to basically manipulate a way to get out of China during the Sino-Japanese War. They had lost three boys in China. They had a total of nine children. Five of them died as infants, and three of them were boys. And you know, in China, that's verboten. I mean, you can't... You don't want girls. All you want are boys, because they carry on the family name.
18:17 Pablo Torre? Right, right.
18:18 Speaker 02 He wrote me a letter, and I was already in the news business. And he said, "Maybe you can someday carry on the name Chung the way a son would." I think I took that mission seriously and tried to be the son my parents never had.
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21:41 Pablo Torre? I want to convey to people who maybe weren't of conscious memory when you were doing some of your most, let's call them, name-making interviews. We'll start, I think, with a voice that is, like you, quite relevant still today.
21:59 Speaker 03 I sell very great condominiums in New York. I have the best casinos in the world.
22:05 Speaker 02 They aren't that great. Come on.
22:06 Speaker 03 What, the Trump Tower?
22:07 Speaker 02 Maybe if you can try and answer this question without giving me the normal spiel. Huh?
22:12 Speaker 03 What is the normal spiel?
22:13 Speaker 02 Well, the normal spiel is, well, the fact is, is that many rich and powerful people do try to remain anonymous. But you became very public, very clearly, by your own design.
22:27 Speaker 03 I don't know if it was by my own design.
22:28 Speaker 02 You mean the publicity?
22:29 Speaker 03 I do developments which get a lot of publicity. I mean, if I didn't do Trump... I mean this. If Trump Tower weren't a great building on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, by a young guy...
22:39 Speaker 02 Trump Tower is one building in New York City with zillions of buildings.
22:42 Speaker 03 Trump Tower was built by a young guy in a very important location. No, I don't, I don't think it was by design, though. I think that it happened.
22:49 Speaker 02 Innocent. Come on.
22:51 Speaker 03 No, I want to be innocent. I've always wanted to be innocent. My entire life has been devoted to being innocent.
22:54 Speaker 02 Isn't little Donald...
22:56 Speaker 03 But I don't know that it was by design.
22:58 Pablo Torre? Okay, so what do you feel, what do you remember now, watching that back now?
23:04 Speaker 02 What happened was, but the producer of the program that I was doing at the time said, "We have an interview booked with Donald Trump." And I said, "Why?" He was a tabloid king. He would create publicity that would put him on the front pages of either the New York Daily News or the New York Post.
23:23 Pablo Torre? Yes.
23:23 Speaker 02 And I said, "I don't see any reason. Why does anybody care what he has to say?" And they, the producer said, "No, you should, you know, we've got it booked." Go ahead and do it. So I went ahead and did it. Afterwards, Trump was not happy with it.
23:38 Pablo Torre? I was gonna ask about the aftermath.
23:39 Speaker 02 Yes.
23:40 Pablo Torre? How did that feel?
23:42 Speaker 02 Do you really feel like a philanthropic person?
23:44 Speaker 03 I feel very philanthropic. I really do. And I'm a young guy.
23:47 Speaker 02 You know, people don't believe that.
23:49 Speaker 03 Well, I think people believe it. See, it gets to a point where some people can never be satisfied, Connie. Perhaps you're one of those people.
23:55 Speaker 02 He said that I didn't know what I was talking about, that I was...
24:00 Pablo Torre? Oh, a lightweight, sure.
24:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, lightweight, uh huh. And you know how he likes to call women nasty? He doesn't have a very wide vocabulary, so he was using the same adjectives. Then, in subsequent years, Pablo, Maury would play in celebrity golf tournaments with Donald Trump. Trump would be there. He'd introduce Maury to his wife Melania. He completely ignored my presence, despite Maury trying to introduce me. It was just really quite extraordinary, if I may. It seemed like a childish way to respond.
24:45 Pablo Torre? Yeah, yeah. Which is to say that anything that's happened since, as much as it is on one level utterly surreal, is also, in this way, exactly a version of what you had experienced.
24:57 Speaker 02 Yeah.
24:58 Pablo Torre? You know, there was a quote in your book that is attributed to Joe DiMaggio.
25:02 Speaker 02 Yes.
25:03 Pablo Torre? About how you were athletically as an interviewer. The quote is, "I'd hate to be on the other end of one of her fastballs."
25:11 Speaker 02 Do you know who told me that was our podiatrist, who was best friends with Joe DiMaggio? He said they were, he and DiMaggio were watching an interview that I was doing, and that's when he said it.
25:27 Pablo Torre? You know, it's funny the way sports does come up in your book.
25:30 Speaker 02 Oh.
25:31 Pablo Torre? Because it recurs.
25:32 Speaker 02 Yes.
25:33 Pablo Torre? And it comes, if I may, if I may establish a bit of the frame here. It comes both as a matter of assignments that were foisted upon you, someone who's perpetually trying to prove your credibility and your seriousness with journalism, but also clearly as a matter of these characters, like, let's just go to Bobby Knight.
25:57 Pablo Torre? In this NBC documentary.
26:01 Speaker 03 I'm gonna do it, and I'm gonna do it my way.
26:03 Speaker 04 There are times Bobby Knight can't do it his way. And what does he do then?
26:07 Speaker 03 I, I think that, uh, uh, if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it. I mean, that, that's just an old term that you're gonna use.
26:19 Pablo Torre? What was, what was, so you said very little in that clip, and he did not need you to say a lot to know that he had said something that he should not have said.
26:29 Speaker 02 Right.
26:30 Pablo Torre? What was going through your mind as he said it?
26:32 Speaker 02 I can't believe this. I mean, I, I couldn't believe he actually said what he said. And this was after he threw a folding chair across the court and was accused of trying to strangle one of his players during practice. Everybody knew that Bobby, Bobby Knight had a, an uncontrollable temper. He didn't suffer any consequences really at that time. It was much later that he, um, kind of blew up and, um, was blown off the court. But one of the funniest things of Pablo was a sports journalist.
27:07 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
27:07 Speaker 02 Was interviewing Bobby Knight, and he asked Bobby Knight, what do you think of Connie Chung? And he said, if she were on fire, I wouldn't even piss on her.
27:19 Pablo Torre? Which, which, you gotta admit.
27:21 Speaker 02 Yeah.
27:22 Pablo Torre? A pretty good line.
27:22 Speaker 02 Pretty good line. I thought it was great. I thought it was hysterical.
27:28 Pablo Torre? You know, what's, what's crazy about that interview is that that was the headline.
27:34 Speaker 02 Yeah.
27:34 Pablo Torre? But the subhead arguably should have been the fact that this happened.
27:40 Speaker 03 I've never hit anybody.
27:42 Speaker 04 Haven't you gone up to a kid and gone whack?
27:44 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah, I went down, I went down the line of our kids one time.
27:49 Speaker 04 You, what'd you do?
27:50 Speaker 03 And just hit him on the shoulder, whacked him, come on, let's go, let's go, let's go.
27:54 Speaker 04 I needed that, that was.
27:55 Speaker 03 Nice soft touch you had there. Well, this, for Christ's sake, isn't like interviewing some politician that wants to be on television. I don't give a damn whether you ever put this on television or not.
28:07 Pablo Torre? So, just for the record here, Bobby Knight literally slaps you in the face.
28:12 Speaker 02 Yeah, whack.
28:14 Pablo Torre? And you handle it as if you had, again, the litany of equivalent circumstances that you'd experienced in DC. You're like, yeah, I've, I know how this goes.
28:25 Speaker 02 Give me an uppercut. No, go on. Go ahead.
28:30 Speaker 02 You know, I mean, it's like, woo, Jesus.
28:34 Pablo Torre? That's wild.
28:35 Speaker 02 It is wild.
28:35 Pablo Torre? It's unbelievable that that was on television.
28:42 Pablo Torre? So, at this point, I just need to observe that for all of the ways that Connie Chung had been mistreated, obviously, by American presidents in private and Hall of Fame coaches in public, she loved her job. She found it thrilling, actually. She became obsessed with the craft of it, the taking of chances, the competition to score the big get. She was, in her own way, doing her father and her family name proud, as he had requested in writing to her. And America, in response, loved watching Connie Chung work. Her interview with Gary Condit, for instance, the embattled congressman from California, was watched by more than 23 million people.
29:28 Pablo Torre? Roughly the same number also watched her interview embattled figure skater Tanya Harding. And the list, which extends deep into sports now, goes on.
29:41 Pablo Torre? I just don't know if I've ever seen somebody grill the greatest athlete of all time, for instance, like you did with Michael Jordan.
29:51 Speaker 02 Gambling has cut short or even ruined a lot of professional sports careers. Can you give it up?
29:57 Speaker 03 Can I give up what?
29:58 Speaker 02 Gambling.
29:59 Speaker 03 Oh, sure. If it affects my life, or the way I play the game, or jeopardize my family, or my financial status, or whatever, or the security of my family, sure, I'd give up in a minute. To solidify my argument is, you know, whatever I've lost, I've always given it back to my wife.
30:24 Speaker 03 So whatever check I make, here honey, I'm sorry for the embarrassment, I'm sorry for what I've caused for, you know, losing this amount of money, you know, here, take it, do what you have to do with it. I wasted it, so this is yours, this is the kids', this is whatever. I didn't have to tell you that, but that tells me and I'm sure that I'm not a gamaholic. I know where I am, I know what I'm doing, but if I feel I've done something that has embarrassed the family, I want to correct it, but yet I want to move on from it too as well.
30:58 Speaker 02 All right, I'm gonna play shrink here, see? All right?
31:02 Speaker 03 Okay, I'm supposed to play patient or what?
31:06 Speaker 02 When you said that you gave your wife the fifty-seven thousand and the hundred and eight thousand that you lost, you know, that says to me, you feel guilty about it.
31:14 Speaker 03 I feel guilty that I didn't, I actually didn't tell her I lost it. That's where the guilt comes from.
31:19 Speaker 02 Oh, you didn't tell her?
31:21 Speaker 03 No.
31:22 Speaker 02 But then when you do give her that money, you do tell her?
31:25 Speaker 03 Right.
31:27 Speaker 02 But when you lost it, at the time you lost it?
31:30 Speaker 03 I was really embarrassed to tell anybody, because I lost. That's the most embarrassing thing, is that I lost.
31:37 Speaker 02 Do you think you have a gambling problem at all?
31:40 Speaker 03 No, because I can stop gambling, I have a competition problem.
31:48 Pablo Torre? I, I just want to observe that Michael Jordan, while being grilled, looks very comfortable with you.
31:54 Speaker 02 Yes.
31:55 Pablo Torre? And that is also part of what made you a special interviewer.
31:59 Speaker 02 Wow, that's so interesting, you know, because I didn't, I mean, I had met him many times, because he would have these Michael Jordan tournaments, and, um, and Maury and I would go.
32:12 Pablo Torre? Yep, golf tournaments.
32:13 Speaker 02 Yes, and Maury would say, I played with Michael Jordan, and he meant, uh, golf, not, not, not on the court. You know, and one of the craziest things I used to say with Maury, um, what celebrity are you playing with? And he says, I'm the celebrity.
32:35 Pablo Torre? You, in a sense, were another big star talking to a big star. And I wonder if that, how you wielded that, were you aware that, I'm Connie [BLEEP] Chung. Coming in to do this interview like no, we're both to get to quote your husband. I'm the celebrity.
32:54 Speaker 02 Pablo, it's very strange, but I was just putting one foot in front of the other, trying to get what I thought was what we in television news called the get. And at that time, Michael had so much going on, you know, with his father's death, with gambling, with Juanita, his wife. So I don't know, I was just thrilled when he said, okay, I couldn't believe it.
33:22 Pablo Torre? I do want to get to another part of your oeuvre to just paint with all the colors on this. Because it's you, it's the richest man in the world, and it's a chair.
33:34 Speaker 02 Is it true that you can leap over a chair from a standing position?
33:37 Speaker 03 It depends on the size of the chair. I'll cheat a little bit.
33:42 Speaker 02 Yeah.
33:45 Pablo Torre? The fact that you got Bill Gates to, again, to his credit, completely clear.
33:52 Speaker 02 Completely clear.
33:53 Pablo Torre? A chair.
33:54 Speaker 02 Wasn't that amazing?
33:56 Pablo Torre? You could get these people to do quite a bit, Connie, is what I learned.
33:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, but you know what? Um, after we sat down and started talking, I started peppering him with questions about the smaller companies that Microsoft was gobbling up. He walked out.
34:11 Pablo Torre? He walked out of the interview.
34:12 Speaker 02 Yeah. And I'm thinking, wait, whoa, hey, dude, where'd you go?
34:27 Speaker 00 Verizon knows that holiday math can be complicated.
34:30 Speaker 06 Okay, let's see, we got the four kids, four gifts each, six teacher gifts. Wait, oh, what did we get? And Sandy and the dogs. Oh, can't forget the dogs.
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35:26 Speaker 00 Availability varies.
35:35 Pablo Torre? I want to quote Maury now.
35:37 Speaker 02 Yes.
35:38 Pablo Torre? Because I did my homework for this interview. And I asked him, what do you think is the most striking part of Connie's book? He says, "The big contrast in her life was how she was so dogged and aggressive as a reporter uncovering stories, yet so dutiful and submissive when it came to her parents?"
35:55 Speaker 02 Yes.
35:56 Pablo Torre? "And her news managers trying to please and not challenge them."
36:01 Speaker 02 He's so right. He is so... He's spot on.
36:05 Pablo Torre? And he says, "Lord knows, not that way with me." That's what he says for the record. But I do want to introduce this dichotomy to people, which is that you are the person going after the powerful, holding them to account. And also, someone who is tortured at work because you're not saying no to these things that you don't want to do.
36:25 Speaker 02 Yes, it's that patriarch thing. And someone who has power in many ways over me, that I couldn't quite, you know, buck it. Buck the system, buck the person, because I saw them as this patriarchal leader who I had to be obedient to. And it was that way with both my parents. And Maury is absolutely right. It was that way with these men who were in management. And I thought that... I thought they had my back and they had my best interests in mind.
37:07 Speaker 02 But as you well know, management, they're CYA.
37:13 Pablo Torre? Hmm.
37:14 Speaker 02 You know, in many ways.
37:15 Pablo Torre? Always.
37:15 Speaker 02 Yeah. And that's why I think I couldn't quite... Figure out how to deal with management.
37:23 Pablo Torre? Yeah. Well, they're trying to cover their ass. They're trying to CYA, cover your ass as a principle in life. And you're encountering that when you get to the anchor chair, right? Again, just the job of of network anchor is this hallowed, it's the ultimate, as you say, a dream job.
37:41 Speaker 02 It was.
37:42 Pablo Torre? And and you begin to realize, even as a as a fill-in, who gets to say good morning? Is contractually negotiated and always the right of the man.
37:54 Speaker 02 Well, when it came to the Today Show, it was. I substituted for Jane Pauli during her pregnancies. And and Brian Gummel had it contractually in writing that he could say, good morning.
38:09 Speaker 05 This is today, Monday, January 4, 1982.
38:14 Speaker 02 And he could say, have a good day at the end of the two hour program. But she could not. And she fought it, but she didn't win that battle. And when I substituted, I also tried to fight it. But I couldn't win that battle either.
38:30 Pablo Torre? You know, I don't think we could give full consideration, as you do in the book, to the chapter that is you, sitting next to Dan, rather, you becoming the first Asian to be a network news anchor, the second woman of all time, the first at CBS Evening News. This is Walter Cronkite's program. This is the man that worked as a correspondent for the ultimate journalist.
38:52 Speaker 02 Yes, my idol.
38:54 Pablo Torre? Oh, still today, I hope that you are not alone in revering Walter Cronkite. And the best day of your life, you write, is of your professional life, is when you get that job. How do you summarize what that was like compared to your expectations?
39:10 Speaker 02 I could not have been happier. You know, I thought, I, boy, I've reached the pinnacle. It's a place where all of our worlds come together.
39:20 Speaker 00 Healthcare, the economy.
39:22 Speaker 05 Stories such as the flood or the hurricane.
39:24 Speaker 00 And sometimes, even a moment.
39:26 Speaker 05 That lets us all sit back and smile.
39:31 Speaker 02 But then, it was all a struggle from then on. Because I'd cover stories and Dan Rather would when I'd cover those same stories and get pissed off that I was covering them instead of him. I think he would have disliked having, not only any sharing the seat with anybody, because he had been doing it by himself and didn't want to move a few inches over for not a man, not a woman, not an animal, or a plant. I mean, he did not want to share Walter Cronkite's chair with anybody. Especially me, because I wasn't compliant.
40:13 Speaker 02 I was trying to establish a precedent in which the co-anchor would be able to share everything.
40:20 Pablo Torre? You were trying to get an A.
40:22 Speaker 02 Yeah.
40:22 Pablo Torre? You were like, wait a minute, hold on, I can also report?
40:24 Speaker 02 Yes.
40:25 Pablo Torre? I can, I can catch what, I can, I can, you know, eat what I catch, right? Like, why, why can't I do all of these things the way that, the, again, just for people who don't know, right? It's, it's Peter Jennings at ABC. I'm Peter Jennings in New York. Just a short while ago, astonishing news from East Germany. It's Tom Brokaw at NBC.
40:42 Speaker 03 There has been so much budget cost this year, it's enough to make your eyes glaze over.
40:46 Pablo Torre? Right. And now it's Dan Rather plus Connie Chung.
40:51 Speaker 02 Connie Chung. The CBS Evening News, team to cover your world. So, there I was.
41:03 Pablo Torre? The first episode Connie Chung ever hosted next to Dan Rather on the CBS Evening News was June 1st, 1993. It was historic. Two years later, CBS fired her from that dream job.
41:22 Pablo Torre? And Dan Rather, according to one news executive, had come to see Connie Chung as his rival, not his co-actor. And in Connie's book, she goes on to describe Rather telling her, quote, "Just read the news on the teleprompter," end quote. Because, according to Connie, Dan Rather very explicitly wanted her to stay in studio and therefore leave all of that reporting, all of the anchoring from the field that she loved to do, to him.
41:53 Pablo Torre? Connie, of course, in response, was outwardly professional. You'd have no idea, if you watched these telecasts, as I did, that any of this was happening behind the scenes. But internally, she was despondent, furious even.
42:11 Pablo Torre? Because what you should also know is that while all of this was happening, Connie had been spending years trying to conceive a child with Maury.
42:22 Pablo Torre? It never worked, despite multiple medical interventions. And so around when Connie had started her job with the Evening News, they decided to file the paperwork for adoption. Except that didn't come through either.
42:38 Pablo Torre? Which is why work, Connie's job, remained pretty much her entire life.
42:46 Speaker 02 I found that when I was writing about it, I, someone, my nephew, asked me, "Was it cathartic?" And I said, "I better look up catharsis, because I'm not really sure what it means." And I discovered that the original meaning was actually medical. That one expunges one's body of unwanted waste. And so, so I thought to myself, "Yeah." When I wrote about CBS and the whole experience with Dan Rather, that's exactly what I was doing. I was expunging myself of this piece of...
43:27 Speaker 02 Dung. And it actually felt pretty good afterwards.
43:32 Pablo Torre? Again, this is the funny thing about television, which is that people at home don't always know how the people on camera, true to the theme of this episode, are actually feeling. And so both of you are quite professional, always polished. That's what I think of still.
43:47 Speaker 02 Yeah.
43:47 Pablo Torre? But the tension and the way in which Dan Rather ultimately ousts you from the chair and from CBS, despite being who you are, as now we clearly understand, that's the sort of thing that can break a lot of people.
44:04 Speaker 02 I thought I had lost face. You know, it was a profound feeling when I got dumped from the program. I really felt I, because it was so public, I lost face. And I just wanted to crawl into a hole and dig my way to China again. So it was...
44:25 Pablo Torre? Humiliation is the feeling.
44:27 Speaker 02 Huge, yeah. So humiliated. And it didn't matter, you know, why or what. It's just I had a very public firing. Although I was offered a different job, I didn't take it because I had a big turnaround in my life. Only two days after I was fired, Maury and I discovered that our adoption that we had been working on for two years was going to come through.
44:57 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
44:58 Speaker 02 And so it was shortly thereafter that our son was in our arms. And he was less than a day old. So it was pretty darn wonderful. It was serendipity.
45:26 Pablo Torre? After decades of relentless grinding through the 70s and 80s and 90s, Connie Chung finally stepped away from the job she loved. And she stepped away for about 20 years, give or take. And it wasn't easy, but she wanted the time to raise her son Matthew. And after hosting a few other programs on TV here and there, yeah, Connie more or less retired.
45:51 Pablo Torre? Think back to what her father had asked of her in that letter she told us about before. Many years ago. Connie had already done all that. She had carried the family name to every living room in America, millions upon millions upon millions of them, as far as any woman could plausibly take it. And that was a legacy that couldn't possibly be topped. Or so it seemed. I don't even know what category this accomplishment goes into. But you now have a service area in New Jersey named after you.
46:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, I do. And it's pretty incredible. I actually have to go there sometime. When I go there, I want to go into the men's room stall and right on the inside for a good time.
46:48 Speaker 02 How's that? You think it's not a good idea?
46:51 Pablo Torre? Milepost 153 should be honored to have you graffiti the men's room at the Connie Junk Service Area. By the way, you're a weed strain.
47:01 Speaker 02 I do have a strain of weed named after me. And I don't know how it came about, and I think I should get a cut. I'm described as easy to grow. I create a nice flower and a scent.
47:15 Pablo Torre? Yes.
47:16 Speaker 02 I don't cause the crazies too much.
47:18 Pablo Torre? No.
47:19 Speaker 02 And I'm good under stress. If you have a deadline, you know, smoke a little Connie Chung weed. And I'm low in it, and I like that.
47:28 Pablo Torre? You're a good strain to wind down with at the end of the night.
47:31 Speaker 02 You bet. Mm-hmm. And I just saw online that you can get like a five-pack pre-roll for only $22.
47:41 Pablo Torre? This is now turning into a live read. For a thing that does have, you know, some dry mouth.
47:48 Speaker 02 Yeah.
47:49 Pablo Torre? But again, whomst among us. But the last sort of tribute that I want to acknowledge here is the one that, and I say this as somebody whose tear ducts, per my genetic makeup, are generally constipated.
48:04 Pablo Torre? But the Connys.
48:07 Speaker 02 Yes.
48:08 Pablo Torre? Can you explain for people who don't know this story? That was in the New York Times.
48:11 Speaker 02 It's pretty remarkable.
48:13 Pablo Torre? Yeah.
48:13 Speaker 02 A woman named Connie Wong called, emailed me. She said, her parents came from Communist China. She was only three years old. Her parents say, we've got to give you an American name. What name would you like? And, you know, at only three, she knew what she saw on television. She said Connie or Elmo. And she said, I'm named after you. I'm named Connie after you. So she goes off to UC Berkeley, Ferrismore. She's in the cafeteria and somebody says Connie Wong. And she turns around, but a lot of women turn around, Asian women. And she finds there are all kinds of Connys. So she knows something's up.
48:57 Speaker 02 She decided to look into it. Connie Wong discovers that there are untold numbers of Connys who were named after me in the 1970s, in the 1980s, in the 1990s. And I am blown away. She tells this story to the Sunday New York Times Opinion section. And the photo editor brings together as many Connys as she can find in the New York area, asks me to come to a New York Times studio. Oh, my God.
49:30 Speaker 02 It's confusing why you're named Connie. You know. I went out, I was born, you know. But I realize what it means is, you know, your parents watched it work hard and like be brave and take chances. Yeah. I did do that. Yeah. So, thank you.
49:52 Speaker 02 Thank you.
50:00 Speaker 02 We take an amazing picture. Three tiers of Connie's, about a dozen, and me in the middle. I tell you, it has blown me away. And on this book tour, Pablo, I have met six new Connie's. And I've also met a Connie Chung in drag.
50:20 Pablo Torre? Oh.
50:20 Speaker 02 Yeah. He told me that it takes him four hours to put on his makeup. And I said, dude, you kind of get faster than I get. I did mine in 15.
50:32 Speaker 02 It's crazy.
50:34 Pablo Torre? When you think back to the way in which your dad, your parents, who you supported through all of this. When you think about how your father saddled you with this mission of continuing the good family name. When you look back at the impact you've had upon the Connie generation, just the symmetry of this, what comes to mind?
50:58 Speaker 02 Back when I was working, I was used to this big pace and occasional adulation. But now I'm getting it. I think Pablo was much happier when I was depressed.
51:17 Speaker 02 I mean, I rose from the dead, frankly. I had been off the treadmill for about 20 years. And, you know, didn't know what to make of my career. But once Maury encouraged me to sit down and write about it. And when I got this beautiful ending of this Connie legacy, I thought, this is a perfect denouement for the book. It's a perfect ending.
51:50 Pablo Torre? Now people understand all of the reasons why. Yeah, you've inspired, literally, generations of people.
51:59 Speaker 02 I can't believe it.
52:00 Pablo Torre? It's true.
52:00 Speaker 02 I know, it's crazy.
52:02 Pablo Torre? And I dare say that as somebody who grew up fantasizing, in a strange way, about co-hosting a show with Connie Chung.
52:10 Speaker 02 Oh, we've done it.
52:12 Pablo Torre? I thank you for making a dream come true.
52:14 Speaker 02 Oh, come on, we've done it.
52:25 Pablo Torre? This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.
52:52 Speaker 00 Verizon knows that holiday math can be complicated.
52:54 Speaker 06 Okay, let's see. We got the four kids, four gifts each, six teacher gifts? Wait, oh, what did we get? And Sandy and the dogs. Oh, I can't forget the dogs.
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Next "America's Biggest Failure": Share & Election & Tell with Wyatt Cenac and Tim Miller Page updated November 7, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated