Connie Chung
speaker
351 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 4 Dec
Connie Chung’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
Oh, no. Mari is very secure in who he is. It's the biggest thing that I admire about my husband. He knows he is this very, very intelligent person, and he has... He's had a storied career as a journalist for many, many years. Then he hit upon the current type of talk show. When he was doing a talk show in Washington, D.C., he was interviewing authors and politicians.
I mean, every author from Gore Vidal to Tom Wolfe to Maya Angelou. And it was a classic old talk show. And he did cooking segments with Julia Child. And he did, during Watergate, he was in the thick of it. You know, he covered Kennedy's funeral, JFK's funeral, covered Martin Luther King's assassination. So he's an old-fashioned journalist. Then he hits upon the talk show circuit.
And one of his producers comes up with the idea of the paternity of Every Child in America. Suddenly, he has six and a half million Facebook followers and a million Instagram followers, and he's become a walking meme. And it's just a big kick for him.
He can wax poetic about what he actually accomplishes by determining the paternity of children and fathers resume paying for their children instead of denying their existence. So it's a funny... He doesn't care what critics say. And I always care. So we have completely different views.
No. He talked me off the ledge many times. When I came home and I said to him, do you know what so-and-so said to me today? And he would Say, don't think about it. Don't take him seriously. Take your work seriously. Don't take yourself seriously. Don't take the critics seriously. Let's have dinner. And I would seriously calm down.
Well, the problem was that the men could not be pushed into that direction. At CBS News, Dan Rather, who is my co-anchor, wouldn't touch it. At 60 Minutes, it was all men at the time, and they wouldn't touch it. They wanted nothing to do with O.J. Simpson. And frankly, I didn't either.
But the management would come to me and say, Barbara Walters is getting X, Diane Sawyer is getting Y, and Katie Cork is getting Z. You have to do this for the team. I said, I don't want to. I don't see the value in it. It's tabloid. I don't know. You know, Tanya, I have a lot of regrets, but that was one of the biggest ones of being the good girl.
Or being told what to do, resisting, but never being able to put my foot down and say, I am not doing it. Go find somebody else.
I don't know. I really don't know. I think they just knew I would acquiesce. I wish I had pushed them and put my foot down to take a stand.
You've known for about a month now that you test positive for HIV. How are you handling it? I mean, I get the feeling, see, you put the game face on for me.
And that you really have some feelings that are down deep in here. that you don't really want to share with me?
Really?
You're so right, Tanya. The reason why I wanted to get it was because HIV, AIDS was at the... It was a front-burner story. And when Magic sacrificed himself and his reputation, his career, everything came out, he was such a gem. I used to... Kind of no magic, because I did the news in Los Angeles.
And when he came on live with the sports reporter at the time, he would always say with his big, beautiful smile, say hi to Connie. You know, his smile is infectious. And he actually asked me to go have... some soul food with him and his very tall friends. And we went to Boris's Snack and Chat, and it was the most incredible gravy-covered fried chicken I had ever had in my life.
And I wolfed it down. At that time, I was young, and I could eat anything I wanted, and it didn't show up in bad places. Now there's a festival going on below my waist. They said, where the heck did that come from? But I thought to myself, I could get that interview because I know him and I'm kind of his friend.
And then when I called some other people in L.A., they all said, ah, magic's my friend. I'll be able to get that interview. And I thought, uh-oh.
I flew to L.A., went straight to his agent's office, and I squatted. I actually became a squatter. I sat outside his office. His face... And assistant said, you know, he's not going to do, the agent is not going to talk to you. And Magic is not going to do the interview. And I said, but I'm his friend. And she said, yeah, everybody's his friend.
So I sat down and I said, I'm not leaving until he leaves to go home. So I squatted. And he had only one door to get out. He finally agreed to pass you. Yeah. And somehow he talked to Magic and Magic said, okay. I was just so happy because it was a big, a big interview. And Magic was too kind.
On the surface, it was very superficially normal-ish. I mean, we seemed as if we were both professional and doing our jobs. But it was pretty clear to me that he didn't want me there. I don't blame him totally because he had... owned Walter Cronkite's chair for many years and had to move over a few inches to make room for me.
I became the first co-anchor at CBS and he really, I think they must have held a gun to his head because I can't imagine that he would have done it voluntarily. So there I was and I do believe that had I been another man, had I been an animal, had I been a plant. He would not have wanted me to share. He would not have wanted anyone to share that seat with him. It was not his cup of tea.
Showing 321–340 of 351 · page 17 of 18
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