Connie Chung talks legacy, feeling like she 'parachuted into a minefield' on '20/20'

While writing her memoir, Connie Chung discovered an unexpected legacy.

Even after a groundbreaking TV career − she was the second woman and first Asian to co-anchor a network evening newscast − she wasn't entirely convinced how successful she had been, or how much it had mattered. "I could never get my arms around declaring myself a success," she tells USA TODAY. She mimicked male colleagues she had seen puffing themselves up and ponderously declaring, "I am very impressive!"

"What makes them able to say that?" she asked. Even in her book, "Connie," out Tuesday from Grand Central, she worried how much credit she could claim.

Then an email arrived, out of the blue, from a young Asian American woman who shared her story about how she ended up sharing the name Connie.

Connie Wang, who sent the email, had chosen the name herself. At 3, after her family emigrated from China, her parents asked Xiaokang to choose an English name. The toddler proposed the names of two friendly faces she had seen on TV: Connie or Elmo.

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Only when she left Minnesota to attend college at the University of California, Berkeley, with its large Asian student population, did she encounter other Connie namesakes and realize there was "a sisterhood of Connies."

Immigrants from China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan and Vietnam over a quarter-century had named their daughters Connie, sometimes even adding the middle name "Chung," to set the aspiration that they would become as fearless and notable during their lives as she had been in hers.

"It took me three decades to fully appreciate the extent that Connie Chung has shaped my experience as a woman, an Asian American and a minority working in journalism," says Connie Wang, now 36 and a writer and editor on maternity leave. "And as I grew up and began charting my own path as a first-generation immigrant, I’ve never felt entirely alone; of course, Connie had done it first, done it so courageously, and done it with such style."

When Chung heard the tributes from Wang and the other "Connies," she was "flabbergasted."

So does she feel successful now? "Well, kind of," she says, laughing, at age 78 still not entirely comfortable with the brag.

'Speaks too softly'

The original Connie Chung was named by her four sisters, who thumbed through a movie magazine before settling on Constance Moore, an actress and singer with a long list of forgettable credits to her name.

Constance Yu-hwa Chung was the 10th of 10 children, the only one born in America, and so timid as a child that an elementary school teacher wrote disapprovingly on one grade card: "Speaks too softly."

She found her voice, and her calling, when she landed a part-time gofer job in the newsroom at WTTG-TV, the local Metromedia station in her hometown, Washington, D.C. Two years later, having abandoned her biology major at the University of Maryland, she was working at the CBS Washington Bureau. At 25, she was assigned to cover George McGovern's presidential campaign.

"Connie Chung, the pretty Chinese CBS correspondent," author Timothy Crouse called her in his classic "The Boys on the Bus" about that campaign. He described her as "bright and alert" and indefatigable. She was the only female reporter regularly on the bus, and the first Asian correspondent to hold such a prominent on-air role in network television.

Journalism "intoxicated" her, she said in an interview. "Once I decided that's what I wanted to do, I was driven, incredibly driven."

A photograph taken two years later, during President Richard Nixon's impeachment hearings in 1974, shows Chung in the middle of a sea of white male reporters, jockeying to talk to the congressmen on the dais. She has a Sony recorder slung over one arm and a look of weary determination on her face.

She soon dealt with the swaggering men around her by emulating them, by cultivating bravado and matching their vocabulary of swear words. She brushed off sexual harassment as if she were swatting away an annoying fly − when McGovern tried to kiss her in a dark hallway, for instance, and when Jimmy Carter pressed his leg against hers at a dinner. "And then he looked at me and smiled," she said.

"I was an aardvark," she says, the odd one, not like the others. "I was not only wearing a skirt, but I had this little 'lotus blossom' look." She theatrically cups her tilted face in her hands, with a geisha's small smile. "That made them ...look at me sideways. 'What do we do with her?'"

She faced sexual harassment and racial asides, recalling "I didn't know what they expected me to say in response, but I would just move on and ask my question."

In her personal life, she remained an obedient Chinese daughter.

In China, her parents' marriage had been arranged, the traditional way, not for love. Her father had worked in his family's jewelry store, then became a spy for the pre-Communist government of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, then maneuvered his way to the United States accompanying Chinese Air Force cadets being trained to fly. Her mother and their four surviving children had followed in a harrowing journey during wartime.

When the Communist government took over China, he worked as an accountant for a U.N. agency and a government agency until he suffered a heart attack and retired.

"My four older sisters had gone off and gotten married, and they were doing things the American way," she says. "I did it the Chinese way." She became the breadwinner responsible for supporting her parents, a role she would fill for the rest of their lives, including after she married talk show host Maury Povich when she was 38.

"I had a double dose of dutiful," she says. "Not only a woman, but Chinese."

Walter Cronkite's seat, or at least half of it

In prominent jobs at the CBS affiliate in Los Angeles, at NBC News and then back at CBS, Chung became known as a confident anchor and a skillful interviewer. She landed the first and only national TV interview of the captain of the Exxon Valdez after the ship was involved in an environmental catastrophe and the first interview with basketball superstar Magic Johnson after he announced he was HIV positive.

In 1993, she got the job of her dreams: Walter Cronkite's chair, or at least half of it, on the "CBS Evening News."

"I really thought, 'I've reached the top of the mountain,'" she says. She had grown up sitting with her parents as Cronkite broadcast the news each night. "Walter was my idol. I wanted to be Walter Cronkite, and I got to be half of Walter Cronkite," as the co-anchor, if not the anchor. "It was exhilarating."

At the time, the only woman who had co-anchored the evening news was Barbara Walters for ABC, and it had been 15 years since she had been eased out of that job after two years of friction with partner Harry Reasoner.

This time, like then, the other anchor was less than welcoming.

Dan Rather was "reluctant" to share the anchor post with anyone, Chung says. "My guess is that even if they put a dog, a cat or a plant" as his co-anchor, "it wouldn't have made any difference. I just happened to be the recipient of, uh, his fertilizer that was being sprayed all over me."

At one point, Rather invited her out for coffee and instructed her to stay in the studio. "I'll cover the stories out there in the field, and you read the teleprompter," he told her. She was too taken aback to respond. When she informed the president of CBS News, he sided with Rather.

With the benefit of hindsight, she wonders why she didn't push back harder and more often. She wished she had insisted CBS back her up when her interview with House Speaker Newt Gingrich's mother caused a kerfuffle. "I think that was one of the biggest mistakes I made in my career," she says. "I was still the dutiful employee."

After two years on the air, she was unceremoniously fired from "CBS Evening News."

That was on a Thursday. On Saturday, she and Povich got a call that the adoption they had been trying to arrange for two years had finally come through. Their son, Matthew, would be born shortly, and her life would take another turn. "When I look back, I think to myself, I was very lucky to have two men in my life, M and M, Maury and Matthew," she says. "They loved me and I love them back, and I don't think a job can love you back the way Maury and Matthew can."

Sisterhood is powerful? Not always

But she wasn't ready to retire. Two years later, she joined ABC News as co-anchor and correspondent of the prime-time news magazine "20/20," joining colleagues Diane Sawyer and Walters.

"I thought that the women would fight the men; we would be quite the triumvirate," she says. "But Diane and Barbara didn't see it that way. They were going at it, on their own, against each other. And I thought, 'What was I thinking?' I had no idea. I was really stupid." She had "parachuted into a minefield." The rivalry was fierce, the workplace toxic.

For the record, her sympathies in that battle were with Walters. "Barbara deserved her diva-dom," she says. "If Barbara wanted something, she should have it because she worked hard and she literally paved our way." In her book, she put it this way: "The first one through the door is wounded with the heaviest gunfire."

Which is, of course, what some Asian women say about Chung.