Connie Chung started a generation of Asian American girls named Connie. She had no idea

NEW YORK (AP) — Some public figures are honored with buildings or monuments of the same name. Veteran presenter Connie Chung has a marijuana strain and hundreds of Asian American women as her heritage.

Chung contacted a fellow journalist five years ago, Connie Wang, whose Chinese immigrant parents had given her the chance, as a preschooler, to choose an American name. She thought of Connie, after a pretty woman she had seen on TV, and suggested a few random cartoon characters. Her parents chose wisely.

After graduating from college, Wang learned she belonged to a special sorority. There were a lot of Asian Connies around her, many of them given the name by parents who saw Chung as an intelligent, accomplished woman to whose career success their daughters could aspire.

Until Wang told her, Chung had no idea.

“I was stunned,” she said. “I’m not a tearful person, and I actually cried.”

Apparently, her career in television news had a bigger impact than she realized. Chung, now 78, tells the stories of her life in a new autobiography, 10 years in the making and available Tuesday, titled — of course — “Connie.”

She gives and gives names

Chung’s career spanned from the 1970s as a reporter for CBS News in Washington, to anchoring in Los Angeles and at NBC News, to an unsuccessful stint with Dan Rather at the CBS Evening News in the 1990s, to dodging the competition between Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer at ABC News.

She talks and, yes, names. The presidential candidate who hit on her. The actor who was into Asian women. The presenter (not Rather) who held a long-standing grudge against her.

Off the air for several years, she lives a comfortable retirement with her husband, television personality Maury Povich. Between her absence, the Rather episode, and stamping a bigger reputation as a celebrity journalist than she ever wanted, Chung is often overlooked.

Not because of Wang and the other Connies. Few Asian Americans had the name before Chung, and few since, but “from the late ’70s to the mid-’90s, that was Generation Connie,” she said. A common argument for diversity in the workplace is that young people can see themselves in prominent roles; it’s rare to come across such a tangible example of her influence.

Shortly after describing the phenomenon, Wang said she had personally heard from at least 100 people with similar characteristics, which is likely a small sampling of what is available.

“There was literally no one else like her,” Wang said. “She was very professional, tough, but also beautiful. What also attracted my mother was her style. She took great care of her appearance.”

She always had to prove something

Chung was the tenth child—the only one born in the United States—of Chinese parents whose arranged marriages were when they were 12 and 14 and who met five years later on their wedding day. Neither son survived infancy, so her father begged her to honor the family name when she began her career. Instead, it turned out to be Connie—shortened from Constance—that inspired her.

After graduating from college and spending two years in local news, Chung landed a job at CBS, in part because of the pressure he felt in the late 1960s and early 1970s that television was becoming less consistent with the world of white men.

“I always had to prove myself,” Chung recalled. “Every day was a test because I was a woman and because I was a minority, but more because I was a woman. There were no skirts in my business.”

Her diligence earned her respect, and her willingness to stay up practically all night to cover George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign resulted in a sensational election for his vice president. She had to prove herself to older men and avoid predators, once publicly rejecting a soggy suitor with a sly nod to the old adage that Chinese food doesn’t satisfy hunger for long: “You don’t want to go to bed with me,” she said. “You’ll just be horny an hour later.”

She believes young people need to hear the stories of sexism and racism she faced.

“We’ve come a long way, but what’s disturbing to me is that we haven’t really come that far,” she said. “Sexism still exists. Anti-Asian racism has shown its ugly face in the most depressing way. Looking back, it’s important to me that women and minorities know that things have changed, but not enough.”

“I collaborated a lot”

It is clear from her memoirs that her fondest memories were of her days dealing with serious matters, from the Watergate scandal to Nelson Rockefeller’s brief tenure as vice president.

Chung became a local news anchor in Los Angeles and, in the 1980s, at NBC News. Still, she said she was too often saddled with what were considered “women’s stories,” about early-career miniskirts, celebrity profiles and tabloid fodder, such as NBC’s “Scared Sexless,” about AIDS.

Too often, she says, she took jobs she didn’t really want to do. Her reputation suffered. She secretly agreed with some of the criticism, but it was hard when the influential critic Tom Shales called her “Connie Fun.”

“I never wanted to be called the b-word,” she said. “I never wanted to be called a diva. So I collaborated a lot. I think that’s a Chinese and female thing. I was a double dose of the mandatory, so it was very much my own doing, because I agreed to do the things that my superiors wanted me to do.”

She returned to CBS News, and when Dan Rather struggled with ratings as anchor of the “CBS Evening News” in 1993, she was named his co-anchor. It seemed like a career high, but Chung wrote that she had a premonition of things to come during her first meeting with Rather, when he said, “now you’re going to have to start reading the newspaper.”

Chung writes in Connie: “I wanted to believe I was chosen because I deserved the job. I must have been dreaming. They wanted me to put a bow around Dan Rather’s neck that would make him look friendly and cozy and normal. But instead I ended up in the noose.”

The partnership lasted two years before Chung was fired. She declined CBS’s offer of a face-saving role, instead throwing herself into raising Matthew, the infant she adopted with Povich.

Later, moving to ABC News, she found satisfying work on a few newer investigations, ones that didn’t involve her in the titanic struggle between Sawyer and Walters. She took a job as a prime-time anchor at CNN, but it turned out that it didn’t last long. Her television career was coming to an end.

She has another namesake

Chung recently learned about her other namesake strain of marijuana, Connie Chung, from her niece. Ever the journalist, she dug into the research and found a pack of five pre-rolled joints available online for $22.

When asked if Connie Chung had tried the Connie Chung brand, she politely declined, later admitting that she hadn’t smoked marijuana since college, effectively answering the question. But she was proud to read about the qualities of Chung’s herb.

“I’m easy to grow,” she said. “I make a beautiful flower, and one of my favorite things about it is that I don’t require a lot of attention. I find that very admirable, although I don’t think Maury would agree that I don’t require a lot of attention.”