Connie Chung looks back on sexist remarks during her career: 'I'm not a lollipop'

Connie Chung looks back on sexist remarks during her career: 'I'm not a lollipop'

"Can you please treat me like the other male reporters?"

Broadcast journalism icon Connie Chung, who broke barriers as the first woman and person of Asian descent to anchor a major nightly American news program, looked back on the sexism she faced during the early days on the job.

In an upcoming CBS Sunday Morning interview with Jane Pauley set to air this weekend, Chung, 78, revisits a moment with John Mitchell, then attorney general under Richard Nixon's presidential administration, on Capitol Hill for an interview circa 1974, where he remarks to a young Chung that she's looking "prettier than ever."

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"John Mitchell seems to know who Connie is," says Pauley after rolling an archival clip of the encounter.

"Oof," says an exasperated Chung. "I remember that, Jane. He looks at me and says, 'You look so pretty.' And I'm thinking to myself, 'What?' I'm not a lollipop. I'm not an ice cream cone. Can you please treat me like the other male reporters?"

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The veteran journalist sits down with Pauley on Sunday's broadcast to talk about the obstacles she faced as a young reporter in male-dominated broadcast news, speaking also on the racism she experienced. She's also gearing up for the release of her upcoming memoir Connie (out Sept. 17), that will tell all about her four-decade career.

An excerpt published by CBS News ahead of her sit-down touched more on her encounter with Mitchell and the men in politics and the government, whom she writes would "size me up from head to toe and greet me with a look as if" she were a "little China doll."

<p>Daniel Zuchnik/Getty </p> Connie Chung

Daniel Zuchnik/Getty

Connie Chung

"Did he expect me to smile and thank him?" Chung writes of Mitchell. "I was there to do my job and proceeded with my questions. Same with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. As I approached him with my microphone in hand, he'd flirt. There was little I could do or say to avoid those creepy old men."

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Speaking with Harvard Business Review in an interview published this month, Chung said she was "determined to succeed" in a field predominantly made up of white men. "I couldn’t act quite as entitled as they did, but I mustered the same confidence that I thought I needed as a journalist to push my way to the front," she said. "It was a tricky line to walk, making sure I was never called the B-word."

"But I had a big sense of humor, and I talked like a sailor, and the men really didn’t know what to do with that, because here I was, this delicate little flower, who spoke just like they did," Chung added. "I think they were really taken aback that I had adopted their persona. It was a time when sexism and racism were rampant, but I found a way to get them before they could get me."

For more from Chung, tune into her interview with Pauley on Sunday.

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