TRANSCRIPT Bullseye with Jesse Thorn: Connie Chung

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Transition: Gentle, trilling music with a steady drumbeat plays under the dialogue.

Promo: Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.

Music: “Huddle Formation” from the album Thunder, Lightning, Strike by The Go! Team—a fast, upbeat, peppy song. Music plays as Jesse speaks, then fades out.

Jesse Thorn: It’s Bullseye. I’m Jesse Thorn. So, there’s an art to doing a really good sit-down TV interview. Now, I’m not talking about most of the interviews that you see on the news these days. Those kind of like talk show things, talking heads in boxes yapping about the NFL or whatever the hottest stocks are. Those are fine. Don’t get me wrong.

I’m talking about two people in a room together, soft lighting, comfy chairs, B-roll of the reporter and guest strolling somewhere, maybe looking at family pictures. Usually a poignant moment where the guest cries, that kind of thing. And when it comes to that kind of thing, Connie Chung—my guest—is one of the best ever. A congressman suspected of murder; an NBA all-star with HIV; presidential candidates. She’d handle them all with the perfect mix of warmth and tenacity.

Chung also anchored. She was the first Asian American to host a major network news show, only the second woman ever to do so. It’s an extraordinary career, and the only thing that might top it is the road that she took to get to where she is. That’s the story contained in Connie: A Memoir. She writes about her time as a local newscaster here in Los Angeles, her childhood in and around Washington, DC, her family’s perilous journey to the US from China, and about her biggest interviews. And now, me, interviewing Connie Chung. Let’s get into it.

Transition: Upbeat synth with a syncopated beat.

Jesse Thorn: Connie Chung, welcome to Bullseye. I’m so happy to have you on the show.

Connie Chung: Well, thank you. Thank you so much. It’s an honor for me to be on your program. I mean, seriously.

Jesse Thorn: I think you’re the first standing guest we’ve ever had on our show.

(They laugh.)

Connie Chung: May I explain?

Jesse Thorn: Yeah, sure.

Connie Chung: I have a bad back. I’ve been flying. You know, sitting on planes, sitting in cars, sitting at interviews. And I realized it was just killing my back. So, that’s why I asked you if you would mind if I could stand. And you know what? They have these desks here in New York that move up and down. And so, the whole console goes up, and it comes down. Pretty snazzy!

Jesse Thorn: I understand that you mean at the NPR studios in New York where you are. It does sound like an “everything’s up to date in Kansas City” type situation. We’re like in Los Angeles; we don’t have standing desks yet.

(Connie giggles.)

We just found out about high end cupcakes.

Connie Chung: Oh my gosh. Very funny.

Jesse Thorn: You’re originally from Washington DC. And I know, because my mom is from Washington DC and is almost exactly the same age as you, Washington DC. was a very different place when you lived there than it is now. Among other things, there is a certain kind of southerness to Washington DC that I think people don’t necessarily appreciate who are from outside of that. What was your experience of that as a kid? I know that you lived in Maryland and the Maryland end of Washington, DC when you were a kid.

Connie Chung: But I was born in Washington, and we lived in Northwest Washington for many years until I was—before I went to junior high school. So, Washington is near and dear to my heart. And it was a very copacetic period. It was after—it was the Eisenhower years, and it was a quiet, sort of relaxed city with very little agita as there is now. (Chuckles.)

It was kind of trying for us because we were Chinese. My parents came in 1945, and I was the only one born in the United States, in 1946. And it was actually difficult to rent a home, because there were no homes to be rented to Chinese people. And we were banned, actually, from going to certain amusement parks, certain beaches, and parks. So, we weren’t especially welcome. But my father had a lot of ingenuity.

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And he did get us a house to rent in—actually—Northwest Washington. And then another one later on, also in Northwest Washington, near all the television stations.

Jesse Thorn: I mean, one of the things that I was thinking about as I was reading about your dad talking a landlord into renting a house to your family in what had been an all-White neighborhood—then particularly, and still today, Washington DC is kind of a bifurcated town. It’s like one of the most African American cities in America. But it’s also kind of run by a—not necessarily in local government, but financially by a kind of like colonialist, swath of lawyers and people that work in government who kind of roll through. What I found myself wondering was like how did your experience as a first-generation immigrant fit into those two worlds?

Connie Chung: It’s actually worse than that. Washington has no home rule, as we put it. It is ruled by Congress. There is no elected representative. It’s a nonvoting member of Congress who sits from Washington, DC. And there are no senators, no congressman. The House District Committee actually runs the city. So, the mayor, everyone in district government is at the mercy of Congress, which is outrageous. And they have long sought home rule, as it’s called, to no avail.

So, over the years, in covering local news in Washington, it was very frustrating. Because Congress was making decisions on behalf of the citizens in Washington. And as you well know, as you were saying, it’s a very bifurcated city. And the fact is that a lot of the Blacks in the city were being ruled totally by a very predominantly White Congress.

Jesse Thorn: What was it like for you? I mean, it was a bifurcated city, but it was a trifurcated city in that there were African Americans, White people, and Connie Chung’s immediate family.

Connie Chung: You know, I was a little bit isolated from the city. Because I grew up in a very quiet Chinese home in which I was very shy, and I never went out. So, my circle was primarily my family. My four older sisters who were quite dominating; they were bossy, and I could hardly get a word in edgewise. And I pretty much stayed home.

My mother would try to get me to go across the street and play with the neighbor, but I just wouldn’t go. I was extremely shy, and it wasn’t until I went to school—I went to kindergarten, and I met the kids at school. And they were quite an international group. We lived in an area where there were several minority—diverse minorities.

Jesse Thorn: Did your parents try and build a Chinese or Chinese American world around your family at all?

Connie Chung: Yes, yes. I grew up very—my parents used to give Chinese parties, I used to call them. Because they were people from their hometowns. My mother was born in Nanjing, which is outside of Shanghai. And my father was born in Suzhou, which is also outside of Shanghai. And that particular Shanghai dialect is very different. It’s a different type of Mandarin.

So, those people sort of stuck together. It was different from the people who spoke very pure Mandarin, from Beijing. And it was very different from Cantonese, which was spoken by people in Chinatown. And so, there was—I grew up in a very cloistered home, in which my parents gave so-called Chinese parties to try and make sure that my three oldest sisters, at least, married Chinese men. And they did.

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Jesse Thorn: And not even just Chinese men, but as you write in the book, no Cantonese guys.

Connie Chung: Well, that was my mother’s rule. And someone (chuckles) had poisoned her mind into believing that Cantonese people, particularly those in Chinatown would open restaurants and laundries, and that they were not worthy of her daughters. So, my mother was vehemently against anyone dating a Cantonese person.

Lo and behold, if I may tell the story, my oldest sister was dating a Cantonese fellow. And she assured my mother, “He’s not going to open a restaurant or a laundry. He’s a biochemist at the National Bureau of Standards.” Which is a government agency. So, for a good long while, I would say—I asked my nieces, and it’s in the book, but I can’t remember right now. But so, for like 15 years or maybe at least 10 years, he worked as a biochemist. And one day, (holding back laughter) he and my sister moved to Florida and opened a restaurant.

Jesse Thorn: We gotta go for a minute. When we come back, even more with Connie Chung. It’s Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR.

Transition: Chiming synth with a syncopated beat.

Jesse Thorn: It’s Bullseye. I’m Jesse Thorn. My guest is television newscaster Connie Chung. Her new memoir, Connie, is out now.

So, one of the things that you dedicate basically a chapter to in your book is your family’s emigration story from China. Your dad was a spy, as well as—eventually—an Air Force officer, although he did not know how to fly an airplane. And he engineered an exit for your family that was, you know, extraordinarily complex and, like a lot of immigration stories, involved just incredible stories of resourcefulness and stuff. And that was all stuff that had happened with everyone else in your family except for you. You were the member of the family who was born in the United States shortly after the family got to Washington, DC.

So, what was it like to live with this family that had been through that extraordinary achievement—and I’m sure like set of extraordinary traumas and unbelievable experience—and for you to be the baby who…?

Connie Chung: Got a free ride.

(They chuckle.)

Jesse Thorn: Yeah, exactly.

Connie Chung: Uh-huh. Well, it created a peculiar dynamic. That’s such an interesting question, because it did create a dynamic in which they were born in China. Many of them were pretty—they were older and were pretty much raised in China, and they went through this harrowing escape. They were very happy to be in the United States and determined to become very Americanized.

I, on the other hand, wanted to be a member of the family. So, since I was born in the United States, I would kind of pretend that I was born in China too. Because they would call me a name that I thought was derogatory, but it isn’t. It just meant that I was born not in China. And it was peculiar, because I wanted to be one of them, and they actually were angling to be more American. So, we had a really—a combo platter of upbringing. Although we would listen to Frank Sinatra and Doris Day and rock and roll—everything from Elvis to Fats Domino—we also went to Chinese opera that was staged somewhere in some theater, because my father and mother loved Chinese opera.

And as much as we loved my mother’s Chinese food, our neighbor—an American woman—taught my mother and my older sister just how to make a simple, you know, tuna fish sandwich, and peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and spaghetti and meatballs, and meatloaf, and good old American dishes—fried chicken, the whole nine yards.

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I, in particular, was raised very Chinese, but also very American. I was totally Americanized, yet I had ingrained in me a deep Chinese upbringing, in which I think I think like a Chinese person. And people have asked me, “What do you mean by that?” And I—it’s hard to describe. I just kind of have this take that is very Chinese.

Jesse Thorn: Your parents had ten children together, five of whom died in infancy. And your mother, when she was preparing to make the trip to the United States with your siblings had to have an abortion in India, a way-stop along the way, because otherwise she wouldn’t have been able—she wouldn’t have been allowed on a boat with a baby. To what extent did you know or hear about those things when you were a kid, or just live with what your mom had been through, as a young woman and bringing your family to the state?

Connie Chung: I knew that of the five infants who died, three were boys. And in China, that’s just not acceptable. Boys are coveted; girls are thrown in a bag with some rocks and thrown in the river. They’re just not wanted in a Chinese family. So, when the three boys died, it was traumatic for not only the grandparents but for my parents.

And one thing that gave me a good indication, which I always knew about, was that one of my sisters was dressed as a boy until she went to school. And it had a profound effect on her, I think. And I think everybody—we didn’t talk about it, and she kind of joked about it. But it was traumatic, because it was not what she chose.

Then, when my mother and father made their journey to the United States, my father went first, as you said—I mean, as you noted—that my mother had to stay in Bombay, India, which is now Mumbai, and with my four sisters. And when she discovered that she didn’t have—she could not bring a baby on board any ship, she made the huge decision to get an abortion. How she did it, I don’t know. This is something that I had known and had been part of the family lore for a long time, but it was never clear to me that she—whether it was a miscarriage or an abortion. So, I finally asked my second oldest sister, Charlotte, when I was writing this book to do an interview with me.

We sat down in the kitchen, just the two of us, in her home. And I asked her, “Tell me the truth, please.”

Because she had a steel trap memory, she said, “It was an abortion.”

And I was—I suspected it. I think other sisters expected it, but we didn’t—I never got confirmation until I began writing the book.

Jesse Thorn: You must have imagined what it was like for your mom, who didn’t speak Hindi—or for that matter, English—and was essentially alone with your siblings in a foreign city, thousands and thousands of miles from her home.

Connie Chung: Exactly. She was an incredible woman. I don’t think she ever got her due. She was strong. She was bold. I can’t imagine what she went through. She knew what she wanted to do, what she had to do. Because she was making a decision about where she wanted her family to grow up. He never talked about it to us, to the children. And my father never talked about it. But the most tragic thing is that it was a boy. That coveted boy.

Jesse Thorn: You know, I got the impression from your book that because you were the youngest and most American, because your older sisters married as young women, and you didn’t as a young woman—

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—that you kind of bore some of that son’s responsibility in your family and to your parents.

Connie Chung: Yes. Yes. My father actually wrote me a letter, and he had a propensity for writing letters to all of us with—do you remember, carbon paper? (Laughs.)

Jesse Thorn: Only barely, Connie. I hate to date myself here, but yes. Just barely. I got carbon paper in the back of my mind. Also, dittos. I also vaguely remember dittos.

Connie Chung: Yes! Oh my gosh, yes. So, he would write letters, and he’d have a pink copy and a blue copy and a yellow copy on this tissue-thin paper. And one of his letters said—I was already in the news business. And he said, “Maybe you could become—maybe you can make the Chung name—carry it on, so that people would know how we came to the United States.” And basically, he assigned me a mission to be the son that my parents never had.

Remarkably, I think I really did take that seriously, to be the son they didn’t have. I think, had the other daughters lived in a different era—they were such strong women, they could have become the son that my parents never had. But what doubled down for me on being the son my parents never had was that I believed in filial piety very strongly. The Chinese part of me was so omnipresent that I felt I owed it to them, because they had struggled to get to the United States, so ingeniously came.

And also, because when my father had a minor heart attack, I was working, and he retired. I became the breadwinner for the family. I think that happens a lot in families, that one child becomes the go-to person, the one who helps the parents through their old age.

Jesse Thorn: Connie, I know that you describe yourself as having been shy as a kid. There is a mention—I think it was in the book—of a report card you got from an elementary school teacher who said you spoke too softly. When I read the portion of your book that sort of starts with you in college, every story is about you asserting yourself.

(They laugh.)

So, I wanted to know when you flipped that switch. I mean, I don’t know—like, for example, you kind of suggest that you couldn’t get into the University of Maryland where you went to school now, but I don’t know if it’s false modesty. Like, I don’t know if you were a good or a bad student, but obviously at some point you decided to be on it.

Connie Chung: You mean to ascend the mountain?

Jesse Thorn: Yeah, just TCB, you know what I mean?

Connie Chung: (Laughs.) It was actually during school that I—I enjoyed running for a student government or being a part of student government. I mean, it started small with president of the homeroom and then trying to get on the legislature in high school or a class office. You know, just like one of the class officers, although I never wanted to be secretary or treasurer. And I thought it would be highly unlikely if I could be president. So, I was vice president of the junior class.

There was something about it that—I still, Jesse, wasn’t one of those who would raise my hand all the time. Just sometimes. So, it took me a long time in elementary school to sort of gain enough confidence to not try and crawl into the ink hole in the desk. I just—it wasn’t until a few years went by in elementary school. Also, my mother very much coddled me. She always walked me to school when everyone else could walk to school on their own. And I tried to convince her to, you know, stay back a block. (Laughs.) Which is—you know, how kids get so embarrassed when their parents are overdoing it.

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And here I was; I was a helicopter mom to my son. And I get it. I did not want to actually repeat what my mother did.

Jesse Thorn: You went through a few different ideas of what you were going to do with your life when you were in college, and you ended up with a congressional internship, and there’s just this little moment, of which there are many in the book—just a sentence where you just mention that the congressman who you ended up working for had given you his card in the halls of Congress.

(Connie confirms with a chuckle.)

Given you and your friend his card. And you just say, in passing, “Actually, we kind of thought it was creepy.” Have you ever thought about like the number of times that something happened to you that was creepy and thought, “Gosh, I don’t know how I managed to not let any of those divert me”? You know what I mean? (Chuckles.)

Connie Chung: Yes, yes! The creepy old men were part of the climate of the time. In other words, all during the ‘60s and ‘70s, sort of this sexist behavior—which I never called it sexist behavior until I rolled back the videotape and relived it in my book. So, there I was saying to myself—both my girlfriend and I, who was my best girlfriend from junior high school—looked at each other and, you know, we know creepy when we see creepy. But I just kept it, because I thought, you know, I don’t know what I want to do when I go to college—I mean, in college, what I want to major in. Maybe I’ll just keep this and see if I want to pursue something in the area of Capitol Hill or whatever.

But then there were so many more creepy old men on Capitol Hill later when I became a reporter that they just—they reared their ugly heads many times. And it registered in my head, but not until I actually sat down and wrote my book—I was able to sort of cluster them and report to the reader exactly what I had experienced with each of those creepies, creeps.

It’s the way it was. It’s just the way it was. And I just didn’t take it seriously or recoil. It was just the way all the women back then traveled through their lives. And I have received so many emails and comments from women in the news business around the time that I was, and they all said, “Been there. Understand. I understand.”

Jesse Thorn: The news business is all about scoops and gets. At least, that’s my understanding from my position over here in Los Angeles as a pseudo-journalist.

(Connie giggles.)

And you, early in your career, were being assigned non-news stuff. How did you make the turn from an hour-long documentary about miniskirts versus midi-skirts to staking out the offices of congresspeople and stuff?

Connie Chung: It was really thanks to the Washington Bureau Chief of CBS Evening News. There I was working in the most coveted bureau of CBS News, reporting stories for the one and only Walter Cronkite.

Jesse Thorn: And you had gotten this job, by the way, first by getting your first news job by replacing yourself as secretary by going across the street to get a lady you knew out of the bank, a bank teller you knew, to come and replace you, so that your boss would have no excuses as to why he couldn’t give you a news job. Then getting that CBS news job by barging into a restaurant as a reporter to do a story about the restaurant that just so happened—

Connie Chung: On sanitary conditions.

Jesse Thorn: Yeah, that there was a CBS News executive sitting in that restaurant who gave you his card, right?

(Connie confirms with a chuckle.)

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So, like you had gotten to that point by pushing, by making it happen. But at the same time, you get there, and you’re still—you know. The girl.

Connie Chung: Uh-huh. I was pigeonholed with female stories. And it’s basically what would appear in the newspapers as “women’s page” stories. And I didn’t—I couldn’t say no the way the men could. When the assignment editor said, “I want you to go cover First Lady Pat Nixon, wife of President Nixon.” She was known as Plastic Pat, because she would never—she was just the dutiful, long-suffering political wife. Which she was. And she would not dare say anything that would be misconstrued.

The men, the male correspondents—of which they were all male correspondents at the CBS News Bureau; a great bench for Walter Cronkite, but nonetheless star reporters—they would say no when the assignment editor would say, “We have to have you do” what was called protective coverage in case anything happens, just to have cameras rolling. And then you, the reporter, would at least write it down.

And the men—I remember distinctly that Ed Bradley would just look at the assignment editor and say, “No” in a loud, definitive voice.

The assignment editor would drag me out (laughing) and say, “You’re going to do this.” And I had a hard time saying no. But it had a lot to do with the male authority. And I always say that I was a double dose of dutiful. Not only because I was a woman and trying to make it and be cooperative and not be called the B word, but I was also Chinese. And I always believed that if a higher authority—meaning a boss, which happened to be all men during my era—told me to do something, I felt I had to do it.

Jesse Thorn: We’ll wrap up with Connie Chung after a quick break. Stay with us. It’s Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR.

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(Music fades out.)

 

Transition: Thumpy rock music.

Jesse Thorn: Welcome back to Bullseye. I’m Jesse Thorn. I’m talking with Connie Chung. She is, of course, an Emmy-winning newscaster and interviewer. She hosted the CBS Evening News, the NBC Nightly News, 2020, Good Morning America, and Connie Chung Tonight. She writes about her life and career in her new book, Connie: A Memoir. Let’s get back into our conversation.

When you were fired from the CBS Evening News co-anchoring job and spent a number of years mostly being a parent, did you miss gets and scoops?

Connie Chung: I didn’t miss the gets and the scoops, but I missed just plain old reporting. It’s fun, actually, to be a reporter—to find out what the truth is and to find both sides of the story and come back and put it together quickly for an accurate report on—Walter Cronkite’s news was certainly the best place to air it. I missed that. I would watch television, and I’d see a story, and I thought, “Ah, wish I had covered that.”

But at the same time, I was soured a lot by my experience at CBS News and those two years in which I had my dream job and then suddenly lost it. But I believe that it was meant to be. It was serendipity that just two days later we got a call from our adoption lawyer that our adoption, which we had been working on for more than two years, was coming through.

[00:35:00]

And I really did believe that some higher authority had blessed me with our son, who was less than a day old when he was in my arms. And Maury and I marveled at the fact that he was only a few hours old. It was a gift! Honestly, I thought I left my life behind on the anchor desk.

And here’s another Chinese thing, Jesse. I thought I had clearly lost face, so I was happy to just stay home. Really happy.

Jesse Thorn: Connie, writing for the air is really different from writing for the page. Even more than that, writing memoir is really different from writing news. Like, when you’re on TV—especially, you know, you hosted morning TV—but even as an anchor, you have to be yourself. But you also are… you’re there to convey the story. And you’re supposed to guard pretty carefully against revealing too much of yourself.

What was the hardest part of spending years writing about yourself? Was the revelation like, you know, water behind a cracking dam? Or you know, did you have to hit the dam with a sledgehammer?

Connie Chung: (Chuckles.) It was excruciating. First of all, I had no idea that I had to use past-perfect tense. Which is I “had gone”, “had seen”, “had been”. Because we would never say that in news, because it’s too wordy. Just say I went to the store. It’s declarative sentences, very much Hemingway. You know, subject, verb, object.

Jesse Thorn: But like, Connie, even more than that, you covered George McGovern’s presidential campaign. And as you write in the book, at one point he tried to kiss you. And you had to decide as a reporter whether you were the story there. I’m sure, given the times and circumstances, it was a sort of prescribed decision. But like, even if something happened with you in a story, you had to keep the you out of it. So, how did you get to the point where you could talk about what it meant to you when these things happened? Like, as a human being.

Connie Chung: Yes. It was extremely difficult. Because my first draft, I submitted to my editor, and she said, “You’re just giving me the facts.”

And I said, “But that’s what I do.”

And she said, “No, you can’t do that. This is a memoir. You have to tell how you feel.”

And I thought, oh, I can’t do that. I said, “I never would have written—” I mean, I thought to myself—I told my husband, “I had no idea. How stupid am I that I didn’t—I thought I could just report what happened and not express any reaction on my part.”

So, that was horrific for me. I really felt as if I were performing dentistry on myself. I had to eke out these feelings. One of the things was that the editor told me that I needed to basically have a beginning, middle, and end for each chapter. So, then I realized that certain things became thematic for each chapter.

And a friend of mine who had written a book, when I—early on, I found it so daunting, because it covered all of my 78 years. And I thought how can I—? I can’t embark on this. I know I want to, but I can’t do it. She told me to break it up in chapters and climb that mountain a little at a time.

So, it was quite a process, honestly. It started about a decade ago. And I really couldn’t bear down on it until I got a publisher and got a deadline. You know, once reporters are faced with a deadline, then they hustle. And so, that’s what I did. I finally put my nose to the grindstone and tried to spit it out. It was really hard.

Jesse Thorn: It’s not just describing the way that you felt.

[00:40:00]

But I kind of get the impression it’s maybe engaging with the way that you felt, especially about your career. That had been such a headlong dash where you had so often had to kind of deflect that stuff, because it could slow you down.

Connie Chung: Well, it my nephew asked me, “Was it cathartic? Was the whole process cathartic?”

And in the book, I described that I looked up the word catharsis, because I wasn’t sure exactly what it meant. And the original definition was a medical one, and I found it to be so appropriate. Because as I re-experienced the bad times, I really felt as if I were having a great time expunging myself of this event and the incidents that led to bad times, to sad times. And I think, all in all, it was a difficult journey writing this book. I knew that there was some awful things that—I mean, career lows. And I didn’t know how to talk about them, how to lay them out.

So, I asked my husband, who is a voracious reader, “What memoir was your favorite?” And he said Personal History by Katharine Graham, who was a lone female publisher at the time of the Washington Post. She was the publisher during the tumultuous days of Watergate, the Pentagon Papers. And she had some personal tragedy as well. But what I found was that she was never really throwing someone under the bus and backing it up again and rolling back over them. She was never “woe is me,” she was never crying in her soup. She was just marching forward. And I found that by the end of the book, towards the end of the book, I was rooting for her.

And that’s the kind of book I wanted to create, one in which I never cried or whined or waved some kind of feminist flag. Because back in the day when I was working, we didn’t—we couldn’t be so-called feminists. We just—we had to just suck everything up and not even know Gloria Steinem’s name. So, what I’m saying is that we—I found this to be the hardest thing I’ve ever done, writing a book about myself.

And you are right that it’s one thing to write a book about someone else, but about oneself… I also didn’t want to create a revisionist history. So, I aimed to be absolutely accurate.

Jesse Thorn: Were there times when you were, let’s say, editing the book that you looked at your description of something that you did and thought, “Eh, that’s pretty badass”?

Connie Chung: (Laughs.) Yeah, yes. Yeah, I was a badass.

(Jesse laughs.)

Very sassy.

Jesse Thorn: Connie, I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for talking to me. And I really enjoyed your book.

Connie Chung: (Gasps.) Are we done?

Jesse Thorn: Yeah, we put in an hour and a quarter of you standing there.

Connie Chung: (Laughs.) Oh, thank you for taking the time to have me on.

Jesse Thorn: Connie Chung. Her new book, as we said, is Connie: A Memoir. Pick it up from your local bookstore or at Bookshop.org.

Transition: Funky, relaxed synth.

Jesse Thorn: That’s the end of another episode of Bullseye. Bullseye is created in the homes of me and the staff of Maximum Fun, as well as at Maximum Fun HQ—overlooking beautiful MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, California, where we are finally enjoying some almost autumnal weather. Or at least some not-summer weather.

Our show is produced by speaking into microphones. Our senior producer is Kevin Ferguson. Our producers are Jesus Ambrosio and Richard Robey. Our production fellow at Maximum Fun is Daniel Huecias. Our video editor is Daniel Speer. We get booking help from Mara Davis. Our interstitial music comes from our pal Dan Wally, also known as DJW. You can find his music, including the music that he has made for Bullseye, at DJWSounds.bandcamp.com.

[00:45:00]

Our theme music was written and recorded by The Go! Team. It’s called “Huddle Formation”. Thanks to The Go! Team, and thanks to their label, Memphis Industries.

You can follow Bullseye on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, where you will find video from just about all of our interviews—including the ones that you heard this week. So, go watch and share them with your friends, smash those like and subscribe buttons. You know how it works.

I think that’s about it. Just remember, all great radio hosts have a signature signoff.

Promo: Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.

(Music fades out.)

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