Connie Chung Revisits the Interview That Ended Her CBS News Career

Flashback is a feature series that revisits key moments in TV news history with the Newsers who were part of them.

With apologies late, great George Carlinthere really are eight words you can never say on television. Connie Chung learned that lesson the hard way 30 years ago, when a certain five-letter word uttered during a high-profile interview spelled the end of his CBS News career.

On January 5, 1995, the pioneer journalist sat down with Kathleen Gingrichmother of the former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrichfor a timely edition of his magazine Eye to Eye. The Georgia Republican had just led the GOP to a resounding midterm victory that reset Congress’ relationship with then-President. Bill Clintonand his antipathy towards POTUS and the former FLOTUS Hillary Clinton he was well known in Washington, DC circles…and, as it turned out, his own family.

Halfway through her interview with Kathleen Gingrich, Chung learned exactly what her son thought of the first lady. “I can’t say what he said about Hillary,” Gingrich initially said, at which point Chung invited him to “whisper” to me on camera. The 69-year-old leaned over and whispered – clearly enough for the audience to hear – “It’s ab****”.

That whisper opened the floodgates for what Chung came to call “B****gate,” which led to recriminations from the Gingrich family, as well as other politicians and journalists. It also directly contributed to his departure from CBS later that year after he was ousted as co-anchor of the CBS Evening News alongside him. Dan Rather.

“It was a nail in the coffin,” Chung he recently told TVNewser during a conversation on his best-selling autobiography, Connie: A memory.

Three decades later, he characterized the interview and the controversy that followed as a “crazy sequence of events,” where it became “a lightning rod” in a larger debate about how family members of prominent politicians should be covered by the media. To this day, however, Chung maintains that Kathleen Gingrich — who died in 2003 — knew exactly what she was doing when she decided to drop the “B” word on national television.

“He was happy to be the star and say what he knew and what he didn’t know,” says Chung. “I can see that’s where Newt Gingrich got his quirky feistiness from.”