The News Sorority

by Sheila Weller

  Connie Chung, the twenty-five-year-old American-raised daughter of a Chinese diplomat, was a young local Washington, D.C., TV reporter. One day she burst into the restaurant—Provençal—that happened to be the CBS honchos’ favorite lunch hangout, and aggressively questioned its owner and patrons about the unsanitary conditions that had earned the restaurant a health code violation. Impressed by her ballsiness, Bill Small gave her his card. “Connie called twenty minutes after I got back to the office. I hired her, and she became one of the most terrific reporters we’ve ever seen.”

  “Lesley and I were like Thelma and Louise,” says Connie. “We were so hungry, we were indefatigable—we were cub reporter killers. The men didn’t know what hit them. Lesley was amazing. She jumped into Watergate and developed sources and was able to break all sorts of stories.” Bill Small: “Lesley went out to interview John Dean. He wouldn’t open his door. Lesley lifts up the slot where you put the letters in and says, ‘I just want to ask you a few questions.’ She did the whole interview through the mail slot.” Connie: “We staked out Ehrlichman, Haldeman, Dean. They’d say, ‘Send Connie out! Send Lesley out! They’ll get ’em.’”

  One day Connie was phoning in a scoop from a phone booth when two “old stuffed shirts” from a rival network, knowing she had coveted information, shoved into the tight space to forcibly eavesdrop. Seated in the booth, eye level to the men’s waists, Connie needed to one-up their bullying and to clear them out. “So I unzipped both of their flies.” Stunned, they exited.

  “Lesley and I didn’t have desks” for their first months at CBS, Connie says. They’d troll the newsroom with their brimming notebooks and they’d cadge typewriters. “Later, they gave us kiddies’ desks.” They’d peck out their copy “while juggling our typewriters on the desks’ slanted tops.”

  Susan Zirinsky, the third hire, was an American University undergrad who’d been desultorily licking envelopes for New York congressman Ed Koch amid highly manicured volunteers who, unlike her, were looking not for careers but for husbands. So she felt like “Alice falling down the rabbit hole” when she found her way to CBS and came upon the other young female reporters pecking away on kindergarten desks—“the tiniest desks! Way in the back where the secretaries sat,” Zirinsky says. Then she realized, “Holy shit! That’s Lesley Stahl! That’s Connie Chung!”

  Pint-size Zirinsky—“Z,” as she is called, then and now—was quickly revealed as a dynamo. (“She fought a lot—you don’t screw around with Susan Zirinsky,” Av Westin says.) “I was staking out John Mitchell at the Jefferson Hotel, looking for Deep Throat in every parking garage every weekend, calling in all the firings—bing! bing! bing!—in the Saturday Night Massacre to Cronkite. It was like good sex! You got thrown a question at six twenty-five from someone going live in five minutes. You were on the phone with Capitol Hill and the White House. (I wasn’t high up enough to talk to Diane; I got some kid.) It was like being on Jeopardy! every single night.”

  Marcy McGinnis, as tiny and young and avid as Susan Zirinsky, was a mere stenographer in the CBS office, “literally taking down the Watergate hearings, minute by minute, in shorthand, for the producers. Z and I were two little munchkins running around: the researcher and the secretary,” Marcy says. “We became friends”—just as Lesley and Connie had—“because we were so alike: tiny, there’s-nothing-we-wouldn’t-do go-getters.”

  All four women are now legends. Marcy McGinniss became the first female senior vice president of CBS News and is now senior vice president of newsgathering at Al Jazeera America. Susan Zirinsky, a decades-long senior executive producer at the network (and the inspiration for Holly Hunter’s character in the movie Broadcast News); Connie Chung, the second ever female cohost of a six-thirty p.m. news show; and Lesley Stahl, a longtime 60 Minutes star. All would later interact with Diane as Diane turned, improbably, from loyal Nixon protector to grunt TV news reporter and then to TV news star and then to major TV news star, showing herself to be as aggressive and indefatigable as they were.

  While Diane was on the other side of the Watergate fence from these emerging women, in the midst of the crisis she began a romance with a new young White House staffer, Frank Gannon. Three years older than she, Gannon was a “really smart guy with a wonderfully ironic sense of humor,” says one who knew him. A product of Queens, New York, and a Catholic tradition-minded enough to collect sacramental objects, he’d attended Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, the London School of Economics, and Oxford. He had recently returned to the United States as a White House Fellow. He was as loyal to Nixon as Diane was.

  The small knot of remaining Nixon staffers, including Diane and Gannon and Gerry Warren, believed the president was innocent: that he had never known about, much less sanctioned, the sabotage or the cover-up. They willed themselves into believing this. Warren, who went on to become editor of the San Diego Union-Tribune and then to become an Episcopal lay cleric, puts what we now call “being in denial” in these understandable words: “You cannot be loyal and think your boss is involved—it just isn’t human.”

  But the truth was growing undeniable. The most dramatic day of the saga was October 20, 1973—the Saturday Night Massacre—during legal maneuverings over the release of Nixon tapes to independent prosecutor Archibald Cox. Nixon fired Cox in an effort to avoid complying with the subpoena. Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resigned, rather than carry out Nixon’s order. Less than a month later, a federal district judge ruled that the dismissal of Cox had been illegal. A record number of telegrams—seventy-one thousand—from citizens flooded the Washington office of Western Union, many calling for Nixon’s impeachment.

  “We continued to be loyal,” Gerry Warren says. In his and Diane’s beleaguered situation, they stonewalled the press. “There was only one message to give and we weren’t giving that: ‘What about the tapes?’” (Secret, unheard tapes existed, detailing the planning stages of the operation.) Reporters pummeled them: “‘What about John Dean’s testimony?’ ‘What about this meeting?’ ‘That meeting?’” Warren’s and Sawyer’s desperate effort to change the subject to non-Watergate issues—to talk about anything else—“was like a tree falling in the forest. The atmosphere in the press room was not pleasant—that’s the best way I can put it.” Warren stresses: “Diane was a brick throughout the whole thing. She was strong—very, very strong.” She had learned about strength by coming back to work at WLKY soon after her father died. Working nonstop through this very different emotional adversity was more of the same: an act of service that became an act of healing.

  As 1973 turned to 1974, Watergate deepened. In February, the House of Representatives voted nearly unanimously—410 to 4—to investigate Nixon for possible impeachment. In March, a grand jury indicted Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Colson, and three others for obstruction, and named Nixon as an unindicted coconspirator. The clamor grew loud for the release of transcripts of Nixon’s tape-recorded conversations with his aides—transcripts that would reveal, in Senator Howard Baker’s famous formulation, what the president knew and when he knew it.

  “It was a siege mentality. It was a siege!” says Gerry Warren of these months. Ron Ziegler was now assistant to the president, Warren was de facto press secretary, and Diane was Warren’s deputy. Diane and Warren worked “twelve, sometimes fourteen, sixteen hours a day—we’d order up meals from the White House mess hall. Someone calls from Newsweek Saturday night: ‘What about this?’ We crash and try to find the answers and get them in the newspapers. I worked with Diane every day. I saw the passion she brought to her work. She was loyal; that’s quintessential Diane.”

  “Bruising, nerve-deadening torment” is how Diane has recalled this period. Thoroughness was her armor—and her weapon. “I read all the newspapers and all the testimony and all the lawyers’ briefs. I became a kind of walking computer. Even the lawyers would call me occasionally, because I se
emed to have everything on file.” Such stressful crisis research was, of course, the best kind of preparation for the intensely competitive, time-pressured TV reporting that would come in her future.

  Finally, in late April 1974, edited transcripts of the tapes were issued, revealing Nixon’s contempt for the country’s institutions, which not only the media but even hitherto loyalists found disturbing. In late July, Nixon was ordered by the Supreme Court to hand over the tapes themselves.

  The hard-core defenders bit the bullet. And then it came, on August 5: the “smoking-gun tape,” which had been recorded a few days after the 1972 break-in. On it, Nixon and Haldeman could be heard discussing the obstruction of justice and the cover-up. It was clear: Nixon knew everything. “Good. Good deal. Play it tough,” the president had told Haldeman.

  Diane and Gerry Warren heard the tape before the public did. Warren looked over at Diane and “I saw the sorrow that hit her. It was like a sledgehammer to the stomach.” “When it was clear what had happened”—that Nixon had in fact been guilty—“it was too late to be mad,” Diane has said. “It was over.” She seems to have felt more despondency and regret than anger. “What a considerable presidency it would have been without Watergate . . . ,” she later reflected.

  Diane would see Pat Nixon walking around the White House compound from time to time, and Julie and Tricia would come to visit their father a lot—Diane got to know them. One day, right after the sledgehammer-to-the-stomach moment, Diane and the others noticed Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, leave her office to go to a private room to talk to the assembled Nixon women: Pat, Tricia, Julie. There was a buzz among the staff—what was this about? It soon became clear that the president had dispatched his secretary to tell his wife and daughters that he had made the decision to resign. Nixon could not face telling them himself. All the other close-in staffers—the men—“thought it was so strange and removed and formal,” Diane has said of this moment. Only Diane understood. “Of course it wasn’t” removed and formal, this choice of his, she would say, much later, to writer Kevin Sessums, in 2011. It wasn’t about formality at all—“It was about pain.” Diane’s sympathy for Nixon remained oddly pure; it’s hard to know where it came from, except that, despite the extreme wrongdoing, his vulnerability was the paramount thing she saw in him. “He also had a courtly feeling about women,” she continued, which was why he had his secretary tell them—this was perhaps more dignified, more deferential, less hurtfully self-revealing. “He felt he was responsible for having manners of a certain kind.”

  Just before his official resignation, Nixon made a speech to his staff in the East Room that appealed to his staff’s religiosity, a quality that Diane and Warren shared. “It was very poignant. He said something that has been imprinted on my mind ever since,” Warren says. “‘Don’t hate. The one you hate will always win.’” Pastor Owen or Catherine Marshall could not have said it better.

  On August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon announced his resignation, effective at noon the next day. He thus became the only American president ever to give up the office. The next day, with an oddly triumphal salute at the top of the stairs to the helicopter, he bade farewell to America and, in disgrace, flew to San Clemente.

  Diane was exhausted, emotionally and physically. She only recently disclosed what she did in the immediate aftermath of Nixon’s resignation. “I went away by myself to Tahiti for a month, moving from island to island.” It is not clear whether Frank Gannon was with her or not. “I kept trying to get further and further away. Talk about a metaphor. I ended up on an island with no hotels, sleeping in the living room of a small house. . . . I didn’t know what was next.”

  But she must have known, because what she did next was this: She flew out to San Clemente, to help Nixon research and write his memoirs. Gannon did, too, and they would continue to be a couple for the next four years. Thus, during the exact time that TV networks were eager to hire young women—talented young women in communications, just like Diane—she was going into hiding with the most despised politician in America. Aside from being unimaginable to those who hated Nixon, Diane’s decision was imponderable to her old friends at WLKY. “This could ruin her!” they thought. It was even imponderable to Nixon’s loyalists and staff. Bruce Whelihan had been Gerry Warren’s deputy, and he had considered himself lucky for ducking the postresignation service in San Clemente. That Diane had volunteered to go stunned Whelihan. “I was shaking my head that she was there.”

  So why did she go? She has described her decision thusly: “His world had collapsed. He had been decimated. We were beyond moralizing. It was a human consideration. Here was a man whose dreams were shattered. If I didn’t come through for him at a time when he needed me, I couldn’t live with myself.” So there, again, was the issue of responsibility. Her service to him was like a marriage, for better or for worse. “I had a sense of duty,” she said, as recently as 2011. “I felt: You don’t get to choose just being there in the celebrated times and then get to walk away when someone is living in defeat.” She also felt, “No matter how they got [to that defeat] . . . and how bruising [Watergate] was for American politics,” to not have continued with Nixon after his resignation? “I just don’t think that’s the person I can be.”

  • • •

  ONE THING BEING at San Clemente did was give Diane the opportunity to learn big-story research and writing. Diane was “really key in putting together Nixon’s autobiography; she oversaw the whole project,” says a man who visited her there. She did much of the research on Watergate herself: She read the transcripts of every single newscast devoted to the scandal, interviewed Ehrlichman and Haldeman in prison, and created a comprehensive flowchart. She then presented her findings to Nixon (with a bit of held breath), and took his dictation on the subject. Nixon was fitful and testy in recounting the ordeal, but Diane prodded him the way any reporter would prod any truculent head of state. “She had no illusions about Nixon” or his guilt by then, says one who knew her then. Still, Nixon the man somehow remained not merely sympathetic but also charismatic to her.

  During her time at San Clemente, she saw a scenario repeat itself. As she would later describe it: “Everybody talks about his awkwardness with social talk. Not only is he not awkward [but] when he gets into substance, he weaves magic in a room. . . . It used to be one of the rare amusements at San Clemente to see people come in who held no brief for him, who were firmly defended by their political and personal preconceptions, and watch how long it took for their mouths to drop open. It usually took somewhere between three and four minutes, and then they were captive. And it happened over and over again.”

  One of Diane’s jobs at San Clemente was reading the mail. When Nixon was stricken with serious phlebitis, a small pile of letters arrived from supporters wishing him a speedy recovery. A larger pile carried a nastier message. Diane herself coined a term for these—“She called them ‘Get Well, Motherfucker’ letters,” says a person she confided in. But while this person and other insiders laughed at her tough élan, she desperately didn’t want it getting out to the public that she’d used the word “motherfucker,” and she pleaded with a writer to that effect.

  It wasn’t that the word “motherfucker” would have offended Nixon, her boss. That isn’t what bothered her. There was, after all, someone who captured her loyalty even more, far more, than did the former president.

  What bothered her was that her use of the word “motherfucker” would have upset her mother.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Secret Princess Becomes the Exile in Atlanta

  Christiane: 1958 to 1983

  CHRISTIANE MARIA AMANPOUR was born on January 12, 1958, in London, England, the first of four children of Patricia Hill Amanpour and Mohammed Amanpour. The couple and their baby soon moved to Tehran, Iran, where Mohammed resumed his work as an airline executive. Another daughter, Fiona, followed a year and a half later. Elizabeth—Lizzy—was born nine yea
rs after Fiona, and Leila two years after that. Four daughters! Christiane was the eldest, the leader—“like a second mother to Lizzy and me,” Leila says.

  Christiane’s parents had met the way destined lovers meet in movies. Patricia Hill, a beautiful, restless, adventurous brunette, was the daughter of upper-middle-class Britons who’d moved to Paris because of Patricia’s father’s work in the insurance industry there. When she was eighteen, and her father’s business associate needed his Mercedes driven from Paris to Istanbul to Tehran, she hounded her father to let her do the driving—she wanted to see an exotic part of the world. After the long and arduous delivery of the vehicle, Patricia Hill, through random circumstance, met Mohammed Amanpour in that then lively capital of the ancient Persian empire. “He fell head-over-heels in love with her. It was a grand romance,” says Lizzy Amanpour. “He gate-crashed all these high-society Iranian parties” to which Patricia, the lovely English newcomer, was invited, “just to see her,” just to try to win her heart.

  Mohammed Amanpour was roughly twice Patricia Hill’s age. He was fond of cognac and backgammon and caviar—a charming, outgoing bon vivant in a country that had been proudly, though forcibly, modernized two decades earlier, back in 1936, when the then current shah’s father, Reza Shah, had banned the wearing of the veil by women. When Mohammed proposed marriage, Patricia said yes, but she had a condition: Their children had to be raised Catholic. Patricia, a convert to Catholicism, was devout. Not being a particularly religious Muslim—and besotted by his young bride-to-be—Mohammed agreed to the terms. After all, it was possible to practice Catholicism in cosmopolitan Iran. The couple married in Paris, Christiane was born in London, and family life proceeded happily in Iran.

  Christiane has said that she was “very shy” as a child and “also very curious—some people would say I was nosy. I always wanted to be around the grown-ups and listen to what they were saying.” She was an athletic girl: She started horseback riding at five, and she has said that she believes that the nervy grit that would characterize her throughout her career was born during those years of “falling off a very, very fast horse a lot. I was literally picked up and put back on the horse by the scruff of my neck. My riding teacher gave me no choice.” Christiane won trophies racing her Arabian stallion. She also swam competitively, and she and Fiona learned to ski almost as soon as they could walk.