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Times were tough for three-time Emmy award-winning Chung in 1995. Her weekly magazine show, "Eye to Eye With Connie Chung," wasn't catching the eyes of Nielsen family members. Although she was the second woman in 17 years to co-anchor an evening news program (Barbara Walters was the first), "The CBS Evening News With Connie Chung and Dan Rather" was in last place behind ABC and NBC. To make matters worse, things were tense between her and Rather: He'd been patronizingly advising her on ways to sharpen her journalism skills. After a publicly announced effort to conceive a child with her husband, Maury Povich, they'd turned to adoption instead. And then came the b-word incident.

Poor Kathleen Gingrich. She was just doing a little PR flack work for her son. How was she to know this wasn't going to be a sympathetic, soft-soap interview? Chung arrived at her house, where the two women chatted for a couple of hours, as the cameras and lights faded into the wallpaper. With Gingrich relaxed and at ease, Chung pulled a move that any seasoned politician would have blown off with a laugh that meant, you wish. Chung leaned in close and asked what Newt Gingrich thought of Hillary Clinton. Kathleen Gingrich resisted at first, but Chung kept at her: "Why don't you just whisper it to me, just between you and me."

"Bitch!"

Ratings-starved CBS played up the b-word incident big-time. I know I canceled my evening plans after reading about the faux pas in the morning papers. But when public opinion of the interview soured, the struggling network directed all blame at Chung. Five months later, on May 18, she was hoisted from her anchor chair and "With Connie Chung" was hacked off the end of "Eye to Eye." The sassy journalist who'd ruled network news just a few years before seemed to disappear from the face of the planet, or at least from the TV screen.

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Perhaps it's appropriate that the word "bitch" would spell the end of Chung's career on CBS. Compared to debutante ice queens Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer and chipper everywomen like Katie Couric, Connie Chung was the bitch -- in the uncompromising, afraid of nothing sense -- of TV news journalism. She pursued stories with unsuppressed eagerness. Once a person agreed to be interviewed by her, he or she could rest assured the interrogation would not be easy. Chung didn't simply read questions from a neatly typed cue card and nod in sympathetic rhythm to her subject's answers; she free-styled. If an interviewee was avoiding the question, Chung would keep asking until she got her answer or her subject broke down.

Chung worked in a environment less restrictive than today's, when TV interviewers are forced to get a publicist's approval of the questions they ask. And she didn't seem to mind making enemies in high places -- live on the air, if that's what it took to get the whole story.

Next page | Playing hardball with Bill Gates and making Tonya Harding cry