THEY SAY CONNIE Chung left her job with CBS voluntarily, but I have my own theory concerning what happened there. This whole story that it was her biological clock ticking, and she wanted to devote herself full time to getting pregnant and having a baby. It just doesn’t add up. In my opinion, the network wanted to get rid of her, and this was just their way of giving her a graceful exit.
Who would give up a career like that to have a baby, when they could adopt? That’s what Barbara Walters did, and look how fabulously everything worked out for her. As she herself puts it in her autobiography—which is one of the most inspiring books I ever read, incidentally—whenever she has any regrets about the time she missed, staying home with her little girl, seeing the first steps, whatever, she remembers: If she’d been home watching those first steps, she would have missed out on her historic interviews with Henry Kissinger and Barbra Streisand and that Egyptian president, what was his name. The one that got shot. You can’t have everything. Life is full of tradeoffs. But when all is said and done, who would really trade a bunch of dirty diapers and drool-soaked clothes for a career like that?
Not that I was closed off to the idea of having kids with Larry. Listen, nobody gets more gooey over kids than me. Little booties, little smocked dresses, all the cute stuff they make now. It’s enough to make you want to adopt a whole orphanage.
Which was always an idea of mine, to tell you the truth. As I told Larry, why do we need to have our own baby when the world is so full of kids who need good homes? Just a while back, I saw this special about Romania, and I want to tell you, you wouldn’t believe what’s going on there. I mean, it was almost too disgusting to watch. Some of the children were older or handicapped, and naturally you have to be very careful with a country like that, that you aren’t getting one with AIDS. But some of the little girls were real little dolls, too. There was this one, big eyes, skinny little arms and legs. You just wanted to reach right through the TV screen and pick her up.
The way I figured, so long as we were adopting, there was no rush either. I wouldn’t have to take time off for pregnancy, or worry about getting out of shape and then having to work so hard to get the weight off like Joan Lunden did. Plus, if we adopted in a place like Romania, we could maybe pitch our experience for a half-hour special. Bring along a camera crew, let the viewers at home live through the whole process, start to finish. I bet if we did something like that, the phone would be ringing off the hook, at the station, with people wanting to know how they could do it too. It would make you feel good, knowing you had an influence in so many people’s lives like that. And I mean, when you’re in broadcasting, you do. Whether you know it or not. Dan Rather changes the part in his hair on Monday, and by Wednesday half the men in America are changing the part in theirs. When you think about it, it’s awe-inspiring.