By Debra Bruno
Washington Post
In her long career, Connie Lawn has had a knack for showing up at memorable moments in history.
The veteran independent broadcast journalist conducted one of the last interviews with Robert Kennedy before he was assassinated. She arrived in Czechoslovakia in 1968 two weeks after Soviet tanks rolled in to crush the Prague Spring. In 1972, she was living in a Watergate apartment at the time of the infamous break-in at Democratic headquarters in the fashionable Washington complex. She talked her way into Beirut as the 1982 Israeli invasion was heating up.
And her intrepid reportage has not gone unnoticed by some of history’s most memorable figures: Nelson Mandela once told her that he had listened to her radio reports in his prison cell on South Africa’s Robben Island.
“I can’t think of a better profession in the world,” she says of her longtime career.
For the past 40-plus years, Lawn has also been a card-carrying member of the White House press corps, long enough to reach the rank of senior journalist in that group. But at 72, and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, she shows up at White House briefings less and less frequently, although when she does, she jokes, press secretary Josh Earnest looks terrified as she slowly makes her way into the briefing room.
Now in the final stages of the disease, Lawn is being treated with in-home hospice care; she has lost 45 pounds, and her once-booming radio voice has grown weak. But her memory is clear, and her recollections of her roller-coaster career — which she chronicled in her 2014 memoir, “You Wake Me Each Morning: The Final Chapter” — are tinged with pride and nostalgia, along with some regrets.
From the start, her life has been a combination of intrepid adventures and screwball situations that seem perfect for a screenplay about the redhead who challenged presidents, argued her way past the Secret Service and shouted her breaking news reports into the nearest landline available.
But as a female journalist for half a century, she has also confronted the less desirable aspects of her chosen profession: the condescension and outright sexual harassment served up by male bosses, politicians, fellow journalists, and other men she encountered in her career. One of those men, she now says, was none other than deposed Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, who has been accused of sexual harassment by multiple women and was the object of a lawsuit brought by former Fox host Gretchen Carlson (“My hero,” says Lawn), which Fox settled for $20 million.
Lawn says that Ailes made an obscene proposition when he interviewed her for a television job in a Washington hotel room in the late 1960s, when she was a young reporter. In the middle of the interview, she says, he suggested that she give him a certain sexual favor if she wanted to be considered for the job.
“I had never even heard the term,” she says of the suggested act. She walked out of the interview.
Asked for comment, Ailes’ lawyer, Susan Estrich, responded via email: “Roger has no recollection of what Ms. Lawn is talking about — from 50 years ago — but he does remember that she was a good, hard-working reporter and considers her a friend.”
Lawn, who did not include this alleged incident in her 2014 memoir, concedes that she and Ailes became friendly over the years, running into one another in Washington, and says that she harbors no real grudge against him. It was, in retrospect, “incredibly stupid” of her to go to his hotel room, even if she was a naive 20-something.
“If I’m mad at anybody,” she says, “I’m mad at myself” for not speaking up sooner. But in those days, instead of banding together, women “were much more aggressive and competing against each other,” she recalls from her sunny home on Lake Barcroft in Falls Church, Va. “We should have worked with each other” to combat harassment and abuse.
And both were rampant in an era when the term “sexual harassment” hadn’t yet been coined, and female journalists were routinely relegated to covering the soft features then known as “women’s news.”
In one of her TV jobs in 1969, in New Bedford, Mass., Lawn was tapped to be the weather girl, even though she knew nothing about meteorology reporting. “I was provided a wardrobe that included a dress that stopped at the top of my thighs,” she writes in her memoir. “I was supplied a red wig, with straight hair that fell down to meet the hemline of my dress. It was beautiful, but if I swung my head around to point at the weather map, it would fall off, right in front of the audience.”
In protest, she refused to learn weather reporting and occasionally made things up, like the time she told her southern New England audience that it would be a great day to visit the beaches on Cape Cod. With no windows in the studio, she was unaware of the torrential downpour outside.
In Washington, she was a regular on a WPGC radio talk show called “Harv Moore and the Redhead,” where her job was to make “witty, sexy comments.” Another time, she writes, a star of a local television station locked her in a room and chased her around his desk as his Saint Bernard romped along behind them.
One vivid chapter describes her encounters with a now-deceased Southern senator who she says was widely known for inviting female reporters to visit him in his private offices and who managed to grope her a few times before she could squirm away. “He was always after me,” Lawn says today. “When I would interview him, he would get an erection and he would put a newspaper on his lap” to hide it.
She admits, however, that she sometimes played the sex game of the 1960s and ‘70s herself. To get a prime parking spot on Capitol Hill back then, she says, she wasn’t above engaging in a little flirtation with the guards. She soon learned that “everything concerning … (Capitol) Hill had mildly sexual connotations,” she recalls in her memoir.
So much of the attention was unwelcome and seemed belittling at the time, but today, she jokingly says that she’d be almost flattered if someone made a pass at her.
Lawn didn’t start out as a journalist, although she always had Washington in her sights. Born in Long Branch, N.J., she landed a post-college job on Capitol Hill, where her budding career as a staffer ended abruptly, she says, after she accidentally walked in on a congressman “in the loo.” Fiercely opposed to the Vietnam War, she canvassed for Sen. Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire in 1968. When she mailed a long report of her experiences to a newspaper only to have it appear verbatim under someone else’s byline, she decided that broadcast journalism would suit her better.
After several years working at various radio and television jobs, she eventually started her own news bureau, Audio Video News, so that, she said in a 2011 speech, no one could force her to do anything.
Thereafter, she was free to cover every subject under the sun: wars, invasions, air crashes, the White House. She has filed stories hours after giving birth, while her beloved sister was dying of cancer, and in front of the synagogue where one of her sons was about to have his bar mitzvah.
In Washington, she became known as the “butter queen” for her many questions about imports from New Zealand — one of her chief clients for many years being a New Zealand radio station. At White House briefings, press secretaries across administrations have been known to look at her raised hand and automatically say, “Nothing about New Zealand today, Connie.”
Today, she spends most of her time in her cluttered, memorabilia-filled home office. Her husband, Charles Schneiderman, is a physician who tends to her along with her hospice team; her two adult sons from an earlier marriage live nearby.
After so many years in the business, it’s no surprise that she looks at her own current circumstances with an unblinking journalist’s eye: “As a reporter, it’s fascinating to see how my body doesn’t work anymore,” she says.
And she also knows how she wants to go: like a few longtime colleagues who have died recently while still on the job.
“That’s the way I want to die,” she says. “Doing my last performance.”
http://jacksonville.com/news/2016-10-18/longtime-dc-reporter-final-stages-parkinson-s-disease
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