WASHINGTON — Connie Lawn has been covering the White House since women journalists were newcomers at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
“It was 1968, in the days of Helen Thomas and Sarah McLendon, but I’ve outlived them, so I’m now senior correspondent, by a couple of months,” says the 70-year-old Lawn, in an interview at WTOP.
Lawn’s first year as a White House reporter was a busy one, with the Vietnam war, as well as the assasinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy.
“I did the last interview with Bobby Kennedy, 20 minutes before he was killed,” recalled Lawn.
After Kennedy had been declared the winner of the California and South Dakota primary elections for the Democratic nomination, Lawn and a few other reporters interviewed Kennedy in his suite at the Ambassador Hotel, in Los Angeles.
Lawn watched Kennedy’s acceptance speech from the side of the stage.
Moments later, as the candidate and reporters walked through the hotel kitchen, Kennedy was shot and killed by Sirhan Sirhan.
“I heard shots, and the next thing Bobby Kennedy was on the ground, (his wife) Ethel was screaming ‘Stand back, stand back, give him air, let him breathe,’ and one of the cameramen looked at her and said ‘Sorry, lady, this is history.’
After 47 years as an indepedent reporter, without the benefit of network support, Lawn notes the irony that in the current news atmosphere, the importance of networks is dwindling.
“I predicted at some point it would be the years of the the independent entrepreneur, and that’s what we have now,” says Lawn. “Of course, I couldn’t envision iPhones — I didn’t know how it would happen, I just knew it would happen.”
As legacy television, radio, and print news organizations try to monetize digital content, Lawn says most independent journalists will never get rich.
“Look, it was great in my heyday, but right now you can’t make a living as an independent — you can barely make a living in the business that we’re in,” said Lawn.
Lawn referred to a recent study by CareerCast that ranked newspaper reporter as the worst job of 2015.
“Look, I love reporting. It’s exciting. You have to care about people. You have to be interested in people and events. But you’d better have another job on the side. And that’s really, really sad.”
Lawn is holding a book party at the National Press Club on May 21st, for the latest revision to her book, “You Wake Me Each Morning: The Final Chapter.”
“I call it ‘The Final Chapter’ because I’ve got Parkinson’s Disease, which is a terminal disease, and I’m not going to be here that long,” says Lawn. “So, this is my legacy.”
