Contributor

Connie Lawn

Longest serving White House correspondent

Nearly 50 years in the White House! That is a long time, and independent reporter Connie Lawn attempts to condense it in a pod cast on the website of the National Press Club. She is a contributing blogger for HuffingtonPost, which she says is her most important outlet. Connie Lawn is now launching the fourth update of her autobiography, called "You Wake Me Each Morning - the Final Chapter." It tells of her struggles running an independent news bureau. She also discusses some major highlights. They include one of the last interviews with Bobby Kennedy moments before he was shot in Los Angeles in 1968; beatings in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention; the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, where she stayed for several months; the 1982 Israeli incursion into Lebanon (where she was briefly kidnapped); and the years of reporting from the White House and other venues. She also says her proudest moment was a meeting with Nelson Mandela who said he listened to her in jail and her reports "gave his people hope." He then picked her up and said "you are not as big as I thought you were!" Connie received a Lifetime Achievement Award from New Zealand in 2006 and was appointed an Honorary Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, from Queen Elizabeth, in 2012. In 2016, she was given the key to Long Branch and Connie Lawn Day was proclaimed! Connie was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, in 1944. She is married to Dr. Charles Sneiderman and has two sons, David and Daniel Rappaport.