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Television is the topic we begin with this morning. We'll check in with two veteran broadcasters, each in some ways a trailblazer. Longtime talk show host Maury Povich announced his retirement not long ago. His partner, herself a prominent television figure, Connie Chung, left the business a few years back. Big life changes for two well-known personalities.

They'll be talking with our Mo Rocca. After a career spanning nearly 70 years, Maury Povich is moving off camera. The Maury I see on TV is so thoughtful, so considerate, enormous amount of patience. It is true that she'd rather be with a guy who's on TV. Well, he's so nice. But I thought those two people were the same.

No. Putting it together with Maury and Connie ahead on Sunday Morning. Hi, Jane. Hi, Connie. Luke Burbank marvels at the comic book universe now coming to life at the movies. A story from Steve Hartman, commentary from Oprah Winfrey, and more, all on this Sunday morning for the 1st of May, 2022.

And we'll be back after this. They're legendary broadcasters, both trailblazers in their field. Mo Rocca catches up with Maury Povich and Connie Chung. I used to be a 3.8.

Now I'm a 2.6. These days, 83-year-old Maury Povich has lots of free time to work on his golf game. It's been my therapy for the last, you know, 50 years or so.

In March, Povich announced that he's retiring from his day job and that original episodes of his longtime talk show, famous and infamous for its out-of-control teens. You are a father at 16. You're gonna have to grow up fast, son. Black olives or green olives?

It's unusual phobias. Bring out the olives. And most of all, paternity tests. You are the father.

Would stop airing in September. You are not the father. But long before the public knew him simply as Povich had already made his name as a public affairs host, a reporter and an itinerant local anchorman who in his off time studied the tapes of TV news's then most trusted voice. Good evening.

The Carter administration said today that $50 a person tax rebate checks could be in mailboxes within three months. At that point in my life, the holy grail was to anchor a network news. I watched Cronkite because, of course, he was the man. But life on the road took its toll. I made the terrible mistake of not being with my family worried about my career. And that ended in a divorce.

The biggest mistake I made was putting my job before my family. That was that was unconscionable. You think it's unconscionable, but that was I mean, the business you didn't set.

You didn't set up the business. That's the addiction of the business. Hollywood's most horrible crime. So when media mogul Rupert Murdoch offered him the relative stability of host of a new kind of news show, Povich said yes. Behind the scenes with the team that uncovered the exclusive Robert Chambers home video. A current affair.

Yes. Was really influential. Would you believe it? Charles Manson is up for parole again. I fervently believe that the first five or six or seven years of a current affair changed the whole landscape of covering news on television.

How so? Because a current affair became popular because of the stories that network newsrooms were putting in the trash can. Jim and Tammy Faye Baker and all the other so-called tabloid stories. And all of a sudden we were getting the ratings that network newscasts were getting.

The CBS News, I guarantee you, does more crime than they used to. Hello, everyone. I'm Ari Povich. Welcome to a current affair. The hosting job at a current affair also meant he would live in the same city as his second wife, which is a perfect cue for Connie to come in. But she's not here. Where's Connie? This is Connie Chung time.

This is Connie Chung standard time. Maury Povich and Connie Chung had met in 1969 when he was a big shot at WTTG in Washington, D.C., and she was a copy girl. Yeah, but Maury never paid attention to me.

You know, I would rip wire copy off the wire machines and I'd hand it to him. And were you pining for him secretly? No. Seven years later, in 1977, they met again on the West Coast. This time, Chung had top billing.

Co-anchor, second banana. She was a big star in Los Angeles. Among the hardest hit were the Beatles themselves. George Harrison says he is still in shock. That's when their current affair began. We dated for over seven years, never lived together.

Yeah, it was perfect. But then you got married in 1984. You got married in 84, correct? But we were living in two different cities. Right.

And that made it the perfect marriage. Why don't you tell him it took you 10 years to put me on the deed? It's not about me. It's going to be about the both of you and Maury. Yeah.

No. What do you mean? See, I've been Mr. Chung for almost 40 years. I mean, if you take a look at it in terms of my career, you could absolutely track that all of my success, my national success came after I married this woman.

Why would you say that? Because she settled me and she encouraged me and she was a believer in what I had to offer. As for Connie's story, after she went national at NBC, she moved over to CBS and in 1993 became co-anchor of the CBS Evening News, a first for Asian-Americans and at CBS for women. Good evening and welcome, Connie.

Thank you, Dan. The pairing didn't last. But at the same time, this is a very fortuitous moment because in 1995, when she was taken off the CBS Evening News, the next day we find out that we're going to adopt this little boy. So it was serendipity.

You know, it was really meant to be. When is Connie going to own her status as a trailblazer? Well, you know, one of the biggest problems I have with this young lady is that she doesn't recognize what she's done and she's just beginning to because she gets now a lot of inquiries from young Asian journalists. And in fact, there's this whole crowd of Asian-American women named Connie because of her. Is that right?

Yes. And then some of them are named actually Connie Chung and then something less. How does that make you feel? I'm flabbergasted, honestly.

And today, the couple splits their time between New York, Florida and Montana, where they keep watch over the Flathead Beacon, the award-winning local newspaper Povich created in 2007. When you look at each other now, what do you see? I see a gorgeous man.

No. Yeah, I do. What you usually will see is, you know, there's a little length here. Yeah, I'm like a monkey.

Monkeys do that. So I see the most beautiful woman I could ever imagine. Oh, Maury, I've become a prune. I'm shrinking and I'm up to your navel. And it's just, I'm so sorry.

You have to look at this. Never let a club get between us. Maury may be done with his program, but Maury Povich and Connie Chung? Oh, no tongues. No tongues. Their show goes on.

Wash your armpits. Also, we're gonna get into things that you just kind of won't believe and we're not able to do in daytime television. So watch out. Listen to Drew's News wherever you get your podcasts. It's your good news on the go.

This is The Takeout with Major Garrett. This week, Stephen Law, ally of Mitch McConnell and one of Washington's biggest midterm money men. List for me the two Senate races where you think Republicans have the best chance of taking a Democratic seat away. Nevada, New Hampshire. Not Georgia. Well, Georgia's right up there, but New Hampshire is a surprise.

In New Hampshire, people really just kind of don't like Maggie Hassan. For more from this week's conversation, follow The Takeout with Major Garrett on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Every night, I dream the same dream. Men, the nightmare begins. That's Benedict Cumberbatch in the new movie, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Behind every Marvel movie lies a multiverse of comic books. And Luke Burbank's found a man who's read all 27,000 of them. Since the dawn of time, or technically the 1960s to be precise, a tale has been building. A single connected narrative involving thousands of characters and millions of pages of comics. The Marvel universe is the biggest story that has ever been told.

It all happens in the same setting. Stories that happened in 1961 or 1962 have consequences in comics that are coming out this week. Douglas Walke is a writer and Marvel expert who patiently explained to me, a non-comic book person, that Marvel might be the longest running and most voluminous story told in human history. And it's all connected. Meaning, if the Hulk stubbed his toe back in 1979, Captain America could be dealing with the consequences here in 2022. All of those events are its history, its past, what it can draw on for this perpetually evolving story.

Not just a continuous story going on for six decades, but a continuous story going on in many, many threads at once that can cross each other at any time. Marvel started publishing comics in the 1930s, but according to Walke, it was only in the early 1960s that Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, and Jack Kirby pioneered the idea of having all the characters live in the same universe. Walke had been a fan of Marvel comics since he was a boy, but his son Sterling didn't start off sharing his love of of, as he calls it, spandex violence. But then, Eventually he was like, oh, but superhero comics are a complicated system. I like complicated systems. Hey, Dad, I'd like to read all the Marvel Universe comics.

Not in the order they were published, the order the events happened to the characters. It's like, okay, that's a pretty tall order. So they set out on a father and son adventure, tackling a seemingly impossible challenge. You just have to find a way in and wander around inside it. There's lots of weird and boring and arcane and confusing parts.

And there are beautiful and magical and fascinating parts. They found themselves jumping around from comic to comic, devouring page after page, issue after issue. I started thinking, what would it actually look like to read these half million pages of comics to read the 27,000 superhero comics that Marvel had published since 1961? It was at this point that Douglas Walks started to transform from mild-mannered Portland writer to Dr. Marvel Brain, AKA one of the few people on planet Earth to read all of the Marvels, which is also the title of the book he wrote about the experience. Superhero comics are stories about our world made much bigger than life and turned into this enormous, endless ongoing soap opera. It seems hard to imagine now with Marvel films regularly breaking box office records. But for years, they struggled to get their work adapted for the big screen. In fact, the first Marvel feature movie was actually Howard the Duck. That's it. No more Mr. Nice Duck.

A box office bomb so bad, it was literally declared the worst film of 1986. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has come a long way since then, churning out hit after hit. But of course, it all started with the comics, which is where things took an interesting turn for Douglas Walks. On the last page, we see Dr. Strange hanging out in his study at home, and on his bookshelf is a copy of all of the Marvels.

The book I wrote exists within the comic story. I could not be happier about this. An unusual origin story, but proof that there's room for everybody inside the biggest story ever told.

Time to play ball with Steve Hartman. Watching eight-year-old Chloe Grimes talking smack, hitting liners, throwing heat. You'd never guess she's also fighting cancer and has been off and on since the age of two. The girl has grit, which is why the Tampa Bay Rays recently invited Chloe to toss out a first pitch. She threw it to a player named Brett Phillips, who now believes this moment wasn't so much ceremonial as it was serendipitous. What a story, right?

You can't not think that there's just some, you know, divine intervention. Yeah. Brett Phillips, number 35, is Chloe's favorite player, even though he's not exactly an all-star. He's not the best hitter, you know. I know, but he's so nice. What's up, guys? She's got that right. This is a player who comes out 20 minutes before every game to talk with kids. How you doing, man? Almost to the point of parenting.

How are those grades? He'll make time for people, even in the middle of a play. I've never seen a professional athlete so devoid of bravado, especially on the day Chloe walked into his life. You know, I had the chance to meet Chloe for the first time, and she's battling cancer, and she brought me these gifts. She wrote my name on a softball, and like, holy cow. Among those gifts, a bracelet. It's going to bring me good luck, huh? And sure enough, that night, not just a home run. It was the hardest ball I've hit in my major league career.

If not for the roof, it might have left the building. Needless to say, Brett won't be taking off that bracelet anytime soon. Although Chloe insists that she got the better gift. He gave me spirit to, like, beat the butt out of cancer. And to Brett Phillips, that smile is what baseball is all about.

Yeah. I've been blessed with a platform to spread joy and love on a daily basis. What are you doing? Just recently, Brett surprised Chloe at her house, cemented their friendship, and earned himself the greatest title in professional sports, most valuable presence in a child's life. How was school?

Good. Commentary this morning comes from Oprah Winfrey, who's partnering with the Smithsonian Channel to raise awareness about inequities in our healthcare system. During the height of the pandemic, I read a story about a family in Detroit. Now, this story would not let me rest.

As a matter of fact, it haunted me. It was the story of the Fowler family. Gary Fowler worked hard his entire life, 56 years old, working 80 hours a week to provide for his family, because that was his greatest desire, to create a secure, beautiful life for the people he loved. He became ill, experiencing COVID symptoms, went to three different hospitals, begging them for help. Each hospital sent him home. Finally, he became so tired, so exhausted, he gave up, went home, sat in his favorite recliner, and died there, because hospitals, three of them in Detroit, would not treat him.

Imagine that. If access to life-saving healthcare for somebody you love depended on the color of their skin. So I wondered how many other Gary Fallers there are in America. Research tells us there are far too many, and we need to do something about this larger pandemic that COVID has exposed. Racial disparities in our healthcare system that cost lives. We're fighting the impact of decades of mistreatment, but we can do better. So let's make the choice to be better and do better.

This can be changed, and we're the ones to change it. There's the Ukraine war we know about, perhaps all too well. And then there's another war, far less familiar, underpinning this entire conflict.

Seth Doan explains. At a special midnight service in Udine in Northeast Italy, this priest led his flock of Ukrainian, Russian, and Eastern European immigrants through their usual orthodox Easter traditions last weekend. But recently he's also accompanying them on a much less familiar path, sparked by the war in Ukraine. In March, this parish decided to split from its mother church in Moscow, joining instead the Istanbul-based Orthodox Church, whose leader has criticized the war, in stark contrast from the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. By separating from Moscow, Father Volodymyr Melnychuk told us, we are adhering to the Christian vision of the world. There are roughly 100 million Russian Orthodox, the largest church within Orthodox Christianity. Their leader is Patriarch Kirill, who's framed Russia's invasion of Ukraine in holy terms. In a sermon in early March, Kirill railed against the influences of the Western world, its excess consumption and gay pride parades, saying of the Ukraine war, we're talking about Ukraine.

We're talking about human salvation. Patriarch Kirill is supporting the war, in fact. Andrei Sinitsyn, who's from Moscow, agrees with his parish's split. The Patriarch Kirill got too close to the government. How is that as a churchgoer, someone who's a believer?

No, it's unacceptable. The church should be independent. I believe that the church is the main supplier of the ideology. Putin's ideology.

Father Cyril Overun was ordained by Kirill and was his theological advisor until 2012. This war has a simple formula. War equals to guns plus ideas. And the guns are, of course, supplied by the Kremlin, and the ideas come from the church. And Father Cyril believes Putin sees this war as a sacred operation.

A mission from God to purge the world from, you know, impurity of the Western ideas and Western values. You're saying that the church has created the ideological underpinning for the war. Well, actually, when I was working in the Moscow Petricate, I was witnessing how this ideology was emerging.

And I protested against that. In Soviet times, priests were pushed to keep the spy service informed. And it's widely believed that Kirill was in the KGB. But Father Cyril believes Kirill was never enthusiastic about it, which created friction with Putin. That's why we are talking about the marriage of convenience and not marriage by love. What do you mean it's a marriage of convenience, not of love? They have to tolerate each other because they use the skills, the charisma and possibilities, the resources of each other.

Each one for his own end. Those resources are vast, says another former insider, Sergei Chapnin, who also worked for Kirill. There are rough estimations that he's definitely a billionaire. And in fact, he is one of Putin's oligarchs. Sorry to say that. Wait, you're calling the patriarch an oligarch?

Yeah. He has financial interest in sort of his cooperation with the state, just like other oligarchs. Chapnin sees Russia's church as a state propaganda machine, spreading Putin's message as the defender of conservative values against a morally corrupt West. Chapnin also thinks the expansionist ambitions of Kirill even exceed those of Putin. The main motivation for Pedro Kirill is actually power and influence.

But because of the war, he actually loses it. Before the war, Ukraine had many Orthodox churches loyal to Moscow. Now hundreds of Ukrainian parishes have broken away in protest, something that's not so easy to do in Russia. Still, this priest from a parish outside Moscow says he felt compelled to speak out.

The responsibility of what is happening now lays on all of us, Father Johann Bourdin told us. Everyone who approved it or stayed silent. But when he spoke in a sermon of what he called this fratricidal conflict, he was questioned by Russian police, fined and warned of a criminal proceeding. You're seeing people in Russia leave the church because of this? It's not a visible process.

They do not leave in groups, he told us. But without a doubt, it's happening. And just as this church in Udine, Italy, illustrates, as Putin tries to alter political borders, the region's religious map is also changing. Thank you for listening. Please join us when our trumpet sounds again next Sunday morning. This is Intelligence Matters with former acting director of the CIA, Michael Morell. Bridge Colby is co-founder and principal of the Marathon Initiative, a project focused on developing strategies to prepare the United States for an era of sustained great power competition.