Following footsteps of a pioneering woman in TV

ON HER TRAIL: MY MOTHER, NANCY DICKERSON, TV NEWS’ FIRST WOMAN STAR

By John Dickerson

Simon and Schuster, $24.95, 335 pages

REVIEWED BY MARTIN RUBIN

Once upon a time, broadcast news in the United States was pretty much an all-male affair. Radio preferred a deep masculine voice, preferably Midwestern in tone, and this carried over into the early years of television, which was dominated by the likes of Edward R. Murrow, Eric Sevareid and Walter Cronkite.

But, as always, there was an exception to this rule, and she was called Nancy Hanschman, who hailed from Wisconsin and thus did have the Midwestern intonation even if she was no baritone.

After her marriage in 1962 to wealthy businessman C. Wyatt Dickerson, she adopted his last name, but whether Hanschman or Dickerson, Nancy was up there with all the big guys who covered politics — and particularly the president — for the burgeoning, ever-more-important medium of television.

As John Dickerson demonstrates in “On Her Trail: My Mother, Nancy Dickerson, TV News’ First Woman Star,” being the only woman in an all men club guaranteed that Nancy would stand out, but she never relied only on this. Driven, fiercely ambitious and immensely hard-working, she always went the extra mile, wrote another draft, took the extra take.

If her scoop sometimes came from the extra advantage being a woman gave her, so be it: It was compensation for all the sexism that had made her road that much harder.

She had “sharp elbows,” recalls the wife of one of her colleagues, but what viewers saw was a poised, charming, professional reporter. Off camera, the single Nancy Hanschman was known to be the escort of bachelor senators like Henry Jackson and those a little more in the swim were aware of her close relationship to married ones like Kenneth Keating and, more tantalizingly, two senators whom she would later cover in the White House: John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

After her marriage, Nancy Dickerson became an acknowledged leader in Washington society, entertaining showily across the Potomac at her palatial estate Merrywood (once home successively to a young Gore Vidal and a still younger Jacqueline Kennedy) even as she continued to cover hard political stories.

Already a successful pioneer in a highly visible medium, Dickerson became even more of a resentment and jealousy magnet after wealth, and still more glamour, were added to the mix. As Mr. Dickerson tartly observes:

“I had always assumed Mom faced a stronger form of [male] chauvinism than I see today — tough women are bitches, pretty ones are gossiped about. Mom was both difficult and pretty so she would have gotten a double dose. I imagined that meant she dealt with a lot more whispers and a sprinkling of overt comments.”

Having followed in his mother’s footsteps (he served as White House correspondent for Time magazine and is currently chief political correspondent for Slate), John Dickerson is well-placed to understand just how much has changed and not changed since the days in which Nancy had to fight so hard to make her mark.

Story Continues →