Following footsteps of a pioneering woman in TV

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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.