My Mother, Nancy Dickerson TV News' First Woman Star
John Dickerson is one of my favorite political reporters, meaning that I read all of his articles in Slate, listen to him on their weekly podcast, and am actually excited when he appears on "Washington Week in Review." Lest I seem too nerdy, I don't actually watch "Washington Week in Review." No, I listen to the podcast version. Okay, never mind, that makes me more nerdy.
This book is about his mother Nancy Dickerson, one of the first woman correspondents in TV news. After a few years as a producer, she became a correspondent for CBS News in 1960 and then worked for NBC News for most of the 1960's. I confess that I hadn't heard of her before. Admittedly, I wasn't alive when she was a star correspondent, though she was enough of a star that I'm surprised that I didn't know about her.
Her specialty was politics, and she was close to members of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, sometimes a little too close. She was often criticized for having too close a relationship to Johnson especially, though this was mostly because Lyndon Baines Johnson seemed to have a crush on her. It doesn't seem that there was any romantic relationship between them, though not for lack of trying on LBJ's part. At one point, during the 1960 campaign, Johnson had a few drinks and wandered into her hotel room in his pajamas to proposition her. She politely turned him down, and so he stayed in her room and talked about politics instead. Somehow, the pajamas make this story slightly classier than otherwise.
Later, during his Vice-Presidency, he was in Sweden, and knew that Nancy Dickerson was in Vienna on vacation. He then had the White House operators track her down, so that he could invite her to dinner in Paris. Again, she politely turned him down, but it's an amazing story. Ah, those were the days. Now, I don't think the Vice-President could be flown from Sweden to Paris in order to meet an attractive reporter for dinner in Paris. I think there has to be another reason for an Official State Visit.
Of course, I'm making the same mistake that others did at the time, by focusing on only the gossip. She was a remarkably hard-working reporter, as her son makes clear. As you can imagine, she didn't always get much respect from her colleagues in the press, though she did have important backers like Edward R. Murrow and Eric Servareid. She was a solid reporter, though she also tended to rely a little too much on her social connections to aid her reporting.
Dickerson is a great writer and writes a book that is also about himself, in addition to being about his mother. Some might complain about this, but I think it's interesting when he explores their relationship. He wasn't at all close to his mother during his teen years and tended to think she was a bit of a phony at the time, though he grew closer to her in her later years. In all, he handles some occasionally difficult material with ease. You try writing about the fact that your mother dated JFK. (They only went on a few dates in the early 1950s before Jackie.)
I've been meaning to read this book for a long time, and I'm not sure what took me so long. It's by a writer whose work I enjoy. It's about TV news, and I'm always a sucker for books about TV news. And it contains all sorts of behind-the-scenes material about JFK. Throw in some baseball and a little time travel, and it would have been just perfect.
