The Son Also Rises
Transcript
CORRESPONDENT:
Connecticut casts 35 votes –
CORRESPONDENT:
Briefly to Nancy Dickerson at McGovern Headquarters, here in the convention area.
NANCY DICKERSON:
With me is Senator Abraham Ribicoff, who made the nominating speech for Senator George McGovern. Senator Ribicoff, you’ve talked with your candidate, Senator McGovern. What does he think about the walk out and the turmoil here at the convention?
SENATOR RIBICOFF:
Well, he has been shocked. What shocks him even more…
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Okay, so that sounds like some unremarkable tape from the remarkably ugly 1968 Democratic Convention. But it was remarkable in one respect – the correspondent was Nancy Dickerson, the first woman to report from any convention, starting in 1960 for CBS and later for NBC.
Dickerson started as a small town girl with big dreams from Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, but she had beauty, guts and relentless ambition, and she used all of that to blaze a trail through Washington.
She had an instinct for stardom, not so much for mothering. Her son John, former White House reporter for Time and now political correspondent for Slate, didn’t much know her and didn’t much like her for most of his life, but he came to like her toward the end of her life, and really came to know her only when he embarked on her biography, called On Her Trail: My Mother Nancy Dickerson, TV’s First Woman Star. John, welcome to the show.
JOHN DICKERSON:
Thanks for having me.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
I think your book is a testament to how you can hold so many conflicting opinions in your mind at the same time. [DICKERSON LAUGHS] You had contempt for her, you admired her, you thought she was courageous, you thought she was a hypocrite. I mean, everybody has conflicting feelings about their parents but it’s as if you had two moms, or maybe three moms.
JOHN DICKERSON:
I think that’s exactly right, and one or two of those versions of Nancy Dickerson really only came to me, or I came to understand them, when I went on this journey through all of this material she left me after she died.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Which was the one that surprised you the most?
JOHN DICKERSON:
I think the one that surprised me the most is sort of the really authentic Nancy Dickerson. As a kid, you’re very quick to kind of point out and recognize things you think are phony, and that’s what we thought with her.
We thought she was always on stage, always an act, using us as a part of that act, and when I went back and saw her for the first time ever in my life in this footage from the ‘60s, she just comes across as being so incredibly authentic.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
What’s the piece of tape that you’re thinking about?
JOHN DICKERSON:
One instance is a radio report she did in 1961 from Europe. She was on a press junket and she was courting my father, and she worked him into a press report she did about a famous painting that was stolen from the British National Museum, and the piece is light, it’s amusing.
You can hear her flirting with my father, who she refers to in the piece, and the voice even that I hear is one of course that I never heard in life. I wouldn’t be born for seven years after that was taped.
NANCY DICKERSON:
It began to be a game to find where the Duke used to hang, sort of a treasure hunt in reverse. There was no sign saying “The Duke of Wellington Hung Here,” but we did find a little room where there were no paintings at all [LAUGHS] which prompted Mr. Dickerson to comment that maybe this time they made off with an entire roomful.
JOHN DICKERSON:
Later, by the time I got to know her as an adolescent, she was an enormous star, and she was Nancy Dickerson the Television Pioneer, and that’s a lot of weight to carry, which is something I learned and understood once I started working on this book.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Let us go back and stipulate that after they broke up, you moved out of her house and in with your father when you were 13. You’d just had it up to here with her.
JOHN DICKERSON:
And I left and went and lived with my father, and never lived with her again. But when I became a journalist in New York, where she was living by then, we became friends, very good friends, for about three and a half years before she got sick in 1996 and had a stroke, and then died eventually in 1997.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So let’s talk about the Nancy Dickerson that you say you admire most. She was the one who burst onto the scene in Washington, where no woman had gone before.
JOHN DICKERSON:
That’s right. A huge chunk in the middle of this book is a straight history of Washington in this extraordinary period in the ‘50s, when Mom first arrived, where the town was smaller but it was alive, and she arrived wanting to get right in the middle of the story and there are all of these wonderful scenes, some of which she recounts in letters to friends or to her parents, of where men tried to brush her aside and she reasserted herself, sometimes by flirting or making men feel happy to be in her presence.
But her key to getting through in life was by basically studying up and knowing more than the men around her.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
One of the people with whom she most successfully flirted was Lyndon Johnson, a senator at the time when she was a staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. That relationship served her all her life, but it also hurt her a little bit too.
JOHN DICKERSON:
That’s right, and when she looked back on it, she realized it probably hurt her more than she knew at the time. You know, her first job was as a booker. She had to get people to go on television or on radio, and a lot of them were reluctant at the time to do that. And she had access and some ability to charm people into going on shows.
Then when she was a full-fledged journalist she also was rewarded for her access and being able to get close to Lyndon Johnson.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
People always thought that she manipulated him with her sexual wiles, and that’s why she was able to elbow herself in front of her competing fellow correspondents and get scoop after scoop.
JOHN DICKERSON:
That’s right. It was one thing to have all the men around you think you couldn’t do the job, but then to have everyone around you think you couldn’t do the job and, to the extent you could do it, it was because of this special relationship – it requires an extraordinary amount of endurance and just will to keep yourself from going bonkers, it seems to me.
And she never did have this relationship that everybody whispered about, although Johnson in a couple of instances in the book that I recount, did try. And she turned down his passes.
But ultimately in 1970 when NBC pushed her out, it was because she had gotten just too close and the networks didn’t want their correspondents to be that close to people in power.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
We should also say that Jack Kennedy liked her, too. There’s a very poignant passage in the book where one of her few moments of lucidity, late in life, was basically remembering Jack.
JOHN DICKERSON:
That’s right. We were looking through these scrap books after she’d had her stroke, and she wasn’t really able to say much, so I was flipping through the pictures and there was one of her with Kennedy in the Senate, and he’s sort of leering at her.
And I said, well, it looks like he’s giving you the big eye, and clear as a bell, she said “Well, he gave every girl the big eye.” [BROOKE LAUGHS] And I didn’t know whether I was surprised that she’d said a clear sentence or that it had been Kennedy’s leer that had woken her out of her silence.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
You know, one of the things I thought was really interesting was that a lot of the jealousy and resentment she generated came from the fact that she was favored by Johnson, but also I don’t think that the newspaper reporters around her realized that part of what gave her an advantage was that she was a broadcast reporter, so when she was the first to report that, say, Johnson had chosen Hubert Humphrey as a running mate, she was there 12 hours ahead or more of the newspapers, and there wasn’t anything she or they could do about that.
JOHN DICKERSON:
And what she took hits for, as you quite rightly point out, is the fact that television was in its ascendancy and politicians were more interested after a period, because again, at the beginning, they were quite reluctant, but after a period they were anxious to get on television and have their picture beamed across the country.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
It surprised you, didn’t it, how important she was for her time in her world. You sort of willfully blanked a lot of that out, didn’t you?
JOHN DICKERSON:
I did. As a young boy, to hear people come up and get very excited about the fact that your mother was this famous television star, it didn’t really make any sense. It also - as a child, you want to be thinking about your own world, not about something else, but what was extraordinary, in searching through and working on this book, was the number of people who would talk about the influence she had on their lives, and what it was like – particularly young women – turning on the television and seeing a woman on that television, which was dominated by men, and thinking about what they could achieve and what they could do in life.
But I was sort of struck by the sort of tonnage of stories about the influence and effect she’d had on people’s lives.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
John, it’s a pleasure talking to you.
JOHN DICKERSON:
Thank you so much. It was a pleasure for me as well.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
John Dickerson is chief political correspondent for slate.com.
BOB GARFIELD:
That’s it for this week’s show. On the Media was produced by Megan Ryan, Tony Field, Jamie York and Mike Vuolo, and edited by Brooke. Dylan Keefe is our technical director and Jennifer Munson our engineer. We had help from Michael McLaughlin and Alicia Rebensdorf. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Katya Rogers is our senior producer and John Keith our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and find free transcripts, MP3 downloads and our podcast at onthemedia.org, and subscribe to our newsletter at onthemedia at wnyc.org. This is On the Media from WNYC. I’m Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD:
And I’m Bob Garfield.
Connecticut casts 35 votes –
CORRESPONDENT:
Briefly to Nancy Dickerson at McGovern Headquarters, here in the convention area.
NANCY DICKERSON:
With me is Senator Abraham Ribicoff, who made the nominating speech for Senator George McGovern. Senator Ribicoff, you’ve talked with your candidate, Senator McGovern. What does he think about the walk out and the turmoil here at the convention?
SENATOR RIBICOFF:
Well, he has been shocked. What shocks him even more…
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Okay, so that sounds like some unremarkable tape from the remarkably ugly 1968 Democratic Convention. But it was remarkable in one respect – the correspondent was Nancy Dickerson, the first woman to report from any convention, starting in 1960 for CBS and later for NBC.
Dickerson started as a small town girl with big dreams from Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, but she had beauty, guts and relentless ambition, and she used all of that to blaze a trail through Washington.
She had an instinct for stardom, not so much for mothering. Her son John, former White House reporter for Time and now political correspondent for Slate, didn’t much know her and didn’t much like her for most of his life, but he came to like her toward the end of her life, and really came to know her only when he embarked on her biography, called On Her Trail: My Mother Nancy Dickerson, TV’s First Woman Star. John, welcome to the show.
JOHN DICKERSON:
Thanks for having me.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
I think your book is a testament to how you can hold so many conflicting opinions in your mind at the same time. [DICKERSON LAUGHS] You had contempt for her, you admired her, you thought she was courageous, you thought she was a hypocrite. I mean, everybody has conflicting feelings about their parents but it’s as if you had two moms, or maybe three moms.
JOHN DICKERSON:
I think that’s exactly right, and one or two of those versions of Nancy Dickerson really only came to me, or I came to understand them, when I went on this journey through all of this material she left me after she died.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Which was the one that surprised you the most?
JOHN DICKERSON:
I think the one that surprised me the most is sort of the really authentic Nancy Dickerson. As a kid, you’re very quick to kind of point out and recognize things you think are phony, and that’s what we thought with her.
We thought she was always on stage, always an act, using us as a part of that act, and when I went back and saw her for the first time ever in my life in this footage from the ‘60s, she just comes across as being so incredibly authentic.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
What’s the piece of tape that you’re thinking about?
JOHN DICKERSON:
One instance is a radio report she did in 1961 from Europe. She was on a press junket and she was courting my father, and she worked him into a press report she did about a famous painting that was stolen from the British National Museum, and the piece is light, it’s amusing.
You can hear her flirting with my father, who she refers to in the piece, and the voice even that I hear is one of course that I never heard in life. I wouldn’t be born for seven years after that was taped.
NANCY DICKERSON:
It began to be a game to find where the Duke used to hang, sort of a treasure hunt in reverse. There was no sign saying “The Duke of Wellington Hung Here,” but we did find a little room where there were no paintings at all [LAUGHS] which prompted Mr. Dickerson to comment that maybe this time they made off with an entire roomful.
JOHN DICKERSON:
Later, by the time I got to know her as an adolescent, she was an enormous star, and she was Nancy Dickerson the Television Pioneer, and that’s a lot of weight to carry, which is something I learned and understood once I started working on this book.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Let us go back and stipulate that after they broke up, you moved out of her house and in with your father when you were 13. You’d just had it up to here with her.
JOHN DICKERSON:
And I left and went and lived with my father, and never lived with her again. But when I became a journalist in New York, where she was living by then, we became friends, very good friends, for about three and a half years before she got sick in 1996 and had a stroke, and then died eventually in 1997.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So let’s talk about the Nancy Dickerson that you say you admire most. She was the one who burst onto the scene in Washington, where no woman had gone before.
JOHN DICKERSON:
That’s right. A huge chunk in the middle of this book is a straight history of Washington in this extraordinary period in the ‘50s, when Mom first arrived, where the town was smaller but it was alive, and she arrived wanting to get right in the middle of the story and there are all of these wonderful scenes, some of which she recounts in letters to friends or to her parents, of where men tried to brush her aside and she reasserted herself, sometimes by flirting or making men feel happy to be in her presence.
But her key to getting through in life was by basically studying up and knowing more than the men around her.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
One of the people with whom she most successfully flirted was Lyndon Johnson, a senator at the time when she was a staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. That relationship served her all her life, but it also hurt her a little bit too.
JOHN DICKERSON:
That’s right, and when she looked back on it, she realized it probably hurt her more than she knew at the time. You know, her first job was as a booker. She had to get people to go on television or on radio, and a lot of them were reluctant at the time to do that. And she had access and some ability to charm people into going on shows.
Then when she was a full-fledged journalist she also was rewarded for her access and being able to get close to Lyndon Johnson.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
People always thought that she manipulated him with her sexual wiles, and that’s why she was able to elbow herself in front of her competing fellow correspondents and get scoop after scoop.
JOHN DICKERSON:
That’s right. It was one thing to have all the men around you think you couldn’t do the job, but then to have everyone around you think you couldn’t do the job and, to the extent you could do it, it was because of this special relationship – it requires an extraordinary amount of endurance and just will to keep yourself from going bonkers, it seems to me.
And she never did have this relationship that everybody whispered about, although Johnson in a couple of instances in the book that I recount, did try. And she turned down his passes.
But ultimately in 1970 when NBC pushed her out, it was because she had gotten just too close and the networks didn’t want their correspondents to be that close to people in power.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
We should also say that Jack Kennedy liked her, too. There’s a very poignant passage in the book where one of her few moments of lucidity, late in life, was basically remembering Jack.
JOHN DICKERSON:
That’s right. We were looking through these scrap books after she’d had her stroke, and she wasn’t really able to say much, so I was flipping through the pictures and there was one of her with Kennedy in the Senate, and he’s sort of leering at her.
And I said, well, it looks like he’s giving you the big eye, and clear as a bell, she said “Well, he gave every girl the big eye.” [BROOKE LAUGHS] And I didn’t know whether I was surprised that she’d said a clear sentence or that it had been Kennedy’s leer that had woken her out of her silence.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
You know, one of the things I thought was really interesting was that a lot of the jealousy and resentment she generated came from the fact that she was favored by Johnson, but also I don’t think that the newspaper reporters around her realized that part of what gave her an advantage was that she was a broadcast reporter, so when she was the first to report that, say, Johnson had chosen Hubert Humphrey as a running mate, she was there 12 hours ahead or more of the newspapers, and there wasn’t anything she or they could do about that.
JOHN DICKERSON:
And what she took hits for, as you quite rightly point out, is the fact that television was in its ascendancy and politicians were more interested after a period, because again, at the beginning, they were quite reluctant, but after a period they were anxious to get on television and have their picture beamed across the country.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
It surprised you, didn’t it, how important she was for her time in her world. You sort of willfully blanked a lot of that out, didn’t you?
JOHN DICKERSON:
I did. As a young boy, to hear people come up and get very excited about the fact that your mother was this famous television star, it didn’t really make any sense. It also - as a child, you want to be thinking about your own world, not about something else, but what was extraordinary, in searching through and working on this book, was the number of people who would talk about the influence she had on their lives, and what it was like – particularly young women – turning on the television and seeing a woman on that television, which was dominated by men, and thinking about what they could achieve and what they could do in life.
But I was sort of struck by the sort of tonnage of stories about the influence and effect she’d had on people’s lives.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
John, it’s a pleasure talking to you.
JOHN DICKERSON:
Thank you so much. It was a pleasure for me as well.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
John Dickerson is chief political correspondent for slate.com.
BOB GARFIELD:
That’s it for this week’s show. On the Media was produced by Megan Ryan, Tony Field, Jamie York and Mike Vuolo, and edited by Brooke. Dylan Keefe is our technical director and Jennifer Munson our engineer. We had help from Michael McLaughlin and Alicia Rebensdorf. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Katya Rogers is our senior producer and John Keith our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and find free transcripts, MP3 downloads and our podcast at onthemedia.org, and subscribe to our newsletter at onthemedia at wnyc.org. This is On the Media from WNYC. I’m Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD:
And I’m Bob Garfield.
Produced by WNYC Studios