Almost a decade ago, an inveterate print man observed, "Covering Washington politics warps people. Covering it for a network can warp you even further."
Who wrote this? Why, John Dickerson, CBS News political director and the new moderator of "Face the Nation," who takes the helm Sunday as the ninth host of television's six-decade-old, top-rated Sunday gabfest. He replaces folksy-yet-venerable Bob Schieffer, who anchored "Face" for 24 years, more than half of Dickerson's life.
Dickerson is the old gray network's first digerati Sunday moderator, a wonk who lives on the Web and, at 46, is three decades younger than his predecessor. He has been a panelist on the news program 86 times and subbed as host on eight occasions. It is hard to consider him "warped," given his discipline (he's a longtime contributor to the online magazineSlate) and polish (always nattily attired, with a face made for television).
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Actually, he is second-generation warped, the son of the late trailblazer Nancy Dickerson, the network's first female reporter, who served as associate producer on the inaugural broadcast of the show that he will now moderate.
It is quite a story, his full-circle odyssey from youthful rebellion against the Chanel-swathed woman (even ironed jeans) with whom he fought so vehemently as a boy growing up in a 36-room mansion on the Potomac, the childhood home of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
Dickerson’s childhood was part of the drama of an earlier Washington, a place of better manners and worse habits. Nancy Dickerson, who spent most of her career at rival network NBC, was a television star, and a knockout, Diane Sawyer before Diane Sawyer, getting her hair done at Saks three times weekly before work, chasing scoops, but also doing little to dispel gossip about her chumminess with Lyndon Johnson, Sam Rayburn and other political potentates.
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Her younger son spent his adolescence struggling against his elegant mother and everything she represented.
"I hated her: I thought she was a phony and a liar," he observes in his candid and affecting 2006 memoir, " On Her Trail," which will be reissued with a new epilogue in August. He is hardly the hero of the story, which ultimately serves as a loving tribute to his mother.
As a petulant teenager, John shot his mother’s publicity photo full of holes with a BB gun — in front of her. Today, sitting in CBS’s M Street offices, a few doors from the “Face” studio, he confesses, “I was a little cretin.”
His parents “lived in a very big house and their liquor was excellent,” he writes in the book. Merrywood was neither merry — certainly not at the end of the Dickersons’ residence, when his father, C. Wyatt, lost his fortune and divorce shattered the veneer — nor wood.
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Of his upbringing, Dickerson concedes, “No, it was not normal.”
No, it was not. Edward Bennett Williams, the powerful Washington attorney and part owner of a certain Washington football team, was his godfather.
When his parents split in 1981, John opted to live with his father, who founded the tony Pisces Club in Georgetown, 10 blocks from where his son now works. On many nights after school at Sidwell Friends, John says, he would “eat dinner with the busboys in the kitchen.”
Dickerson ultimately made peace with his mother, who died in 1997, long before she could see him thrive in the medium that made her a star. His 11-year-old daughter, Nan, is named for her.
When he was young, being a political journalist, especially on television, “was the last thing I wanted to be,” he says.
Yet here he is.
A winning formula
"Face," which has 3.4 million viewers during its first half-hour and is the crown jewel of CBS's Washington operation, is not broken. It is the most popular television destination for folks who like to spend their Sunday mornings watching more political debate.
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The challenge is how Dickerson can put his imprint on the program and move it forward, embracing the vagaries of rapidly changing journalism without damaging its success.
"You start with a huge rock in your basket," Dickerson says. "The values and the aim of the show, which Bob Schieffer both embodied and set as his goal more than 20 years ago, is to basically figure out what the news story is, bring people on who can talk about it, explain it and put it in context, and then maybe make a little news." Which Schieffer did on his final telecast, pushing Jeb Bush on campaign finance laws.
Dickerson brings to the show his print reporter background and his own style of questioning, talking multiple RPMs faster than his 78-year-old Texan predecessor. There is also, he notes, “how the show lives in social media, and what you do after the show is broadcast.”
Ah, social media. Says CBS News President David Rhodes, who, after weeks of discussions, finalized the offer to Dickerson on April 11, the day before it was announced on the broadcast, “You have to notice that John has a pretty robust digital presence.”
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He has 1.36 million Twitter followers (@jdickerson). Until recently, he was chief political correspondent for Slate and will now serve as a columnist. He will continue as part of the site's weekly "Political Gabfest" chattering triumvirate, as well as host of the campaign-history podcast "Whistlestop." Dickerson strives to remain neutral, although two years ago he faced criticism for a story headlined "Go for the Throat," which some conservatives viewed as offering President Obama political advice but he defended as analysis.
His broadcast bosses embrace Dickerson’s work at Slate. “CBS News benefits from the reporting and analysis that John puts into this weekly effort,” said Christopher Isham, network vice president and Washington bureau chief.
Share this articleShare“He is a Washington guy, the rare person who can say this is really his community,” Rhodes says.
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“That means he’s been hanging around this business for a very long time. He doesn’t need to learn the subject. The writing is also really important.”
Says “Face” Executive Producer Mary Hager, a fellow University of Virginia grad: “He’s going to be very active in terms of getting out and covering the story, whether that means going to a primary state and working his sources in the state parties along with the candidates and their campaigns, or heading up to Capitol Hill to work the hallways.”
A lifetime of politics
Dickerson spent 15 years atTime, working his way up from secretary, and once babysitting a suspected terrorist for a couple of weeks for a story. He never did time in the hinterlands, he admits, "though I wish I had." But "trying to scratch my way in at Time was its own kind of experience."
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He loved covering the Hill, where he had a high school internship in the office of then-Sen. John Warner, a Republican from Virginia.
“You have this group of interesting, ambitious, textured people all engaged in trying to reach some kind of result,” he says. “The stories of that process, and also their backgrounds, it’s a great story. This is what’s so frustrating when it’s all clotted up.”
As for recent network ethics kerfuffles, NBC's Brian Williams's casual relationship with the truth and ABC's George Stephanopoulos's Clintonian contributions, Dickerson says, "I am well aware of where the line is." It is a line that has traveled some distance since his mother's days in network television.
After her marriage to financier and former Reagan deputy secretary of state John Whitehead, Nancy Dickerson moved to New York and continued to move in boldface circles. Hillary Clinton spoke at her Washington funeral. Will he be rigorous when it comes to interviewing his mother's friend?
“She would expect me to be as tough on Hillary Clinton as anyone,” Dickerson says. “And if I wasn’t, I would be letting down her memory.”
Dickerson’s life today is decidedly different from that of his childhood.
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Saturday is family movie night, while Sunday evenings are devoted to games. His personal essays and stories tend to be about an adored 10th-grade teacher at Sidwell Friends, his children's athletic involvements, daughter Nan's swim meets and 12-year-old son Brice's baseball doubleheaders after "Face."
His home in Palisades has no name and is far, far smaller than Merrywood.
He is married to his college sweetheart, the former Anne McKeehan, who coaches authors and experts for television and radio appearances. The Obamas have not been dinner guests at his home, as the Reagans were at Merrywood right before the 1981 inauguration — and the Dickerson fortune and marriage imploded. Many of Dickerson's closest friends date from his days at Sidwell, when politics and journalism were not abiding passions.
“He was into sports, computers and Bob Dylan,” recalls Jim Kingdon, who runs a renewable energy company. Says Paschal Fowlkes, a digital media sales director: “You might be surprised to the degree that he is a very silly and goofy man.”
Washington and politics present “this huge bath of uncertainty,” Dickerson says. His job at “Face” is to help viewers “get a little more control over some confusing things. If you’ve made their lives a little better, if they understand the issue a little bit better than they did before,” then he has made Sundays a little brighter, a moment of clarity before the launch of another busy week.
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