On Her Trail

By John F. Dickerson/Austin

The first time I ever heard my mother sound nervous was last July, and by then she had been dead for two years. I was at the L.B.J. library in Austin, Texas, listening to a telephone call she had placed to President Lyndon Johnson more than four years before I was born. "Nancy Dickerson is on line two," begins the White House operator. Johnson picks up: "Yes, honey." She tries to start with a joke, but it warbles out: "The next time I need a new swimming suit I'm going to consult you." The President is silent, having forgotten a quip he made about her fashion sense that was picked up in the papers. Now she's jittery.

She moves on, pitching him a story she wants to do for NBC News about Johnson's special assistant. "We want to follow Jack Valenti all over with whatever he does and take pictures," she says, trying to make it sound fun. With her faint Midwestern accent it sounds like she's delivering a line in a musical. "No," Johnson comes back quickly. "You'll have more jealousy here than I can deal with now." She tries again for several more minutes, but Johnson shoots her down.

I didn't know what I'd find at the L.B.J. library when I went there searching for scraps of my mother. She died as a somebody, or someone who had been a somebody, anyway--as the first network newswoman for CBS. To baby-boomer women it must seem absurd that I would describe her that way, but by the time I was old enough to pay attention, women correspondents were everywhere, and her career was in eclipse, with only a few more turns in front of the cameras. She was a veteran of two networks and PBS by then and no longer had--or didn't show--the butterflies that are stirring on that phone call. So I am discovering a different woman in that conversation and in the cracked binders of newspaper articles from the one I knew for 30 years. I am finding the woman other people always told me about.

I admire her stride, but that's because I am following in her footsteps. (Though, of course, she did it all in heels.) I've been on the other end of that phone line, tap-dancing to bring a source around. And this year, I've been shuttling from Washington to Austin, stuffing myself at age 32 into the Bush campaign jet the way she did into those drafty prop planes in the same town, at the same age, 40 years ago. I too have drinks at the Driskill hotel and send a postcard to my dad on a slow afternoon.

I run into her old sources at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles. They've come back to relive Camelot's stop here in 1960 when they had dark, slicked-back hair and offered serious phrases to a young woman who was the first to cover such an event for television. In Milwaukee, Wis., where I stop with W., my aunt hands me a cache of Mom's letters. By election time, my Bush briefing papers have been smashed up against these relics in my cases for so long that the smell of the barns and attics where the notes were stored has soaked through everything.

At times this generational mixing makes the world look smaller now. Black-and-white pictures and yellowed news clippings always make people look weightier than they were. But when I think about what drew Mom away from Wauwatosa, Wis., to Washington in 1952, I realize it was the sense that the nation's capital was the center of the world--a place where decisions were made to rebuild Europe, battle the reds and grow a pretty smart economy. Great Men seemed to be doing Great Things, and she wanted that life at the center. The microphone was her passport there.

The stakes are just as high now, but seem so only to a narrow band of us who feel like we're shouting to reach the public over the e-mail chime and PlayStation 2. Our next President may preside over the first catastrophic terrorist attack and will appoint Supreme Court Justices who may completely reshape the social landscape. But these questions seldom come up in the national political conversation. Today's ambitious girl from the sticks might think Silicon Valley a more happening place.

The candidates look smaller now too. Johnson, whom Nancy Hanschman (her maiden name) covered in her first campaign in 1960, was a bigger personality running for Vice President than George W. Bush is today running for the top job. Perhaps L.B.J. was more mysterious--even if he did show off his surgical scar--because the cameras weren't always there. He and his friend House Speaker Sam Rayburn complained that television was killing the old back-room ways. Viewers thought Rayburn a lout when they saw him stay seated when Mom interviewed him. Editorial writers and voters criticized Johnson for talking to this woman before he spoke to the more "serious" men in the press corps.

Now Queen Latifah is asking Vice President Al Gore whether he prefers his women in leather or lace. And what's more, he answers. (Lace.) Bush has tried to push away the microscope, remembering what happened to his father when reporters got it wrong about the President's understanding of a supermarket scanner. So each day starts at the ramparts, and the candidate glares at photographers who try to catch him with his tie undone or drinking a nonalcoholic beer.

Perhaps Bush senses there's a smallness about newshounds too. Some of us want to get on the air just for the sake of the exposure, not because we have a new fact or idea to report. Mom was the first glamour TV gal--with matching ego--so she would have sympathized with us (if she wasn't stepping on our necks to get to the camera). She loved seeing herself on television, and she loved gossip. She had an undifferentiated hunger for the news, but she had a civics-class feeling about it. She thought all this information was important somehow because times were heavy, so she worked holidays and waited on doorsteps for those who didn't return calls. She thought that to get on air you had to get it right and be fair. That seems quaint now.

Even more old-fashioned is that for all her hard squints into the typewriter to get the story right, she made the Big Bargain. She could breeze through the halls of power, even in her 20s, and she could phone the President because--paging Dr. Freud--she was beautiful. And she knew how to work her beauty as well as her stopwatch. Just listen to one of the letters to her parents about the events lined up for the week ahead. "Monday I will be with Senator Scoop Jackson for dinner. Tuesday Senator Keating has invited me to a party for the Vice President [Nixon]. Friday I'm going out with a New York Times columnist. I sure am getting fancy." Her journal at age 12 foretells how she would later play the game. "Last week, Allan Wood said he would give me three Cokes if I would wear a sweater and skirt this week to dancing class. I got the three Cokes."

A lot of scoops came from those dates and the parties she threw. Of course, her male colleagues whispered that she was sleeping around. They would do that today too. But by letting herself be wined and dined, Mom was only working to overcome a locker-room atmosphere that favored her male colleagues. She may have given some pols a pass for making one. But not more so than the guys who sat by the pool with John F. Kennedy and said nothing when he went off to the cabana. She protected what we once considered private, just like the guys. When a drunken Wilbur Mills took her to see stripper Fanne Foxe perform and declared, "I own her," Mom didn't report it. She also stayed mum after having dinner with Johnson the night after J.F.K.'s shooting, keeping to herself the panic in his eyes, his wild talk that he would be the next victim.

I haven't been invited to Bush's ranch the way my mother was to Johnson's, but after covering John McCain in the primaries, I spent a weekend with a colleague and our wives at McCain's mountain cabin. The stories and insights and blunt talk crackled like fireworks. As we left, I had an urge that I still can't shake. I thought, "I've gotta tell Mom about this."