The Woman Who Led the Way Into TV News
Guest Commentary, tvweek.com, May 1, 2006

Katie Couric will take the anchor's desk at CBS News 46 years after that network hired its first female television correspondent. Her name was Nancy Hanschman and she was my mother.

When Mom was hired she wasn't a star like Couric. She was a 33-year-old booker who had spent six years convincing senators and congressmen to appear on "Face the Nation" or the radio program "Capitol Cloakroom." She wanted to get on the air and studied every move made by her male colleagues Edward R. Murrow and Eric Sevareid and Howard K. Smith. She took voice lessons, acting lessons and studied policy issues like she was preparing for the bar, but her bosses said no.

Women didn't have the authority to deliver the news, she was instructed. Pauline Frederick was the lone pioneer, covering the United Nations for NBC, but she was the exception to the rule. One helpful male colleague explained to Mom that if she went on the air she'd be depriving a male of his salary and since she was single and the male correspondents had wives and children to support, she should really stop being so selfish. She should think of the children.

She didn't listen. In January of 1960 she arranged for a rare interview with House Speaker Sam Rayburn, the second-most-powerful man in government. He didn't go on television much-he thought the whole operation was frivolous, plus he was bald. The lights shone off his pate and made him look like he was wearing a miner's lantern. But Mom was attractive and cunning and she convinced him to sit still. Having scored the interview, the news producers had no choice but to put her on the air. They did so grudgingly. "Nancy," said one, "please don't giggle."

Mom covered five administrations, starting with Eisenhower's. Young girls imitated her in the '60s and '70s, interviewing their stuffed animals with the vacuum hose as their microphone. When big things happened, Mom was there. She was the first to speak with John F. Kennedy after he was inaugurated and she was at Andrews Air Force Base when his body returned from Dallas. She stood on John Glenn's lawn in 1962 and reported on his wife's reactions to his famous orbit. She was on the mall in Washington with Martin Luther King Jr. During press conferences Lyndon Johnson regularly called on her by name when he wanted to make news.

When I was born in 1968 it was nearly a state secret. By then Mom had married and was working for NBC, where the 10 a.m. "News With Nancy Dickerson" was the network's first to be anchored by a woman. Everyone agreed that viewers didn't want to see a lot of signs of maternity with their daily broadcast, so they shot her only from the neck up. If childbirth couldn't be a sign of femininity to her viewers or her male colleagues, it would be a sign of macho endurance-she was on-air the day before I arrived and covered the Republican convention in Miami two weeks later.

Now television newswomen celebrate their pregnancies in public early and often. The latest is ABC co-anchor Elizabeth Vargas, who will soon take a six-month maternity leave. The New York Times story about Couric's decision led with a scene of the family conversation she had with her children about the big switch. It's acceptable now to be a mother with kids and a newsperson too.

So that's it. We're done, right? The last barrier in television news has been broken. Almost. There's one more to go. The last barrier is whether Couric will be judged as a newsperson or as a woman. Will she be allowed the tantrums of her male colleagues or will she be labeled a diva the minute she has a bad day? When she interviews the president, will commentators say her questions were bound to be too soft or alternatively too hard because she was trying to compensate? The bar is higher for her. But is it higher because she didn't achieve stardom as a correspondent in the field and people will be quick to dismiss her as a mere "show person" or because people just aren't ready for a skirt behind that desk?

We'll know she's cleared the last hurdle when her work is mentioned and her gender and background aren't. Mom faced the same questioning Couric is now facing before she joined John Chancellor, Sevareid and Smith as PBS's representative in a prime-time "Conversation with the President." She had become a celebrity at a time when that was frowned on in a correspondent. That made commentators forget that she had been in the Washington news business for 20 years, and they questioned whether she had the news credentials to interrogate Nixon. The next day the New York Times editorial focused on one of Nixon's unfufilled campaign pledges about which "one of his interviewers pertinently reminded him." You never would have known they were keying off on Mom. The paper only mentioned the journalist's question, not her gender.

John Dickerson is chief political correspondent for Slate.com and is writing a memoir about his mother for Simon & Schuster.