Nancy Dickerson

Nancy Dickerson (January 19, 1927 – October 18, 1997) was a pioneering American radio and television journalist. As famous as a celebrity and socialite as she was for her journalism, she later became an award-winning independent producer of documentaries.

Born Nancy Conners Hanschman in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee, Nancy Dickerson first attended Clarke College in Dubuque, Iowa, for two years before moving on to the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she earned a degree in education in 1948.

She worked as a grade school teacher in Milwaukee until moving to Washington, D.C., in 1951 where she took courses in speech and drama at The Catholic University of America to improve the skills she would need to pursue her dream of becoming a broadcaster. It was in her next position as a Senate Foreign Relations Committee researcher that she would develop a passion for the inner workings of government which would define her career of more than four decades.

Although the field of television journalism was almost entirely dominated by men at the time, Dickerson got her break in 1954, when she was hired by CBS News's Washington bureau to produce a radio show called Capital Cloakroom. She would also become associate producer of Face the Nation. In 1960, CBS made her its first female correspondent.

She reported for NBC News from 1963 to 1970, covering all the pivotal stories of that time: political conventions, election campaigns, inaugurations, Capitol Hill, and the White House. She is noted as being the first woman correspondent on the floor of a political convention. In 1963, she covered the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, in which Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. She was also part of NBC's coverage of President Kennedy's assassination and funeral. Her narration is heard on the NBC videotape at the Andrews Airforce Base arrival of the late president's remains and the statement made by the newly sworn in Lyndon B. Johnson in Washington D.C.

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