[070206cfb1200]{.underline}

John Cole:

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Library of Congress \[the Library\].
I'm John Cole. I'm the director of the Center for the Book in the
Library of Congress. We are the reading and book promotion arm of the
Library. We are fortunate that we are part of a national network of
reading promoters. There are now centers for the book in all 50 states
that we work with, and we are also associated with the author program
for the National Book Festival. And this year the Book Festival will be
held on Sept. 29, which is a little advance notice for you.

We enjoy presenting authors through this series, called "Books and
Beyond," presenting authors that have some kind of a special connection
with the Library of Congress, either are people who are heavy users of
the Library of Congress, have used the collections, or have worked with
us in different programs. And it's always a source of satisfaction for
me to be able to hold up a book, a real book that has been produced by a
real author, whom you're going to hear from in just a few minutes.

We always co-sponsor our programs as well, and in this case our
co-sponsor is the Serial and Government Publications Division of the
Library of Congress, which you will hear a little bit about in a moment,
because I'm going to have our speaker introduced by Georgia Higley.
Georgia is the head of the Newspaper Section in the Serial and
Government Publications Division. And I want to thank her for suggesting
John as a speaker, and I'm pleased that we're all here to enjoy his
presentation. There will be a book signing \-- a question-and-answer
period following, plus a book signing.

We are able to film this presentation to be seen later on the Library's
Web site, and also on the Center for the Book's Web site. We hope you
will ask questions. He has a lot of answers, but if you do answer a
question \-- if you do ask, if you ask a question, please, that is your
permission for us to use your image and your question as part of the Web
site presentation. So, that is one way that we try to perpetuate not
only the questions and answers that our authors have, but also the
presentations. And if you go to the Web site now, the Center for the
Book portion, we have around, more than 65 talks that we have presented
since the year 2000 \-- since the year 1998, actually, that are
available on the Web site.

I now would like to turn the meeting over to \-- the session over to
Georgia Higley to introduce our speaker. Georgia?

\[applause\]

Georgia Higley:

Thank you, John. It's a pleasure to introduce John Dickerson. It's
always \-- it's always great to have both a practicing journalist and a
user of newspapers to \-- to talk and give his experience about how to
create this book, "On Her Trail: My Mother, Nancy Dickerson, TV News'
First Woman Star." John Dickerson is currently "Slate" magazine's chief
political correspondent. And prior to joining "Slate," he covered
politics for 12 years at "Time" magazine. And four of those years he was
the magazine's White House correspondent. So it's particularly apropos
that he's covering his mother.

He's written extensively on more recent affairs, such as President
Bush's efforts to curb terrorism, his domestic policy and political
strategies. John has interviewed George Bush a number of times since his
election in 2000, and in 2004 he co-wrote the "Time" cover story naming
George Bush "Time's" Person of the Year. And in addition, the cover
story \-- the story he co-wrote on Karl Rove was included in the best
political stories of 2003.

Before his time at "Slate," he covered Capitol Hill. He reported on the
Gingrich Congress, the House impeachment proceedings and Senate trial of
President Clinton. And before covering Congress, John wrote about
economics and the budget process. And, during the 1996 national election
he covered the campaigns of Bob Dole, Lamar Alexander and Steve Forbes.
He has also written for the "New York Times" and the "Washington Post."
He appears regularly on NPR, and on MSNBC. He's appeared on the "Today
Show," "NBC Nightly News" "Good Morning America," "ABC's This Week," and
the "News Hour." And he's a native Washingtonian. He graduated from the
University of Virginia with a degree in English.

He's here today to discuss his book, "On Her Trail: My Mother, Nancy
Dickerson." The book is based on her personal papers, television and
radio broadcast recordings, as well as newspaper and journal articles
and reports, and of course John's memories. When his mother died in
1997, more than 20 boxes of her personal papers were delivered to his
office, which, he says, included everything from her journals as a
little girl to her journals before she had her stroke.

And, in researching John \[laughs\], I was looking at some of the
reviews of the book and I think Leslie Stahl probably provides one of
the best descriptions of the book, and I'd like to read a portion of it
here:

"John Dickerson's biography of Nancy Dickerson is a raw and compelling
portrait of his mother, who was, in a way, the Katie Couric of her time,
the first woman to break into the all-male fortress of TV news back in
the dark ages of the 1960s. With 'On Her Trail,' John Dickerson has
written more than a biography. It is a history of the time, with rich
news stories about John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, a social dissection
of elite Washington. It is, and this may be the most captivating part of
the book, a personal confession of life with a mother almost obsessively
driven in her career. Some may compare the book to 'Mommy Dearest,' but
it is really 'Mommy Lost and Mommy Found.' In the first part of the
book, mother and son somehow lose one another. But in the last part,
they find each other again on many levels.

"The book is a mix of solid reportorial digging with a son's sometimes
heartbreaking insight. It is bold, shocking at times, and brilliant. As
a journalist himself, John has a unique perspective on his mother, a
pioneering news woman who was the first woman news correspondent for CBS
television, the first woman to report from an anchor booth and the floor
of a political convention, the first woman at NBC to anchor her own
newscast, and a wife and mother."

Please welcome John Dickerson.

\[applause\]

John Dickerson:

Thank you very much, Georgia. And thank you, John. I am absolutely
delighted to be here for many, many different reasons. When I grew up
here, in Washington, I was an intern on the Hill \[Capitol Hill\], I
also interned for a lobbyist, and so I did a lot of research here as a
young man. I also did research here for the book, and my research
associate, Liza \[Elizabeth Higgins\] Hull, who is here, used to not
only work here before I knew her but spent hours here looking through
newspapers and pictures and journals, all of which was a tremendous
contribution to the book. So, we are knee deep in this place with this
book. And, also because I cover Congress and because last night I was in
the Capitol covering this non-Iraq vote, I looked over here and thought,
"Well, I'll be back again." So I'm really delighted to be here and thank
you all for coming out on this freezing cold day.

I'm going to start at the beginning, with the preface of the book,
because that sort of gives you the outline for the whole book and this
journey that Georgia so nicely described \-- my relationship with my
mother. And then, I thought I would sort of do something slightly
different than I normally do, which is piece together some of the,
moments in Congress which I covered last night. As I was leaving at 8:00
\[p.m.\] and there was no one around but the security guards, I had, as
I often do, a recollection of Mom and her period in the Capitol, walking
around when you can hear your footsteps echoing through the halls. And
so I'm going to piece together some of her experiences on the Hill when
she was there, both as a staffer and as a \-- then as a journalist. So,
let me start then at the beginning.

This is from the preface to the book. "The first time I ever heard my
mother sound nervous, she'd been dead for two years. I was at the LBJ
\[Lyndon Baines Johnson\] Library in Austin, Texas, listening to a
recording of her telephone conversation with President Lyndon Johnson in
February of 1964. He had been in office for three months. I wouldn't be
born for four more years. The White House operator begins, 'Nancy
Dickerson is on line two.'

"'Yes, honey,' says the president to Mom.

\[Laughter\]

"'The next time I need a a bathing suit I'm going to consult you,' she
warbles.

"Why is she talking about swimming suits?

"'What's that?' Johnson doesn't know what she's talking about either.

"She says it again. 'The next time you need a new swimming suit I'm
going to consult you.'

"She sounded so young. I listened to Johnson for hours on C-Span, which
seemed to have a special channel just for his phone conversations."

\[laughter\]

"I bought cassettes of Johnson's greatest hits for long drives, but I'd
never heard her on the tapes. Silence. The recording captures even the
regular blip of the reel turning on Johnson's tape machine. He's not
responding. I cough as if I were on the line with him. I want her to
drop the swimsuit business and move on.

"Johnson resets the conversation and saves us all. 'How are you, honey?'

"'Fine, thank you,' she replies, jittery. She starts to pitch. 'The
reason I'm calling is this. We want to do a story this week without
interviewing on television \-- nothing like that \-- but we want to
follow Jack Valenti all over with whatever he does and take pictures.'
And he said -- ' just talked to him.' He \[Valenti\] said, 'No, I'm not
going to do it. Every time I see your camera coming, I'm going to run
the other way.' And I said, 'Well, we'll run after you.'

"She's trying to make the piece sound fun; with her faint Midwestern
accent and precarious cheer, it sounds like she's in a musical and might
break into song at any moment. She's also talking very fast, producing
entire sentences that sound like single words. Now I'm nervous.

"'No, we don't want any of that,' said Johnson slowly. He's gruff, but
not irritated. 'We don't want to take pictures of employees. You'll have
more jealousy here than I can deal with now. I've got enough of it
between the old ones and the new ones and there's not anything he's
doing that's important enough for your camera. And if it was, it
oughtn't to be on camera.'"

\[laughter\]

"She tries again, but Johnson shoots her down. He's fighting, he's
fighting to integrate his staff, like his special assistant Valenti,
with the holdovers from the Kennedy administration. He doesn't want her
making his task harder. Before the call ends, Mom is able to extract one
approval. He will let her film the first lady and her daughters for the
"Today Show."

"'That's fine,' he says, 'Very good, and you let me know if there's ever
anything I can do for you, okay? Thank you, honey.'

"He hangs up. The tape burps out. The next call starts. Johnson talks to
the Secretary of Agriculture Orville Friedman about a cabinet
appointment. I exhale. I'd been rooting for her so hard I'd forgotten to
breathe.

"I went to the LBJ library searching for scraps of my mother. She had
been famous once. She was the first woman news correspondent for CBS
television. The textbooks refer to her as the "First Woman of Television
News." A few other women had gotten there first, but she was the first
one people remember, the first star. 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, for CBS
and later for NBC. She was the first to speak with John 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 reaction to his famous orbit. She was on the
\[National\] Mall in Washington with Martin Luther King. Lyndon Johnson
regularly called out to her by name when he wanted to make news.

"All of this happened either before I was born or after my bedtime. By
the time I was old enough to know what the news was, Mom's career with
the networks was over. She was still on television once a year or so,
but she wasn't like Walter Cronkite or John Chancellor. They were a big
deal. We watched them every night on the news. But people kept telling
me what a big deal she was. My fourth grade teacher asked me to get her
autograph. The mother of the shortstop of my Little \-- the mother of
the shortstop on my Little League baseball team asked if she was my
mother, and when I said yes she got so excited I thought they might have
to call the doctor. 'How neat for you to have her for a mom.' Not
exactly. I cared more about riding my bike and playing touch football.

"She was fine, I supposed. We lived in a big house and famous people
came to call, but I was never sure why that mattered or why she did. By
the time I was 13, I wasn't confused anymore. I was angry. I hated her.
I thought she was a phony and a liar. Everyone still thought she was a
big deal, but I thought she distinguished herself at home by being
petty, rigid and clumsy.

"My parents divorced that year and I took my electric clock and brown
comforter and I escaped. I moved in with my father. Mom stayed at
Merrywood, the mansion where she and my father had raised five children,
entertained presidents, and smiled on cue for nearly 20 years of
celebrity photographers. I would never live with her under the same roof
again.

"At the Johnson Library, I returned the matchbox-size tapes of LBJ's
phone calls to the desk. Mom and I had become close before she died, and
I wanted to spend a little more time with her memory, but I was late. I
had a plane to catch. I still hadn't checked out of my hotel. I hurried
back to the Driscoll in downtown Austin. Mom was 32, my age, when she
first stayed there in 1960 to cover Johnson's run for the White House. I
grabbed my battered bags and raced to the airfield used by the private
planes. In the parking lot I made a mental note of where I'd left the
rental car. I'd be back in a few days.

"'Jesus, Dickerson, we've been waiting for you,' said someone as I ran
out onto the tarmac. I dropped my suitcase at the snout of a Secret
Service bomb dog, and ran toward the 727 that read 'Bush-Cheney
2000.'The flight attendants smiled and handed me a cup of warm-enough
coffee. They'd seen this mad dash before. My more punctual colleagues in
the press were already poking at their laptops and reading the day's
schedule. I took my usual seat and straightened out the ruffle of press
badges that I wore around my neck. The plane started down the runway. I
touched the worn leather box in my briefcase that held Mom's rosary, my
preflight ritual.

"Where were we off to? I looked at my schedule. Michigan. Election Day,
Election Day was just two months off. I walked out on Mom, but almost 20
years later I was following in her footsteps."

So, that's the preface. This book goes up and it goes down. And most of
it, though, is my journey through those 20 boxes, those letters and
journals and newspaper clippings, and the story of Mom's life, and her
exciting and fascinating career here in Washington.

She grew up in Wauwatosa, Wis., came to Washington because she wanted to
be where the action was. And so she got a job as a clerk at the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee. And I'm now going to string together a few
scenes from both her time on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and
then a scene where she first breaks into television news, and then we'll
come back to Congress. I think that's the way I'm going to do it,
anyway.

Mom got addicted to the Senate drama. Each day she could watch all the
personal striving, pettiness, glory, generosity and pride of the human
condition. senators are great theater, especially when they get
indignant about their prerogatives. They gave outraged floor speeches
and cornered each other to exact promises and trade favors. She loved
the sounds of the Capitol, the halls echoing with the click of heels on
marble, the tourists asking for directions, and the typewriters
clattering in every office as she walked by.

Not long after she started at the committee, Mom met the flirtatious
Lyndon Johnson. He walked across the room, sat in a comfortable stuffed
chair, and put his feet up on her desk. He asked if he could use her
phone. "I raised an eyebrow at him," Mom said in her oral history in the
Johnson Library, "making it clear that even for the distinguished
majority leader of the Senate, that wasn't the proper place to put one's
feet."

For Mom, the Senate was like an Advent calendar; there was the public
show, but if you knew the right trick you could open a little window and
see behind the scenes. When Sen. Frank Church downed pitcher after
pitcher of water during a hearing, she turned to a colleague and said,
"He's putting out the fire from last night," knowingly referring to his
hangover. When Sen. McCarthy's face twitched repeatedly during a
hearing, she joked about it later to a colleague. "Nancy," her friend
responded, "that's not a tick; he's winking at you." The Wisconsin
senator wasn't the only one. "Chasing women kind of comes with the
territory in the male chauvinist Senate," wrote columnist Hugh Sidey at
the time, "like the springy black leather couches."

Mom's sources \-- well let's \-- she's not a journalist yet, so let's
not give her a promotion until she actually gets it.

\[laughter\]

So that's what it was like when she was here as a staffer. Well, she
didn't like being a staffer. She wanted to be where the action was and
the only way she could do that as a woman was become a member of the
press. So how was she going to do that? Well, she joined CBS because she
knew everyone on the Hill and they needed somebody who knew everyone on
the Hill as well. So they hired her, but then for six years they
wouldn't let her go on radio. They wouldn't even let her in front of a
microphone. She figured the only way she could get herself on air was to
get a scoop big enough that they would have to put her on air. So, she
went for the biggest game she could find, House Speaker Sam Rayburn. And
this is the story of how she got Speaker Rayburn on television.

She had actually done one little group of radio reports from Europe, and
so she had been on the radio, but had not been on television.

"Mom's experience in Europe had confirmed her belief that if she could
get a scoop, they would have to put her on the air. So, she picked the
hardest target, Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn. The formidable Texas
lawmaker hated television. He banned cameras from the House, except
during a few specified hours each year. He complained to his friend
Lyndon Johnson that the damned things were ruining the business of
politics, plus, the bright lights reflected off his bald pate and made
him look like he had a star burning on his noggin.

\[laughter\]

"And so, to most requests he would say something like, 'No one has a
finer command of the language than the person who keeps his mouth shut,
and move along.' But the 78-year-old was sweet on 'Miss Nancy' as he
called her, so he agreed to give her a rare and exclusive interview. If
she scored such a coup, her dubious producers had said they would put
her on the air. 'But Nancy,' one said, 'if you're interviewing the
Speaker of the House, please don't giggle.' She did giggle a little, but
not because she was flirting and chirpy; she was nervous. Rayburn was a
giant. The longest-serving speaker, he had led the Democrats for 20 of
his 48 years in the body. Most female television stars start today on a
local station interviewing the town gardener about her prized pumpkin.

\[laughter\]

"Everyone needs a little time to get accustomed to the lights. No one's
first televised interview is with one of the most powerful men in the
country.

"In my first television performance, I forgot to breathe.

\[laughter\]

"I was 25, but I looked ten. Fortunately, I was on Court TV, which was a
fledgling operation then, so probably about 14 people saw me.

\[laughter\]

"I was talking about the prosecution in the BCCI Banking case. While I
knew intellectually that breathing is crucial to speaking, I couldn't do
it. My answers to the questions petered out the minute I started, as if
I hadn't inhaled since college.

\[laughter\]

"I knew what I was talking about, I just had drywall dust in my lungs.
Fred Graham, the host, who had worked with Mom at CBS, said \-- Fred
Graham was the host, he had worked with Mom at CBS. 'I'm sorry, John,
we're running out of time,' he said, after I had barely answered the
second question. He looked like he wanted to give me CPR. Running out of
time? It was Court TV; they had nothing but time.

\[laughter\]

"They were just trying to hustle me off the set and bring on a less
mumbly guest. The bum's rush must have brought me back to life because I
answered the last question about political influence with gusto. 'There
is no political influence, in my estimation, in the prosecution of this
case.' 'In my estimation?' Who talks like that when they're 25?

\[laughter\]

"Someone gasping for air, that's who. Someone should have slapped me.

"I don't remember what, if anything, Mom said about the performance, but
she had probably been sympathetic. Her first time was balky, too.
Rayburn roared into his office, nearly tripping over the thick TV
cables. 'What have you done to my damn my office?' he yelled at her. She
hadn't exactly told Rayburn that it was going to be a filmed interview.
He thought he was sitting down for a little chat with a pen and paper.
'Get all of this out of here!'

"'It won't take very long, Mr. Speaker,' she pleaded. He relented. On
tape, Rayburn looks like a character out of a Dickens novel who refuses
to give the orphan soup or a seat by the fire. His voice is gravelly and
still tattooed with the Texas twang. He can't sit still and swivels in
his leather chair. Mom sits at the edge of the desk, as close as she can
get to stay in the shot, but stay clear of his swinging. She's dressed
conservatively in a black suit. 'You're going to be terrific,' she said,
putting her hands on his. 'I'm going to make you a star,' he grumbles
into his shirt. 'Well, if I'm not going to marry you, I might as well go
on your program.'"

\[laughter\]

"The real interview starts. It's perfectly fine. They talk about the
coming legislative year, his 78^th^ birthday, and the 1960 political
campaign. Rayburn seems so much more rich and textured than the men in
office today, but maybe everybody looks that way in black and white.

"When he gives his last answer, she thanks him, and then turns and looks
at the camera. nNow, back to Douglas Edwards in New York.' She'd heard
other people say those words, but after practicing them herself so many
times she could barely get them out. She just couldn't believe it was
happening. The tape records a few more tries before she gets that
closing right. In New York, producer Don Hewitt, who would later produce
"60 Minutes, called after the program. 'We want you on every night.' The
"Good Housekeeping" profile of Mom recorded CBS vice president John
Day's reaction. 'It dawned on him, just as she'd planned it to, that
Nancy was the answer to what to do next to spark up their coverage.'"

So, that's how she got the job. And, after she got the job, she used all
those contacts she developed over the years on the Hill to keep getting
scoops.

One of those contacts, as I mentioned before, was Lyndon Johnson, who
was in 1960 running as Jack Kennedy's running mate. And this is \-- as I
said, I was over at the Capitol last night, and Mom got a lot more on
the inside than I did, and she spent some fair amount of time in the
senators' hideouts, which are very special places that the senators
rarely invite members of the press. In 1960, the Senate was stuck in
session during the summer. Richard Nixon was out campaigning, and John
Kennedy was angry about that fact. He had to be here Washington in the
Senate. So Johnson tried to find a way to make Kennedy feel like he was
delivering for the ticket and making some use of this time that he was
in Washington. So this is a scene from Johnson inviting Kennedy for
lunch with some of the older senators.

"After the nominating convention" \-- and Mom was at this lunch, the
only reporter. "After the nominating convention, Johnson figured out a
way to show he could deliver politically. The senators were in
Washington for a special summer session of Congress, and it was driving
Kennedy mad. His opponent, Vice President Nixon, was already much better
known and was crossing the country, shaking hands and attacking the
young, liberal Massachusetts senator, while Kennedy was stuck in the
Capitol answering roll-call votes. To show that the time wasn't being
wasted, Johnson arranged a lunch for him with old Democratic bulls.
Kennedy had not been an inside player with the establishment leaders in
the Senate, and Johnson, the majority leader, was offering instant
admission to their inner circle. If Kennedy could make the sale at
lunch, thought Johnson, he might woo important people in the Southern
states the candidate needed so badly.

"Kennedy wasn't thrilled about the lunch because he and his strategists
saw the country differently than Johnson. Kennedy had been successful
playing the outside game in the Senate and making a national name for
himself. He and the campaign advisors didn't believe it was necessary to
court people who might be powerful in Washington but who lacked real
power in their states. After all, the Washington Democrats had backed
Johnson for the nomination, and it hadn't worked.

"Johnson invited Mom to the lunch to lower the tension. She was the only
member of the press there, but she hadn't necessarily been invited for
her professional talents. She was a warming influence, meant to put
everyone at ease. She knew Jack, and perhaps Johnson knew that his new
partner liked to be in the company of attractive women as well, the way
a thoughtful host might serve an honored guest his favorite wine. The
lunch was held in the hideaway of Sen. Alan J. Ellender of Louisiana,
where Mom had once handed out her mother's cookies. When she walked in,
the room was warm and fragrant with the gumbo bubbling on the low stove.
Georgia Sen. Richard Russell, Harry Byrd of Virginia, and John Stennis
of Mississippi sat in deep Victorian sofas as if they had been there
since Appomattox.

\[laughter\]

"As they waited for the nominee, the old men of the club grumbled. They
were astonished that 'the Boy,' as they called him, had won the
nomination. They were pretty sure he was going to lose to Nixon. They
were on alert for signs of haughtiness from Kennedy. Since he had won
the nomination without them, they imagined he already assumed that when
he won the presidency he would be their leader, and have more to say
about the nation's affairs than they would. Kennedy arrived late,
looking like he'd, looking like he's barged into the wrong room. When
the door closed behind him, he didn't settle down. He held onto the
sheaf of papers under his arm as if he were leaving shortly, or, worse
yet, like he might review them while the others talked.

\[laughter\]

"He shook hands with each of them, all of them older, and addressed them
formally with 'Hello, Senator,' to which each of them replied, 'Hello,
Jack.' As Mom described the scene in her notes, it was as if Kennedy was
uncomfortable being chaperoned by Johnson. He didn't want admission to
the club LBJ was trying to grant him. The men talked a lot about the
food. Ellender, who was known as 'Chef Supreme,' took considerable pride
in his cooking. Everyone took several helpings of the okra, oyster, and
shrimp-tail gumbo, a version of which is still served in the Senate.
Kennedy just picked at his plate. 'Not good enough for the Northerner,'
thought Ellender.

\[laughter\]

"The conversation never got rolling. Kennedy was vague about campaign
strategy and he kept calling them all senator. They kept calling him
Jack. To top it off, Kennedy left before everyone else, which gave them
all a preview of the role he had in store for them during the campaign,
which was to say no role at all. The lunch had been, by any measure, a
failure, but Johnson kept trying. Even after his guest of honor had
left, he said, 'See, I told you he really was a nice boy.'

The next scene is the night after John F. Kennedy's assassination.
Johnson \-- Mom had been at CBS where she'd covered Johnson, and then
she switched over to NBC. When Kennedy was assassinated, she went out to
Andrews Air Force Base, one of the most extraordinary things that
happened throughout this book, but I never saw any of this real time, of
course, since I wasn't alive, and since there weren't VCRs, we didn't
have tapes of any of this. My poor children have, you know, lots of the
tapes they're forced to watch of my performances,

\[laughter\]

but with Mom there was nothing.

So in these libraries and archives, I found and saw for the first time
footage, including footage of her and Bob Abernathy, at Andrews
narrating the return of Kennedy's plane. They didn't know what was
happening. They didn't know the body was going to be on the plane. And
it's extraordinary to watch the camera focused on the plane as the
casket descends, and they're learning that what's happening is that the
body of the president is returning. It's a whirlwind three days, which
then turns into a discussion of what a Johnson presidency would be like.

Mom on NBC is on a show with Martin Agronsky, and Agronsky and Mom have
a small little debate over whether Rayburn really wanted Johnson to run
on the Kennedy ticket. Agronsky asserted that he didn't. Mom asserted in
a polite way that he did. The minute she came off the air, there was a
call from the new president who complimented her on correcting Agronsky,
correcting the record, and doing it in a way that wasn't offensive and
didn't embarrass Agronsky on TV. He then at the end of the conversation
invited her and my father to dinner at his house, the night \-- his
first full night as president.

"When Mom and Dad arrived at the Elms, the name of Johnson's house, the
night after the assassination, the president was not yet back from the
White House. The Secret Service frisked them down to their underwear, as
if trying to make up for their own failures in Dallas. Ladybird was
upstairs. She had attended the prayer service that day, and visited with
Jackie Kennedy. They were greeted by Lucy Johnson, barefoot in a green
Chinese robe. Mom and Dad traded small talk with her.

"Lucy was focused on the irritating restrictions that would come with
being a presidential daughter. 'How would you like to have Secret
Service men with you every minute of the day?' she asked. Even now, she
couldn't talk to a boy late at night without the phone light going on in
her parents' bedroom. Her father, seeing it, would either monitor the
call or interrupt to tell her that she ought to be asleep.

\[laughter\]

"She concluded that living in the White House would only be worthwhile
if she could have her own private line.

"When Johnson arrived, Ladybird came downstairs on cue with a drink and
popcorn. After kissing her hello, the president returned to the subject
of Mom's exchange with her colleague Martin Agronsky. In his early days
in the House, Johnson explained, he was trying to get funds for a public
works project, but an older, stronger congressman had opposed it.
Johnson maneuvered the program into committee and then onto the House
floor. He won the debate on the floor, but in doing so publicly put down
his older opponent. Afterward, Rayburn took him aside and said, 'Lyndon,
you feel pretty smart because you got what you wanted. But you also got
yourself an enemy. A really clever fellow would have won without
ridiculing a man on the way and earning himself an enemy for life.'

"Everyone nodded. Johnson paced. He walked over to the television and
started talking back to NBC's Huntley and Brinkley. He was determined
that the country should be calm, and whatever the broadcasting duo,
whenever the broadcasting duo said something he thought was
inflammatory, Johnson would bark, 'Keep on talking like that and you'll
bring on a revolution, just as sure as I'm standing here.' His
speechwriter, Horace Busby, and Judge Homer Thornberry arrived. The
president explained that he'd ordered the Secret Service to protect
House Speaker John McCormack, because he was worried about a
government-wide takeover attempt.

"That afternoon the Soviets had made a show of good faith by turning
over a complete dossier on Lee Harvey Oswald's activities during his
years in Moscow. Johnson was relieved but not settled. 'Maybe they're
out to get us all,' he said. He was going to keep the armed services on
alert. He was sure that assassination \-- he wasn't sure the
assassination was the work of just one man. He worried about conspiracy
theories. He talked about how Lincoln's assassination still had
unanswered questions. 'Damn sure that kind of mystery doesn't happen
here,' he said. 'I'm going to make sure there isn't one damn question or
one damn mystery that isn't solved about this thing. You can be sure of
that. Not one damn unanswered question.'

"He interrupted himself, walking over to the phone and pushing one of
its buttons. He picked up the receiver. 'Is this the White House?'
Johnson said. 'Oh, sorry.' Then he punched another. 'The White House?
Sorry.' He looked over at his wife. 'Bird, come over here and get me the
damn White House!'

\[laughter\]

"'That's going to have to be changed. The whole damn world could go up
in smoke and I wouldn't be able to get Dean Rusk. Take me ten damn
minutes to reach the secretary of state.' The White House secretaries
who logged Johnson's activities every day as president recorded the
moment with almost comical blandness. 'President Johnson said that one
of the first things he would like to do is revise the White House
operator system. It was too slow for him.'

\[laughter\]

"Finally, the president got through to the national security advisor,
McGeorge Bundy. He reminded him to get those wires out fast to every
country recognized by the United States to assure them of the continuity
of our government. Then, without irony after the phone debacle, he told
Bundy, 'I don't want any of them thinking we don't know what we're
doing.'

\[laughter\]

"Next in the Secretary's log is 'Told Nancy about Rufus's bravery.'
Johnson's first letter as president had been to the Kennedy children.
His second had been to the head of the Secret Service, commending agent
Rufus Youngblood. Immediately after the first shots in Dallas,
Youngblood threw Johnson and his wife on the floor of the car and
covered them. 'There we were, hunkered down in the car,' said Johnson,
'and he had his body on us. And Bird was hunkered down there with us,
too. We were hunkered. Rufus moved so fast. It was one the greatest
things I've ever seen, Nancy; I didn't know Rufus had that many
reflexes.'

"At one point, Judge Thornberry called his daughter to reassure her,
just as millions of parents had called their children that night. LBJ
took the phone from Thornberry and started talking. 'Is he your
boyfriend?' he asked. 'What's his name? Buddy? Well, put Buddy on, I
want to talk to him. Buddy? This is Lyndon Johnson, your new president.
Just fine, thank you. Thank you. Need all the help we can get. Well,
Buddy, take good care of the little girl who's with you.' Johnson was
trying to comfort the country one person at a time."

Alright. The last reading will \-- we're going to skip the rest of the
Johnson administration and Nixon. And I'll just give you one last scene
before we have questions.

In 1996, while I was covering the presidential race, Mom had a heart
attack and a stroke. And it was quite a debilitating stroke that left
her unable to talk for long periods of time. And she suffered under that
condition for about a year and a half before she passed away. And I
spent a lot of time with her. She and I had become good friends when I
became a reporter in the early '90s. And so the book, after discussing
her career, talks about this period where we became ever-increasing
friends and enjoyed covering the news together, even though she wasn't
actually covering the news. She certainly was a great help in my
learning about it. And this is a scene from when she was sick, towards
the end of the book.

"When she had recovered a little, her past became our therapy. It was
embarrassing how little I knew. When I discovered a cabinet full of
photo albums, I spread them out on the Oriental rug. It was like I had
just discovered a friend's family trove. The faces are familiar, but you
know nothing about the experiences they're having. It's one thing to
know your mother as famous in theory. It's another thing to see pages
and pages of glossy photographs of her with the key historical figures
of the last 30 years. I showed Mom some of the pictures, but got little
reaction. So I showed her some pictures of the "Time" photographers \--
that the "Time" photographers had taken of me at work on the campaign
trail.

"'That's Dick,' she would say, pointing to my \-- to a picture of me
interviewing Lamar Alexander. 'No, that's me.' She'd called me by my
father's name, or maybe she really thought it was my father. After a
while, she learned the tricks toddlers do, to say yes or repeat the
right words as if she understood what was being said. And for a few
rounds of questions, I let the trick work, pretending along with her
that she knew what we talking about. But then I had to test her. I point
to a picture of Nixon. 'Who's that?'

"'Michael.' My brother. Sorry, Mike, I'm sure she didn't mean it.

\[laughter\]

"A few months into her therapy I mostly gave up on the identification
drills, happy enough that she was talking and interacting. Sometimes she
would check her watch and look around, confused. 'What time is it?' I
would tell her. 'I've got to get to work.' And then she would drift
away.

"Then, one day a surprise. We looked at a picture of her with Jack
Kennedy near the Ohio clock in the Senate. He was a senator at the time,
leering \-- I think it's fair to say \-- at the young Mrs. \[Nancy\]
Hanschman, a clerk for the Foreign Relations Committee. I joked, mostly
to myself, 'He's giving you the big eye.' 'He gave every girl the big
eye,' she said, as clear as can be, and, I'm certain, with a knowing
smile. I didn't know whether I was more shocked that she'd uttered a
clear sentence, or that it had been Kennedy's indiscretions that had
brought her back.

"My brother, Michael, came through town on business during one of my
weeklong stays, and the three of us had lunch at her house in New York.
We sat in on her occupational therapy and teased her like we did as
kids." I should note before continuing along, that we \-- when we were
kids, we were in television commercials with Mom. And, in those
commercials, we used to make lots of fun of her because she occasionally
got her lines wrong. One of them was for a product called Pro Power,
which is mercifully off the market. It was a combination of orange juice
and milk.

\[laughter\]

And, she \-- she got her lines rather confused in talking about Pro
Power, and that will be referred to in here.

My brother \-- so this is at lunch with my brother Michael. "We sat in
on her occupational therapy and teased her like we did as kids. She
couldn't use her right hand very well, so the therapist made her pick up
grapes, one by one, and tried to teach her to play checkers. This was
hard to watch. When I was a kid, Mom and I would sometimes play checkers
on a big fuzzy rug in the library with pieces the size of butter plates.
Perhaps it was because Michael and I were there, but the therapist said
that she had done as well she ever had. She couldn't handle the grapes,
but she moved a few checker pieces at the right time and in the right
direction, though she had to do it with her left hand. Her right was
just a soft useless claw. We decided that our teasing had helped, so we
gave her more of it. There was a certain comfort in being able to tease
her again, because if she weren't sick that's what we would have been
doing. It made us feel a little normal. So we taunted the hell out of
her to get her to do things.

"During the lunch that day we behaved like teenagers. We all had a
little plate of grapes to keep her therapy going, and Michael, and
Michael and I threw them at each other. They bounced off the antiques
and imperiled the Daumier miniatures and the Poirot hanging on the wall.
We knew the idea of them rolling someplace they might never be found
would get a rise out of her. And then, we went through the old litany:
her tennis game, her performance in those commercials, the time her
chair collapsed beneath her at Thanksgiving.

"'Oh, you kids,' she said, smiling slowly. As we kept at it, her right
hand moved towards the grapes. 'It has as much vitamin J as orange
juice,'I said, repeating her commercial gaffe. She pinched a grape with
her mangled fingers. 'And as much bread as watermelon,' said my brother.
We tried not to look at her, but we knew she was concentrating hard. She
moved her arm quickly and threw the grape at me. It was the greatest
thing I ever saw Mom do."

So, that's the last reading. Thank you all very much for listening. I
look forward to your questions. I hope you have them.

\[applause\]

Thank you. Yes.

Female Speaker:

Your accounts are very detailed and I \[inaudible\] found \[inaudible\].

John Dickerson:

I found \-- yes, I'm sorry. I'm very bad at that. I always forget to do
that. The question was, my accounts are detailed, and so what kind of
notes did I find? I reconstructed them in a number of different ways.
Fortunately, after the dinner with Johnson, Mom came home and typed up
her notes on the back of an old Western Union sheet of paper. And, so
there were some notes. In fact, in that chapter it goes on about some of
the other things that were \-- that Johnson said, like that at this
terrible moment he wished Sam Rayburn were still alive. And \-- I did
that. Then, of course the wonderful thing about the Johnson assistants
is that they kept notes of his daily activities. So I had some of that.
Homer Thornberry had written about that dinner that night. So, I kind of
tried to piece all of the little pieces together.

The same is true with the Senate. Mom fortunately wrote lots and lots of
letters home to her parents, and her parents kept all of those letters,
and so there are scenes in the book of finding these different caches of
letters that describe \-- and they have this wonderful mix of both
discussion \-- there's a \-- discussion of what is going on. For
example, a party at the Kennedy's house in the '50s, with all of the
players there and she's describing each of them, because of course at
that time the Kennedys weren't so well known. And at the end she has a
laundry list of other items about presents she needs to get for the
Hafenreffers, and so they have this mix of kind of personal and public.
So, there \-- she kept a lot, and fortunately there's a lot in the
public record as well. Yes?

Female Speaker:

How did your mother influence the way you go about reporting and
conducting interviews?

John Dickerson:

The question is how Mom influenced me, the way I go about reporting. In
a couple of ways. One, she was incredibly diligent and incredibly
hardworking, before interviews and before really anything. It was
wonderful talking to her old colleagues, who would talk about being in
various places and Mom kind of being off in a corner studying and
working. There's a great scene in one of these old pieces of footage
where she's interviewing a military official and he says, "Nancy, I
don't think that's a fair question." And she gives this great comeback,
which is, "I wouldn't have asked it if I didn't think it was fair,"
which, to me, is incredibly simple. And he then has to answer it. And it
was just incredibly simple and effective, and so I've looked forward to
using that line.

\[laughter\]

And I had \-- a wonderful thing that happened after I'd written the
book, unfortunately. But I found she did an interview with three other
network news anchors of President Nixon, that I go into some detail
about because this was after she had been let go by NBC and so it was
this wonderful \-- life was very, very tough for her at that time, both
personally and professionally, and there was this wonderful moment where
she got to be one of the four people interviewing Nixon. And it was just
a real shot in the arm, and she worked very, very hard on that.

And one of the questions she asked Nixon \-- which she never actually
asked him, but in her preparation she asked him \-- what mistakes \-- if
he made any mistakes. And in April of 2004, I asked \-- before I'd ever
read Mom's notes on this \-- but I asked President Bush a similar
question that caused some news. And I'm sort of glad it happened that
way, because it was just neat to see that sort of we were sort of on
some sort of parallel track in some strange way.

Female Speaker:

Did your siblings live with your father as well, and did they, any of
them, go into journalism as well?

John Dickerson:

The question was whether my siblings moved in with my father as well,
and if any of them are in journalism. My siblings are all a fair amount
older than me. My brother's the closest; he's five years older. And my
sisters, who are really \-- who are half-sisters \-- though that's a
distinction I only make sort of in the book but we never make in our
lives \-- are a good deal older. So they had all moved out of the house
when my parents split. But I \-- I am the only one nutty enough to go
into journalism. Yes, in the back.

Male Speaker:

In the LBJ Library, where you got some of the material, how much
\[inaudible\]?

John Dickerson:

Well, a great deal. There are pictures in here that are from the LC.
There was a lot of \-- Liza \[Elizabeth Higgins\] Hull spent a lot of
time here going through Martin Agronsky's papers. There's a great line
in here from Murrow's papers, because Murrow was at CBS when Mom
started. And there's some wonderful \-- Mom was assigned to Murrow and
he was little taken aback at that. But, once they developed a
relationship he was really a wonderful mentor, and throughout her career
she would cite all of the things he told her. And there is a great
letter here from him to her describing how she should handle herself
with the CBS negotiations over her contract. And it's very \-- it's very
funny. He says something \-- essentially he says, you know, they can
take anything from you they want and then sell you down the river, but
having said that, it is the standard CBS contract.

\[laughter\]

So \-- and Liza would write these \-- even when we didn't find a
specific little nugget, there was this great context of what people \--
Alsop's letters, because there's a lot of social history, Washington,
too; Severride's letters, gosh we had \-- and, so even if Mom wasn't
mentioned or she was mentioned in a sort of offhanded way, the book is a
lot about the time and the people around her, and the city, and so it
contributed a lot to that as well. Yes?

Female Speaker:

Thank you. I have to say that as a kid I loved watching your mom on TV.
I don't think anyone has said that, but I really loved watching your mom
on TV. But my question is, why did you \-- why did you write this
biography? And during the biography, you were also writing your
autobiography at a certain time in your life, being a relatively young
man. What were the reasons?

John Dickerson:

The question is, what were the \-- why did I write this and what were
the reasons for it? After she died, these 20 boxes showed up sometime
later, really in late '97. I really started going through them in '98.
And, if you like telling stories as we both \-- Mom and I both did, and
if you're a journalist, and you get \-- your passion is to have a thing
that nobody else has and then turn around and show other people. And
this was extraordinary. I mean, the letters, and her life, which again I
had never seen.

The book begins with a rather rough 40 pages or so of what my growing up
was like, and my view as a 13-year-old, as uninformed and raw as that
can be. And the person I discovered in these letters and the history I
discovered \-- well, there are two things. One, the person I discovered
was different than the one I had known in life, and I found incredibly
compelling and impressive and amazing, as a mother or as a person. But
then, separately, if I were just Joe Smith, it was a great story of
Washington social history and media history and these anecdotes about
the presidents that I had never read before. So it felt like it was a
story that sort of had to be told. And the more I started writing it,
the more I felt that was the case. So, that's what got me going. Yes?

Male Speaker:

Did your mother have any interaction with Paley, or any opinions on
Paley?

John Dickerson:

She did have interactions with him, but I don't \-- I don't remember any
clear \-- I don't remember any clear impressions, I'm just looking here
to see if Paley even shows up in the book. He doesn't. Gen. Sarnoff was
the one that she had the most interaction with, and there's a great
scene of how she essentially talks herself into Sarnoff's office; he was
the head of NBC. She had no appointment with Gen. Sarnoff, but she went
to his office and said that a good friend of his had suggested she go.
The good friend had never suggested she go. She'd never met "the good
friend." Sarnoff wasn't there that day, but it was just \-- it was some
sign of her moxie that she just marched into the boss's office in New
York. But \-- so \-- my father, who is still alive \-- I wish I could
ask him, because he would probably have the great answer to that
question. And I'm sure there is one, I just don't know it.

Male Speaker:

Was your mother aware of the influential role she played as an
influential woman, as a woman journalist and television personality? Did
she mentor other women? Did she feel herself as a role model? What were
her views on that?

John Dickerson:

It's a great question. The question was whether Mom viewed herself as a
role model or saw herself in the history of women in television. She
did, in both good ways and ways that weren't perhaps that helpful to the
sisterhood. There are great stories and there are some in the book of
people who \-- young women who came to Washington who just called her
up. A former colleague of mine at "Time" magazine, Ann Blackman, called
her up and Mom said, "Okay, let's go to lunch," and this was at the
height of Mom's stardom. So she was willing to go have lunch with a
young woman who wanted to be a reporter. Cokie Roberts tells a similar
story.

And she loved that role, and she certainly saw herself in that role. She
had \-- and there are some great quotes when she's trying to get \-- to
break in at CBS, where she's talking to reporters and bashing her bosses
by saying, "This is absurd that women aren't allowed on TV." And it's
very \-- she's quite a rabble-rouser in a sense. But on the other hand,
she had incredibly strict standards for other women. And, during the
'70s when there was a lot of promotion of women because there were a lot
of lawsuits in order to get FCC licenses, there were legal proceedings,
and she felt pretty strongly that a lot of women were given advancement
in the job and didn't deserve it. And that caused tension with those
women.

She also, I think because she had to do it without a playbook and
without any peers, had a kind of a view of both family life and the mix
and balance of work and family that was sort of, "You should never talk
about it. And I did these things when I was having kids and I never
talked about it, so no one ever should." I think women who came
afterwards felt like that wasn't helpful, because it kept up this notion
that you could do two incredibly difficult things perfectly. And I think
Mom came to sort of that view at the end as well, although in a \--
there was a big debate with Meredith Vieira when she left CBS "60
Minutes" and a fight with Don Hewitt. And Mom was interviewed for that
and essentially reiterated this position which was, you know, "Tough." I
think that was something that, again, women who came afterwards felt was
a little tough on them.

Female Speaker:

When you look at the notes your mother left \[inaudible\] Congress, and
you're going through \[inaudible\], do you see it as being the same,
different \-- has anything changed?

John Dickerson:

It's a good question. The question is whether Congress has changed, when
I look at Mom's notes and my notes. A couple of different levels. One,
on a public level that has nothing to do with our personal lives, they
were much more friendly. The two sides dealt and worked with each other.
They don't do that so much. When I was covering this last night, the
Republican and Democratic leader couldn't agree on the rules to even
begin the debate on what is the most important topic of the day. So, the
posturing is all still the same, and it was the same back then. There
was a kind of corruption back then that's different than what some
people would argue is the corruption of today, in terms of campaign
finance and that kind of thing.

Reporters had a relationship that was much closer to their sources,
which was both good and bad. You know, it's not completely gone. I spent
\-- when I covered the Hill full time, you know, I had a chance to spend
some time in those Senate hideaways too, and you can \-- after having
covered the Bush White House, I didn't know how good I had it, because
the Bush White House is very closed off. And on the Hill you get a much
more \-- you can really get a sense of the people you're covering, and
that's still kind of true today. Nothing close to what she got to see,
but it's still true today.

John Dickerson:

Any more questions? All right. Thank you all very much for listening and
for your questions.

\[applause\]

John Cole:

Well, I want to publicly thank John Dickerson for sharing his story, his
mother's story, with us, and I'd like to thank the audience for their
excellent questions. I think that together this has been a terrific
experience and insight about Washington, D.C., and about broadcast
journalism that we wouldn't have had otherwise. We're going to have a
book signing now, and I'm going to ask that John come back here and sit,
and if you have not purchased a book, I think there are still a few
left, and we can kind of form a line down this way for the book signing.

Also, I'd like you when you go out \-- and I know some of you need to
leave right away \-- take a look at the schedule for the next talks that
we have coming, the two coming up this month. Feb. 21, historian Doug
Wilson will be talking about his new book about Lincoln, "Lincoln's
Sword and the Power of Words." And we have just arranged for Sara
Paretsky, mystery writer, to come on Feb. 27, so those will be both
presentations plus some others that are here. But, one last time, please
join me in thanking John Dickerson.

\[applause\]

\[end of transcript\]