Profile · Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
Nancy Hanschman Dickerson
Raised in Wauwatosa; local high school; born Nancy Conners Hanschman, Jan. 19, 1927; died New York, Oct. 18, 1997
$4.25 million
Before she was the first woman CBS hired as a network television correspondent, Nancy Hanschman was an architect’s daughter from Wauwatosa who took an education degree at Wisconsin, taught Milwaukee elementary school, and decided Washington looked more like the job. Born Nancy Conners Hanschman on January 19, 1927, she was the daughter of architect Frederick R. Hanschman and Florence Conners. She spent two years at Clarke College in Dubuque, then finished a B.A. in education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1948. By 1954 she was producing Capitol Cloakroom. In 1960 she won the correspondent’s title the men had kept, and that fall in Los Angeles she became the first woman to report from a national-convention floor. Lyndon Johnson’s decision to run with Kennedy went out through her interview. She covered the March on Washington, Kennedy’s funeral, and three inaugurals, then left the network to syndicate Inside Washington and produce 784 Days That Changed America—Watergate to resignation—which won a Peabody. Variety named her one of the top ten television reporters in 1964, the only woman on the list. She threw the parties the capital came to. Son John inherited the trade. She married C. Wyatt Dickerson Jr. on February 24, 1962; they had three children, including John Dickerson. She later married former Deputy Secretary of State John C. Whitehead. She died in New York on October 18, 1997, after a stroke, at age seventy, and is buried at Arlington. The Wauwatosa piece is the origin, not a long adult residency: a suburb that sent a schoolteacher into a boys’ club and watched her take the floor.