Nancy Hanschman Dickerson

Born Nancy Conners Hanschman to Frederick R. and Florence Conners Hanschman on Jan. 27, 1927, in Wauwatosa, Wisc., a suburb of Milwaukee. She attended Clark College, then a Catholic school for women in Dubuque, Iowa, then entered the University of Wisconsin, where she concentrated in English, Spanish and Portuguese, earning her bachelor's degree in 1948. She taught school for a time in Milwaukee but in 1951, came to New York in search, she said, of an interesting job. When she could not find something suitable, she went to Washington, where she became a registrar in the Institute of Languages at Georgetown University. She soon found a more desirable job, doing research for the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. In 1960, CBS decided it would expand its staff to cover the Presidential elections and named her its first woman correspondent in February of that year. The other two networks, NBC and ABC, already had named women to their news staffs, but Miss Hanschman was certainly in the vanguard of women in the ranks of network correspondents. She first covered Senator Humphrey's campaign, but when he lost the West Virginia primary to Mr. Kennedy and dropped out of the primary, she covered Senator Lyndon Johnson all the way to the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles in July of 1960, where he became Mr. Kennedy's running mate, She married C. Wyatt Dickerson, in 1962. That union ended in divorce in 1983. In 1989, she married John C. Whitehead, chairman of AEA Investors, an investment concern in New York, and chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. He is also a former senior partner and co-chairman of Goldman, Sachs & Company, and was a Deputy Secretary of State in the Reagan Administration. Survivors in addition to her husband include three daughters, Elizabeth Earls and Jane Dickerson, both of Washington, and Ann Pullion of Villanova, Pa.; and two sons, Michael Dickerson of Atlanta, Ga., and John Dickerson of Washington, and a sister, Mary Ellen Phillip of Milwaukee.