Thirty-something years later the plain-spoken writer can be found visiting different countries as a media consultant, sharing gems of his era and tips on how to apply journalism ethics in today’s situations. It was while on such a visit to Guyana as part of a US State Department initiative last month that he spoke with this newspaper.
Dickenson began his career as an intern in Houston and subsequently moved to Washington DC the hub of political journalism where he was hired as a political reporter with the National Observer. He later moved to the Washington Star as political reporter, columnist and then national editor. He was later hired by none other than Ben Bradlee as political editor at the Washington Post.
Dickenson was there when the Watergate scandal broke and remembers those days as exciting. He says there was absolutely no fear among the editors and reporters who worked on the stories – quite unlike what obtains in other countries.
He recalled covering the huge Vietnam anti-war protests in Washington and said that period brought about a huge change in the attitude of deference reporters previously had towards presidents and secretaries of state because these officials were found to be lying. The attitude now, he said, is that the interviewee has to prove him or herself worthy of doing the job.
Dickenson also covered the assassination of US president John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1963 and later that of his brother senator Robert Francis Kennedy five years later.
Beginning in 1962, his political reporting covered the JFK administration as well as those of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Regan, George H W Bush and Bill Clinton. “I thought that during most of those years, I had the best job in the world and felt sorry for everyone else,” Dickenson said.
His knowledge of American history was a huge plus and Dickenson feels its imperative for anyone who wants to be a political reporter to know history. The issues of the day, he said, always have a background in what happened 20 or 50 years ago.
He noted that the US was still dealing with race, central government, power in states. Issues that were dominant at the time of the writing of the US constitution are still relevant over 200 years later; a continuity of issues that go back to the founding of the country.
He said that in his visits to countries around the world, he tells journalists that prior to going to any assignment they should do three things, “prepare, prepare, prepare”. Any journalist who is prepared and informed beforehand of the subject matter will immediately sense evasiveness and know when s/he is being told a falsehood.
He likened it to the training an auto mechanic needs, adding that if a mechanic did not know how a car ran then s/her obviously would not be able to repair one. He said the process of becoming a political reporter involved consistently educating oneself, cultivating sources among politicians, advisers and people in power.
“The more you know,” he added, “the more confident you will be when asking questions.”
He said that a common practice among talk show hosts in the US, particularly those on the Sunday morning shows, was to go through the libraries and find statements their prominent guests might have made perhaps three months earlier, check them against what they were currently doing and then expose the discrepancy and ask them to explain the deviation from policy. But more often than not, he said, the politicians appearing on those shows are briefed on what to expect and quite often they were found to be “staying on the message” – evading the issue because of what they wanted the message to be.
Though Dickenson has practiced impartiality, he noted that in the US there were some journalists who preferred one candidate over another or made judgements about who they thought the stronger candidate was. He singled out Fox and MSNBC as being identified as biased and said he had no problem with that as long as they did not pretend to be otherwise.
The retired journalist who has also been has been the coordinator and moderator of the Smithsonian Institute’s ‘The Smithsonian Forum on the Media and Society’ has also written two books. Home on the Range chronicles the epic drama of the settling and development of the High Plains, as viewed through the saga of his family, wheat farmers of McDonald, Kansas. In his second book, We Few: The Marine Corps 400 in the War Against Japan, the former marine chronicles the experiences of ten men, out of 400 who graduated from a special officer candidate school set up after the Marine Corps found itself short of men. The book follows them through induction, training, and combat in some of the bloodiest battles of World War II, to the lives they led after the war.
Dickenson served as a marine during the Korean war, but did not see combat as he entered after the armistice.
