The Olasky Interview preview: John Dickerson

MEGAN BASHAM, HOST: Next up on The World and Everything in It: a preview of this week’s edition of The Olasky Interview podcast.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: WORLD Editor-in-Chief Marvin Olasky talks with veteran Washington reporter John Dickerson. He’s the new host of 60 Minutes on CBS. But he got his first front row seat in Washington when he was still a child.

OLASKY: The Washington you grew up in was not the typical Washington. Tell us about growing up in McLean on 49 acres or whatever.

Dickerson: Yeah. So, growing up in the 70s and 80s, Washington was—Well my mother was the first news correspondent for CBS News. And my father was a businessman in Washington. And he’d been pretty successful. So, before they were divorced when I was age 14, so until I was about 14, I lived in a very big house with lots of privilege. And it was a house in which they entertained Republicans, Democrats, Independents. And that was the way Washington worked. Nobody had to fundraise on the weekends, so everybody was around. Nobody had to fundraise at the end of the day. So you had a lot of social mixing. And you had a situation then where you would sometimes have conservative Democrats who were more conservative than liberal Republicans and vice versa. So you had a kind of ideological mixing. And it was a more transactional city.

It was also, some people would maybe argue, a less representative city because the relationships that were social, also were a part of a city clubiness that where you had people who had influence on lawmakers through wealth or through access that got their business done in Washington before the people’s business. So, but it was a much more, productive city. Now productive can be good and bad, but there was a lot more that got done because of those relationships. And my mother and father were very much a part of that social, that kind of social and political and policy all kind of mixed together in a way that it no longer does.

(Photo/Patrick Henry College/Art Cox)

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