2026 ~ Annual 4th & Walnut Lecture
Tuesday 17th March, 7 pm EST.
John F. Dickerson
Virtual and in-person at Bellarmine University's Frazier Hall
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John Dickerson is a journalist, author, and longtime interviewer, most recently co-anchor of the CBS Evening News and chief political analyst for CBS News. He spent 16 years at CBS, where he also served as senior national correspondent, contributor to CBS News Sunday Morning, and previously co-host of CBS This Morning. From 2015 to 2018, he moderated Face the Nation and served as the network’s chief Washington correspondent. During the 2016 presidential campaign, he moderated two CBS presidential debates. From 2019 to 2021, he was a correspondent for 60 Minutes, where his story on the death of Elijah McClain was nominated for an Emmy. He resigned from CBS News in December 2025.
In addition to his political reporting, Dickerson is known for his in-depth interviews with figures ranging from Apple CEO Tim Cook to actors Glenda Jackson and Christian Bale; authors Colson Whitehead, Michael Lewis, and Tara Westover; and musicians John Prine, Jon Batiste, Jason Isbell, and Dave Matthews.
Dickerson is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and for 20 years has been a co-host of Slate’s Political Gabfest. He also hosts Whistlestop, a podcast on presidential history, and Navel Gazing, drawn from his 35 years of notebooks he carries with him.
He began his career at Time magazine, covering economics, Congress, and national politics, and spent four years as its White House correspondent. From 2005 to 2015, he was Slate’s chief political correspondent. He has covered nine presidential campaigns.
Dickerson is the author of On Her Trail (Simon & Schuster); the New York Times bestseller Whistlestop: My Favorite Stories from Presidential Campaign History (Twelve Books); and The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency (Random House).
He has received the Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency, the David Broder Award for political reporting, and in 2025, the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in TV Political Journalism for his essays.
A native Washingtonian, Dickerson graduated with distinction from the University of Virginia with a degree in English and American Studies. He lives in New York City where he serves on the board of Covenant House International.
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers … There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
This moment marked a pivotal moment in the monastic life of Thomas Merton as he turned from the world denying monk of The Seven Storey Mountain to the world embracing monk of the sixties as he began addressing many of the major issues of that time, some of which are as relevant today as when he penned them, if not more so.
The early sixties saw Merton’s most intense writings on war, the nuclear arms race, the cold war, racism, and other issues. When he was silenced from writing on issues of war and peace and he was banned from publishing his recently completed book Peace in a Post-Christian Era he started to circulate mimeographed copies of these banned writings, including his famous Cold War Letters.
After Merton’s experience in Louisville that day he would write to James Baldwin saying: “I am therefore not completely human until I have found myself in my African and Asian and Indonesian brother because he has the part of humanity which I lack.”
The annual "Fourth and Walnut Lecture" is co-sponsored by the International Thomas Merton Society and the Thomas Merton Center, at Bellarmine University.