Almost a decade ago, an inveterate print man observed, “Covering Washington politics warps people. Covering it for a network can warp you even further.”

Who wrote this? Why, John Dickerson, CBS News political director and the new face of “Face the Nation,” who took the helm Sunday as the ninth host of television’s six-decade-old, top-rated Sunday gabfest. He replaces venerable yet folksy Bob Schieffer, who anchored “Face” for 24 years, more than half Dickerson’s life.

Dickerson is the old gray network’s first digerati Sunday moderator, a wonk who lives on the Web and, at 46, is three decades younger than his predecessor. He has been a panelist on the news program 86 times and subbed as host on eight occasions. It is hard to consider him “warped,” given his discipline (he’s a longtime contributor to the online magazine Slate) and polish (always nattily attired, with a face made for television).

Actually, he is second-generation warped, the son of the late trailblazer Nancy Dickerson, the network’s first female reporter, who served as associate producer on the inaugural broadcast of the show that he will now moderate.

It is quite a story, his full-circle odyssey from youthful rebellion against the Chanel-swathed woman (even ironed jeans) with whom he fought so vehemently as a boy growing up in a 36-room mansion on the Potomac River, the childhood home of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Dickerson’s childhood was part of the drama of an earlier Washington, a place of better manners and worse habits. Nancy Dickerson was a television star, and a knockout, Diane Sawyer before Diane Sawyer, getting her hair done at Saks three times weekly before work, chasing scoops, but also doing little to dispel gossip about her chumminess with Lyndon Johnson, Sam Rayburn and other political potentates.

Her younger son spent his adolescence struggling against his elegant mother and everything she represented.

“I hated her: I thought she was a phony and a liar,” he observes in his candid and affecting 2006 memoir, “On Her Trail,” which will be reissued with a new epilogue in August. He is hardly the hero of the story, which ultimately serves as a loving tribute to his mother.

As a petulant teenager, John shot his mother’s publicity photo full of holes with a BB gun — in front of her. Today, sitting in CBS’ Washington offices, a few doors from the “Face” studio, he confesses, “I was a little cretin.”

His parents “lived in a very big house and their liquor was excellent,” he writes in the book. Merrywood was neither merry — certainly not at the end of the Dickersons’ residence, when his father, C. Wyatt, lost his fortune and divorce shattered the veneer — nor wood.

Of his upbringing, Dickerson concedes, “No, it was not normal.”

No, it was not. Edward Bennett Williams, the powerful Washington attorney and part owner of a certain Washington football team, was his godfather.

When his parents split in 1981, John opted to live with his father, who founded the tony Pisces Club in Georgetown, 10 blocks from where his son now works. On many nights after school at Sidwell Friends, John says, he would “eat dinner with the busboys in the kitchen.”

Dickerson ultimately made peace with his mother, who died in 1997, long before she could see him thrive in the medium that made her a star. His 11-year-old daughter, Nan, is named for her.

When he was young, being a political journalist, especially on television, “was the last thing I wanted to be,” he says.

Yet here he is.

“Face,” which has 3.4 million viewers during its first half hour and is the crown jewel of CBS’ Washington operation, is not broken. It is the most popular television destination for folks who like to spend their Sunday mornings watching more political debate.

The challenge is how Dickerson can put his imprint on the program and move it forward, embracing the vagaries of rapidly changing journalism without damaging its success.

“You start with a huge rock in your basket,” Dickerson says. “The values and the aim of the show, which Bob Schieffer both embodied and set as his goal more than 20 years ago, is to basically figure out what the news story is, bring people on who can talk about it, explain it and put it in context, and then maybe make a little news.” Which Schieffer did on his final telecast, pushing Jeb Bush on campaign finance laws.

Dickerson brings to the show his print reporter background and his own style of questioning, talking multiple rpms faster than his 78-year-old Texan predecessor. There is also, he notes, “how the show lives in social media, and what you do after the show is broadcast.”

Ah, social media. Says CBS News president David Rhodes, who, after weeks of discussions, finalized the offer to Dickerson on April 11, the day before it was announced on the broadcast, “You have to notice that John has a pretty robust digital presence.”

Indeed, he has 1.36 million Twitter followers. 

“You might be surprised to the degree that he is a very silly and goofy man.”

Washington and politics present “this huge bath of uncertainty,” Dickerson says. His job at “Face” is to help viewers “get a little more control over some confusing things. If you’ve made their lives a little better, if they understand the issue a little bit better than they did before,” then he has made Sundays a little brighter, a moment of clarity before the launch of another busy week.