MONTPELIER, Vermont (AP) ― On Nov. 22, 1963, Tom Wicker was in the first press bus following John F. Kennedy’s motorcade when the president was assassinated. Wicker, the New York Times’ White House correspondent, would later write in a memoir that the day was a turning point for the country: “The shots ringing out in Dealey Plaza marked the beginning of the end of innocence.”
At that moment, however, all he knew was that he was covering one of the biggest stories in history.
“I would write two pages, run down the stairs, across the waiting room, grab a phone and dictate,” Wicker later wrote. “Dictating each take, I would throw in items I hadn’t written, sometimes whole paragraphs.”
Although Wicker didn’t even have a reporter’s notebook that day and scribbled all of his notes on the backs of printed itineraries of the presidential visit, his story captured the detail and color of the tragic events.
Wicker died at his home in Rochester, Vermont, after an apparent heart attack Friday morning, his wife, Pamela, said. He was 85.
“He’d been ill with things that come from being 85,” she said. “He died in his bedroom looking out at the countryside that he loved.”
Wicker grew up in poverty in Hamlet, North Carolina, and wanted to be a novelist, but pursued journalism when his early books didn’t catch fire. He worked at weekly and daily newspapers in North Carolina before winning a spot as a political correspondent in the Times’ Washington bureau in 1960.
Three years later, he was the only Times reporter to be traveling with Kennedy when the president was shot in Dallas.
One year later, Wicker was named Washington bureau chief of the Times, succeeding newspaper legend James Reston, who had hired Wicker and called him “one of the most able political reporters of his generation.”
Among his books was “A Time to Die,” winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1976, which recounted Wicker’s 1971 experience as an observer and mediator of a prison rebellion at New York’s Attica prison.
Wicker, the son of a railroad man, started in journalism in 1949 at the weekly Sandhill Citizen in Aberdeen, North Carolina, where he was paid $37.50 a week to report on such local news stories as the discovery of “the first beaver dam in anyone’s memory on a local creek.”
In mid-1961, when Times veteran Bill Lawrence abruptly quit his post as White House correspondent in a dispute with management, Wicker got the assignment. He said it was a dream assignment ― “sooner or later most of the government’s newsworthy business passes through the White House” ― and especially covering the excitement of the Kennedy era.
After the president’s assassination, he described Jackie Kennedy as she left the hospital in Dallas: “Her face was sorrowful. She looked steadily at the floor,” he wrote. “She still wore the raspberry-colored suit in which she greeted welcoming crowds in Fort Worth and Dallas. But she had taken off the matching pillbox hat she had worn earlier in the day, and her dark hair was windblown and tangled. Her hand rested lightly on her husband’s coffin as it was taken to a waiting hearse.”
In 1966, Wicker was named a national columnist, replacing retiring Times’ icon Arthur Krock, who had covered 10 presidents. Wicker’s first column reported on a political rally in Montana. He would later say that it was a huge step to move from detached observer to opinion holder ― and especially in the times he was writing.
Wicker was not lacking in opinions, though, and over the years took strong and sometimes unpredictable stands, emphasizing such issues as the nation’s racial divide.
Although Wicker was attacked by President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew for his negative coverage during the Nixon administration, he argued in a 1991 book, “One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream,” that Nixon accomplished much in his presidency and deserves a high ranking in history.
In his final column, published Dec. 29, 1991, Wicker commented on the fall of the Soviet Union and urged President George H.W. Bush to “exercise in a new world a more visionary leadership” on non-military issues like the environment.
“As the U.S. did not hesitate to spend its resources to prevail in the cold war, it needs now to go forward as boldly to lead a longer, more desperate struggle to save the planet, and rescue the human race from itself,” he wrote.
