Tom Wicker
| Tom Wicker | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Thomas Grey Wicker June 18, 1926 Hamlet, North Carolina |
| Died | November 25, 2011 (aged 85) Rochester, Vermont |
| Occupation | Journalist |
Thomas Grey "Tom" Wicker (June 18, 1926 – November 25, 2011) was an American journalist. He was best known as a political reporter and columnist for The New York Times.
Wicker was born in Hamlet, North Carolina. He was a graduate of the University of North Carolina. He won a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University in 1957. In 1993, he returned to Harvard, where he was a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government. He died from an apparent heart attack, on November 25, 2011.
Wicker began working in professional journalism in 1949, as editor of the small-town Sandhill Citizen in Aberdeen, North Carolina. By the early 1960s, he had joined The New York Times. At the Times, he became well known as a political reporter; among other accomplishments, he wrote the paper's November 23, 1963 lead story of the assassination of President Kennedy, having ridden in a press bus in the Dallas motorcade that accompanied Kennedy. Wicker was a shrewd observer of the Washington, D.C. scene. In that capacity, his influential "In The Nation" column ran in the Times from 1966 through 1992. In an exit-interview Q & A with fellow Times reporter R.W. Apple, he reflected on one primary lesson of his years in the capital. Apple asked whether Wicker had "any heroes" in political life.
Wicker's 1975 book A Time to Die: The Attica Prison Revolt, which recounted the events at the Attica Correctional Facility in Attica, New York, during September 1971, received an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best Fact Crime book. He is also the author of several books about U.S. presidents, including Kennedy Without Tears: The Man Beneath the Myth (1964), JFK & LBJ: The Influence of Personality Upon Politics (1966), and One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream (1991). Other volumes Wicker penned include Facing the Lions (1973), a novel about a presidential campaign involving a candidate modeled on Sen. Estes Kefauver; Unto This Hour (1984), a novel of the American Civil War, during the Second Battle of Bull Run (1862), Tragic Failure: Racial Integration in America (1996) and Shooting Star : The Brief Arc of Joe McCarthy (2006).
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