Tom Wicker, 85, longtime N.Y. Times political columnist

November 26, 2011|By Robert D. McFadden, New York Times

Tom Wicker outside the White House in 1963, about two months before JFKs… (george tames/new york times )

NEW YORK - Tom Wicker, one of postwar America’s most distinguished journalists, who covered the assassination of President John F. Kennedy for The New York Times and became an iconoclastic political columnist for 25 years, died yesterday at his home near Rochester, Vt. He was 85 and also the author of 20 books.

The cause of death apparently was a heart attack, said his wife, Pamela.

On Nov. 22, 1963, Mr. Wicker, a relatively unknown White House correspondent who had worked at four smaller papers, written several novels under a pen name and, at 37, had established himself as a workhorse of the Times Washington bureau, was riding in the presidential motorcade as it wound through downtown Dallas, the lone Times reporter on a routine political trip.

The searing moments of that day - the rifleman’s shots cracking across Dealey Plaza, the wounded president lurching forward in the open limousine, the blur of speed to Parkland Memorial Hospital and the nation’s anguish as the doctors gave way to the priests and a new era - were dictated by Mr. Wicker from a phone booth in stark, detailed prose drawn from notes scribbled on a White House itinerary sheet. His story filled two front-page columns and the entire second page.

Nine months later, Mr. Wicker, the son of a small-town North Carolina railroad conductor, succeeded the renowned James B. Reston as chief of the Times Washington bureau, and two years later he inherited the column - although hardly the mantle - of the retiring Arthur Krock, the dean of Washington pundits, who had covered every president since Calvin Coolidge.

In contrast to the conservative pontificating of Krock and the genteel journalism of Reston, Mr. Wicker brought a hard-hitting Southern liberal/civil libertarian’s perspective to his column, “In the Nation,’’ which appeared two or three times a week from 1966 until his retirement in 1991. It was also syndicated to scores of newspapers.

Riding waves of change as the effects of the divisive war in Vietnam and America’s civil rights struggle swept the country, Mr. Wicker applauded President Lyndon B. Johnson and Congress for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but took the president to task for deepening American involvement in Southeast Asia.

He denounced President Richard M. Nixon for covertly bombing Cambodia, and in the Watergate scandal accused him of creating the “beginnings of a police state.’’ Nixon put Mr. Wicker on his “enemies list’’ before resigning in disgrace over the Watergate cover-up.