Tom Wicker, 1926–2011

The newsman who witnessed JFK’s death

Tom Wicker became a famous journalist the day President Kennedy was assassinated. As a reporter for The New York Times, he was in the presidential motorcade on Nov. 22, 1963, when the shots rang out at Dallas’s Dealey Plaza. Amid the chaos after the shooting, Wicker frantically scribbled notes, ran half a mile carrying his typewriter and briefcase, and dictated a 106-paragraph story in a series of phone calls. The shooting, he later wrote, “marked the beginning of the end of innocence.”

Born and raised in North Carolina as the son of a railroad conductor, Wicker served in the Navy before studying journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He started a career as a novelist, said the Associated Press, but when his “early books didn’t catch fire,” he began writing for local newspapers. His drive and talent landed him a job with the Times in 1960 as a political correspondent in the Washington bureau.

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