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Tom Wicker*
When Wicker first applied to the Times for a job in 1957, Daniel had been one of the New York editors who had turned him down. If Daniel were to be completely candid with Wicker, which he would never be, he would admit that from the beginning he had not been very fond of Wicker personally nor impressed with him professionally. Wicker was a tall, raw-boned, ruddy-complexioned Southerner with thick fingers and alert narrow eyes and a heavy jaw partially concealed by a reddish beard. He was then in his early thirties and had not been very experienced as a journalist, although he did have interesting credentials. He had already written five novels, three under a pseudonym, that captured some stark scenes of violence and sex and politics in rural settings, and in 1957 he had won a Nieman Fellowship in journalism at Harvard after having worked the previous six years on the staff of the Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina, his native state. Wicker was the son of a railroad man, and had been reared in the poverty of the depression in a small place called Hamlet. Like Clifton Daniel, he had gotten his degree in journal¬ism from the University of North Carolina, but this did not result in any preferential treatment for Wicker; it might have had a reverse effect, making Daniel more aware and critical, especially when Wicker came into the Times' newsroom with that beard. Nobody of the Times reporto-rial staff then wore a beard except a foreign correspondent who recently returned from Turkey, and he was quickly transferred to Jersey City.
Shortly after Wicker had completed his fellowship at Harvard he joined the staff of the Nashville Tennessean, and then in 1960, his beard shaved off, he appeared again at the Times, this time in Reston's** bu¬reau in Washington, and he was hired. He became one of Reston's boys and four years later, at the age of thirty-eight, Reston's successor as bu¬reau chief. It was an incredibly quick rise made possible by the Times great shift in the sixties and also by Wicker's talent as a journalist.
Wicker was a driven man, sensitive and tough, one who had become resigned without bitterness to the probability that he would never make it as a novelist.
But Tom Wicker had little time to ponder contemporary American taste in fiction once he joined the Times. At the Times he became caught up in the current of journalism, the daily opiate of restlessness. He trav¬elled across the country with politicians, wrote his stories on airplanes and in the backs of buses. He wrote easily under deadline pressure and liked this life that, through his position on the Times, brought him a rec¬ognition that would most likely have eluded him had he continued to take the long solitary gamble of the novelist. As a journalist Wicker could usefully employ other assets, too, among them a disarming country-boy manner that he did not attempt to modify, it being no handicap in Wash¬ington, it being almost an asset, in fact, during the early administration of Lyndon Johnson, a fellow Southerner, the onetime farmboy and rural schoolteacher: Wicker's coverage of Johnson through 1964 showed a depth of understanding that was not so evident during the Kennedy years.
In addition to Wicker's great interest in politics and people, he pos¬sessed a quick mind and an ability to articulate what was" on his mind. Like many Southern journalists, Wicker often talked better than he wrote. And wrote he well. He could probably have become a good televi¬sion commentator, and was effective when debating on panel shows, .making his points with long Faulknerian sentences mixed with regional metaphors and wit, coated in a Carolina accent.
But with all his qualities, Tom Wicker's early success on the Times owed a great deal to luck, to the fact that he had been at the right place, at the right time. While this may also be generally true of many journal¬ists who succeeded in a big way when young, it was extraordinary true in Wicker's case: he joined the Times just before its revolution, he joined Reston's bureau just in time for the early excitement of the Kennedy era and the drama that followed, and he happened to be the only Timesman among the Washington press corps who travelled with Kennedy to Dal¬las. Wicker's story of the assassination took up more than a page in the Times of November 23, 1963, and it was a remarkable achievement in reporting and writing, in collecting facts out of confusion, in recon¬structing the most deranged day in his life, the despair and bitterness and disbelief, and then getting on a telephone to,New York and dictating the story in a voice that only rarely cracked with emotion.
Wicker had chosen that day to be without a notebook, so he scribbled his observations and facts across the back of a mimeographed itinerary of
Kennedy's two-day tour of Texas. Today Wicker cannot read many of these notes, but on November 23 they were as clear to him as 60-point type. He wrote his story with other reporters in the pressroom of the Dallas air terminal, having gotten there after a half-mile run while lug¬ging his typewriter and briefcase, jumping a fence along the way without breaking stride, remembering almost everything he saw and heard after Kennedy had been shot, although remembering relatively little of what had happened before that. Wicker had been riding in the Presidential motorcade in one of the press buses; and when Kennedy was hit, Wicker heard no shots, although another reporter in the bus noticed that the President's car, which was about ten cars ahead, was speeding away.
The press buses continued to travel at a parade pace, but things quickly began to change. Wicker noticed a motorcycle policeman bump over a curb, dismount, and begin to run. There seemed to be some confu¬sion within the crowds of people who had been lined along the road to get a glimpse of the President. The press buses stopped at the place where Kennedy was to address the crowd. Wicker noticed how the heads of the large crowd of people began to turn as the word was passed back. Wicker was literally seeing a rumour travel. It reminded him of wind sweeping over a wheat field. Then a stranger grabbed him by the arm and asked, "Has the President been shot?" "I don't think so," Wicker said, "but something happened."
Wicker and the other reporters, about thirty-five of them, moved to where they were to hear Kennedy speak, and it was there that another reporter came running with the news. Then all the reporters ran. They jumped into the press buses that would take them to Parkland Hospital. During the next few hours, the details began to pile up - the eyewitness accounts, the medical reports, the words of White House spokesmen, the recollection of one newsman that he had heard shots, the description of a Dallas television reporter who had seen a rifle being withdrawn from the corner fifth- or sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. There were truths, half-truths, errors, illusions, rumours, secondhand ac¬counts, thirdhand accounts - all these were passed freely to the press, were circulated among them, and there was very little time to check these facts or allegations. Wicker and the rest had to go largely on instinct, the totality of their experience so far in life, their insight into others, a spe¬cial sense that good reporters develop and use in a crisis. And Wicker's instinct in this crisis served him well.
It is probably true that Wicker's reporting from Dallas that day, one afternoon's work, will live longer than any novel, or play, or essay, or piece of reportage that he has ever written or will ever write. It was not that he produced a classic. He had not. He had previously reported as well, written better. But the test in Dallas was like no other test. It was an assignment that could make or break a Timesman's whole career in a few hours. Wicker was writing for history that day, and his story dominated the front page, was spread in double measure and set in larger-than-usual type, as was his by-line - this edition of the Times would not be thrown away by readers a day later, it was a collector's item. It would be saved by hundreds, perhaps thousands of readers and they would store it for decades in their attics or closets, and would pass it on as a family heir¬loom or a relic or a vague testimony to their existence on the day Presi¬dent was shot.
When Tom Wicker's story began to come in from Dallas, two pages at a time, he running down the steps of the Dallas terminal each time across the waiting room into a phone booth, miraculously never having to wait for a booth or a line to New York, the most concern was not with Wicker's prose style - it was whether he had it all, and had it right, even things that would have seemed too trivial on any other day... He was writing blind. He was feeling the facts and was guided by instinct. There were 106 paragraphs in his story in the Times the next day, and yet only slightly more than one of these paragraphs described what Wicker had seen with his own eyes.
After the assassination story that day, and the related stories that followed, Wicker's stock rose sharply at the Times. He was then thirty-seven, having been on Reston's staff only three years, and he had un¬doubtedly been lucky at being at the right place, at the right time; but in Dallas on that particular afternoon he had also been the right man. It was not surprising a year later when Reston selected Wicker to succeed him as the Washington bureau chief...
From: The Kingdom and the Power by Gay Talese

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