Thomas Grey "Tom" Wicker 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. He was one of the lead journalists for the paper's coverage of the assassination of President Kennedy, and he had ridden in a press bus in that Dallas motorcade. 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 capitol.
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