HAMLET – Thomas “Tom” Grey Wicker was born June 18, 1926 in Hamlet, N.C., the son of a railroad freight conductor, Delancey David, and Esta Cameron Wicker. Tom attended Hamlet schools and graduated from Hamlet High School in 1944. He worked on the Hamlet High Newspaper, the Sandspur and the spark was lit.
Tom Wicker became a journalist best known for his political reporting in The New York Times. Wicker served in the US Navy during WWII. He graduated from UNC Chapel Hill in 1948 with a Bachelor’s Degree in journalism. Over the next decade he wrote for several newspapers in North Carolina and then became a Washington D.C. Correspondent.
On November 22, 1963, Wicker was a member of the presidential motorcade when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. His coverage of that event was said to be thorough, thoughtful, and precise. During his tenure as a reporter for The New York Times he established himself as one of the most highly regarded political writers in the United States.
In 1964, Wicker was appointed chief of the Times’s Washington bureau. Then, only two years later, he began writing his well-known “In the Nation” column. Wicker wrote this column until his retirement in 1991. The column was a forum he used to express his thoughts and opinions on all things political. His column spanned topics such as the Vietnam War to President Nixon.
In September 1971, when prisoners at Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York took 38 guards and workers hostage, the inmates chose Wicker as the person they preferred to mediate with the authorities. He wrote about the lack of communication in his acclaimed book “A Time to Die,” written in 1975.
Wicker wrote 20 books in his life time, some under the pseudonym Paul Connelly. One book written as Paul Connelly, “Get Out of Town,” is rumored to have been written about Hamlet. Wicker died on November 25, 2011 near Rochester, VT.
