Biography

Tom Wicker

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Tom Wicker was born on June 18, 1926 in Hamlet, North Carolina, USA. He was a writer and actor, known for Bus Stop (1961), Attica (1980) and News in Perspective (1963). He was married to Pamela Hill and Neva Jewett McLean. He died on November 25, 2011 in Rochester, Vermont, USA.

He was the voice behind the famous radio announcement of President Kennedy's death in which he breaks down in the middle of the announcement.
He supported President Lyndon Baines Johnson and Congress for the Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He criticized the President for the country's involvement in Southeast Asia.
He denounced President Richard M. Nixon for the bombing in Cambodia and the Watergate Scandal that he was put on Nixon's enemies' list.
Son of a North Carolina railroad freight conductor, Delancey David, and his mother, Esta Cameron Wicker.
He worked on his high school newspaper before he decided to make a career in journalism. He served the United States Navy during World War II. He graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 1948. After college, spent a decade at several newspapers in North Carolina including Winston-Salem Journal before becoming the Washington D.C. Correspondent.

[About Nixon] If you can imagine a President of the United States saying in a press conference 'I am not a crook'. You'd never before conceived that the President might be a crook.
[About the police who killed the inmates at Attica] It is now some 30 years later and I can't get over the feeling that they didn't have to do that. If they had just sat there, another two weeks, maybe three then the inmates would have given up.
[About President Kennedy's murder] No Americans living at that time had ever witnessed anything like that before. That assassin's bullet killed something else, the feeling that if you're exaulted, you're invulnerable.
[Civil Disobedience speech at a teach-in at Harvard University in 1971] We got one President out and perhaps we can do it again.

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