Tom Wicker died today. Unless you are of a certain age, you probably don’t know who he was. His coverage of the JFK assassination earned him the respect and admiration of a lot of people. One of the things he reported during the chaos after the shooting was the content of the speech Kennedy was en route to deliver when he died. Here are some excerpts:
The speech Mr. Kennedy never delivered at the Merchandise Mart luncheon contained a passage commenting on a recent preoccupation of his, and a subject of much interest in this city [Dallas], where right-wing conservatism is the rule rather than the exception.
Voices are being heard in the land, he said, “voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality, wholly unsuited to the sixties, doctrines which apparently assume that words will suffice without weapons, that vituperation is as good as victory and that peace is a sign of weakness.”
The speech went on: “At a time when the national debt is steadily being reduced in terms of its burden on our economy, they see that debt as the greatest threat to our security. At a time when we are steadily reducing the number of Federal employees serving every thousand citizens, they fear those supposed hordes of civil servants far more than the actual hordes of opposing armies.
“We cannot expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will ‘talk sense to the American people.’ But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense. And the notion that this nation is headed for defeat through deficit, or that strength is but a matter of slogans, is nothing but just plain nonsense.”
Kennedy was fighting The Stupid, too. Mr. Wicker made sure we knew that in his first report. Rest in peace, Tom Wicker.
I’ve always felt a lot more died that day than one man.
Wicker, contra the account by Gay Talese in the Times obit, actually broke down a few times as he stood in a pay phone booth and read his reporter’s story back to headqtrs. He was being filmed and his voice recorded as he struggled to read the part about the president being declared dead.
In Wicker’s report he also failed to note that the two SS men initially flanking the car had been ordered off the limo — very suspiciously — by the head of the SS detail riding in the follow up car as they left the airport. Also no mention of the long seconds which passed between the first and last shot as the SS seemed extraordinarily slow to properly react. But TW understandably missed much of this bec the press bus he was in was well back in the motorcade — again a most unusual and important fact which TW failed to signal to his readers.
He also missed reporting the long delay before the presidential plane finally took off from Dallas — solely bec selfish LBJ insisted on getting sworn in and they had to wait nearly an hour before fed judge Sarah Hughes showed up.
Wicker later would become one of the Times pit bulls in defending the Warren Report against critics. And when Oliver Stone released his anti-WR movie “JFK” in 1991 Wicker quickly wrote up a nasty piece attacking it in his paper — “Does ‘JFK’ Conspire Against Reason?”
One of the weird things about the Warren Commission is that most of the commissioners didn’t back it. Almost all of them disavowed at least parts of it. But then you have reporters getting snotty with people who know they were handed a very flawed report.
Yep. Earl Warren for instance later said he thought Moscow might have been involved with Oswald (thus making it a conspiracy), which theory he might have gotten from LBJ who apparently strongly suggested this possibility as he tried to enlist Warren to head the commission. Russell, Cooper and Boggs also later expressed views pointing at conspiracy behind Oswald.
And the man who put the comm together, LBJ, at various times told people, including interviewer Walter Cronkite, that the Soviets or Castro probably were the culprits guiding Oswald
And yes, many major Corp media reporters were awful in the way they reflexively and aggressively stood up to back the Lone Nut Theory — almost Stalinist in the way they personally attacked WC critics as if no sane person could possibly disagree with the findings of those seven Eminent Men of Impeccable Integrity and Honesty. Wicker, Rather, Tony Lewis, Cronkite — all of them and others did the country a great disservice in the way they refused to allow for an open vigorous public debate on Dallas.
is that Wicker was a good journalist who only reported facts – not mindless speculation.
Stephen King just wrote a book called “11/23/63”. Here’s a part of the review in New York Magazine
Wicker and King – may their tribe increase.
Ditto.
For fifty years, the “magic bullet” was the heart of the conspiracy theories, but when it’s shown that the bullet travelled a perfectly straight line, it just goes down the memory hole and the same people gin up a new line.
Isaac Newton would have had no problem with the path of that bullet from the sixth floor window to Connally’s leg.
Ah, Arlen Specter’s infamous Magic Bullet Theory — still a major embarrassment for Lone and a bit of nonsense even Specter had trouble explaining when questioned about it by journalist Gaeton Fonzi in 1966. So much of an obvious problem for WC defenders that Specter stopped giving interviews on the topic to anyone who wasn’t a confirmed WC defender.
Yep there’s the trajectory problem and the pristine nature of the bullet to account for, not to mention Gov Connally’s consistent testimony that he and the president were hit by separate bullets — an impossibility if one shooter using the official murder weapon is assumed.
I just posted how TW misreported and omitted key facts that first day, although I tempered my criticism by noting where he and the other reporters were placed in the parade — well back and notdirectly in front of the president’s car as they usually were. So little wonder he got some things wrong but that’s hardly reason to applaud his reportorial skills.
And quoting a favorable review about a silly work of lone nut fiction actually is fitting for a theory so steeped in (official) fiction. Note too the sort of Stalinist ad hom attitude the reviewer takes to critics of the official story — precisely the attitude I pointed out in my previous post.