Columnist Tom Wicker, covered assassination of President Kennedy

Tom Wicker, the former New York Times political reporter and columnist whose career soared following his acclaimed coverage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, died Friday at his home in Rochester, Vt. He was 85.

Wicker died apparently of a heart attack Friday morning, his wife, Pamela, said. "He'd been ill with things that come from being 85," she said. "He died in his bedroom looking out at the countryside that he loved."

Wicker grew up in poverty in Hamlet, N.C., and wanted to be a novelist, but pursued journalism when his early books didn't catch fire. He worked at newspapers in North Carolina before winning a spot as a political correspondent in the Times' Washington bureau in 1960.

Three years later, he was the only Times reporter to be traveling with Kennedy when the president was shot in Dallas.

Gay Talese, author of the major history of The New York Times, wrote of Wicker's coverage: "It was a remarkable achievement in reporting and writing, in collecting facts out of confusion, in reconstructing 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."

One year later, Wicker was named Washington bureau chief of the Times, succeeding newspaper legend James Reston, who had hired Wicker and called him "one of the most able political reporters of his generation." In 1966, Wicker began his "In the Nation" column, becoming, along with colleague Anthony Lewis, a longtime liberal voice on the Op-Ed page. Two years later, he was named associate editor of the Times, a post he held until 1985.

He ended his column and retired to Vermont in 1991 but continued to write. In his final column, published Dec. 29, 1991, Wicker commented on the fall of the Soviet Union and urged President George H.W. Bush to "exercise in a new world a more visionary leadership" on nonmilitary issues like the environment.