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ON PRESS

by Tom Wicker

Viking; 271 pages; $10.95

Spiro Agnew, in his days as chief White House press scourge, once called Tom Wicker "the boy wonder of opinion makers." Half right. Though his New York Times columns can be pearls of persuasive good sense, Wicker is hardly a Wunderkind. At 51, he has been a foot soldier in the service of truth, newspaper division, for nearly three decades. He has risen from the Sandhill Citizen of Aberdeen, N.C.—a backwoods weekly for which he sold ads, laid out pages and, incidentally, covered the news. He has been a White House correspondent, Washington bureau chief, columnist and bestselling author (A Time to Die, about his role as mediator in the 1971 Attica rebellion; Facing the Lions, a 1973 political novel).

In On Press, Wicker retraces the road from Aberdeen to Times Square, pausing for frequent pit stops: anecdota, place-dropping and sermonettes on how the press is not really biased, conspiratorial, overly negative or otherwise worthy of punishment. The preaching, like Wicker's daily columns, is honest, pertinent—and excruciatingly self-evident. After a long retelling of his experiences covering election campaigns, for instance, he concludes weakly that "in modern times, it seems to me, the so-called 'media'—television pre-eminent among them—provide the true arena of politics ... That is the fundamental reason for the decline of party in American politics." Such vintage bromides frequently obscure Wicker's talent for seeing the human cartoon and the irony that resides in American politics.

Here is young Tom as sports editor of the Lumberton, N.C., daily in pre-Warren Court days, confronted by a war party of angry local baseball players after he had accidentally desegregated the box scores. Here he is, older but unbowed, battling with the Times's infamous New York editors, one of whom once interrupted him on a presidential trip to demand a reconciliation between his story and the Associated Press version. Wicker shot back: "My story's right and anyway, I just left the A.P. It's down in the bar, drunk." He inks an indelible portrait of Lyndon Johnson, who liked to hang the Presidential Seal on a bale of hay at his Texas ranch, hold a brief press conference and ride off on his horse. The columnist also remembers an intense young man who showed up in his Washington office with fantastic tales of U.S. duplicity. Wicker sent him away for lack of proof; three years later the visitor, Daniel Ellsberg, returned to the Times with the Pentagon papers.

On the subject of those papers, Wicker meanders to one of his few passionate assertions: short of war and other immediate threats to life, there is hardly any justification for claiming "national security" as an excuse for keeping things from the public. He also denounces competition as an evil force in journalism, resulting less often in better news coverage than in sensationalism. Some hard-charging reporters may find Wicker's assertion mildly heretical.