Tom Wicker began working in professional journalism in 1949, as editor of the small-town Sandhill Citizen in Aberdeen, North Carolina. By the early 1960s, he had joined the times of The New York Times. At the Times, he became well-known as a political reporter and one of the lead journalists for the paper's coverage of the assassination of President Kennedy, as well as being a shrewd observer of the Washington, D.C. scene. In that capacity, his influential "In The Nation" column ran in the TImes from 1966 through 1992.