ABSTRACT

One of the most famous examples of mid-twentieth-century professional journalism is Tom Wicker’s account of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which first appeared in a special edition of the New York Times published on the same day that Kennedy was killed (22 November 1963).1 Kennedy’s assassination came at the high point of the post-war boom and the peak of American influence over the rest of the world (before the USA was seen to fail in Vietnam). Wicker was prominent among a generation of journalists writing news for an industrial society – journalists whose news writing amounted to an industrial process in its own right. Wicker’s account of the death of JFK is a fabrication. This, we hasten to add,

does not mean that he made any of it up, but that he composed it; Wicker constructed his account, building a structure out of what he had observed that day in Dallas. Wicker’s structure is streamlined. He presents a stream of information lined up in order of significance, starting with the assassination of probably the most important man in the world and moving down through the hierarchy of information (and people) to encompass Jackie Kennedy’s bloodstained stocking and the bullet wounds sustained by John B. Connally Jnr. Not only because of his lesser wounds but also because he is a lesser mortal, the Governor of Texas does not appear in the body copy until the tenth paragraph (though there has been a fleeting glimpse of him on the fourth deck of an eight-decker headline). If we were conducting a class on news reporting, we would say that the lines

formed by Wicker’s structuring of this world-famous event comprise a pyramid (or triangle). But there is nothing ancient about this formulation, or Wicker’s use of it; instead, it is consistent with the modernist mode of abstracting from appearances and the order in which they first present themselves, the better to understand that which is being presented. Wicker re-presents JFK’s assassination in much the same way that a Cubist painting presents reality anew. Wicker’s representation bears the same sort of relation to raw experience as Picasso’s depiction Three Musicians (1921). In Wicker’s case, he has travelled backwards and forwards in time so as to shape the occurrence he is describing. Similarly, Picasso captured the presence of three musicians by depicting them from different angles

which would not normally present themselves to the same viewer at the same time. In each instance, immediate sense impressions have been taken out of their real-time setting and organised into clearly identifiable, geometric shapes (pyramid, cube). But these formulations are not only for form’s sake. In drawing words, sentences and paragraphs together into the formal development of his story, Wicker has also replaced the line of events as they occurred in time – a flat timeline – with a sequence of information presented in descending order from primary importance to supplementary significance. This presentation is the final movement in a three-part manoeuvre on Wicker’s

part. First, as a trained observer, he will have made a mental record of events as they occurred in real time. Second, although he actually wrote it on a portable typewriter at the scene, in his mind’s eye Wicker must have stepped far enough back from the scene to extract key elements from the raw footage going on in his mind and to identify in these elements what would become the crucial components of his story. By now it is as if he has already drawn another line, dissecting the timeline of events and reaching as far back as the mental position from which to review them. Finally, he takes these crucial components and edits them into a hierarchy of descending significance (since you need to know this, you may also wish to know that which follows on from it; since you must have wanted to know that – or you wouldn’t have read this far, you may also, etc.). Having constructed the story according to this logic, Wicker has also drawn another line starting from his own, internal viewing platform, stretching not only back to the original setting in all its vivid detail but also forwards, in the direction of his readers. This last line is the one that puts them in touch with the scene, via the reporter’s reconstruction of it. In the way he wrote the story, in effect, Wicker took the flat timeline of events and drew two more lines, sharply angled against this first one, so that together they form a triangle (or pyramid structure).2