Working feverishly through the afternoon, he came up with a 106 paragraph account of the day's events that dominated the _Times'_ front page the following morning. In decades to come, students and historians will turn to Wicker's story on microfilm with perhaps a sense of wonder that it omits no facts of major importance, and contains virtually no errors. Tom Wicker was writing for history that day, and largely as a result of his masterful performance, he was elevated the following year to the position of the _Times_ bureau chief in Washington. In 1968, he was appointed associate editor of the newspaper, and in 1971, he returned to New York in order to concentrate on his column, "In the Nation." For the past 13 years, the column has appeared three times weekly in the op-ed page of the _Times._ A tall, ruddy-complexioned, powerful-looking Southerner of 52 with a country-boy manner and a Carolina accent as thick as molasses, Wicker has managed to combine his lifelong career in journalism with an independent career as a book author. The most successful of his seven novels, _Facing the Lions_, was on the _New York Times_ best-seller list for 18 weeks in 1973, while his most recent nonfiction work, _On Press: A Top Reporter's Life in, and Reflections on, American Journalism_, was published last year by Viking and will soon be released as a paperback by Berkley. In an interview at his office in the _Times_ building, the affable, articulate Wicker responds to an opening question about whether journalists are less accurate today than in the past by saying, "No, I don't think they ever were very accurate. It's hard to get pinpoint accuracy under pressure. I think that's an inherent weakness of daily journalism. But you have to consider that there are something like eight million words a day coming in here. It's very tough to double-check all of that by deadline. I think of journalism as being kind of like an early alert system." In his column, Wicker has never been told what to write, never had an article killed or edited, and never been urged to conform to the _Times_ editorial policy. Some of his pieces look best in retrospect -- for example, the three columns he wrote in September and October 1977 about the dangers of storing nuclear waste. The sympathy with which he treated the prison death of convict George Jackson in a 1971 column caught the attention of inmates everywhere, and during the uprising at New York's Attica prison later that year, he was called in as a mediator and official observer. His book about the uprising, _A Time To Die_, (1975), won him two major literary awards and was made a Book of the Month Club selection. An engaging public speaker who travels widely, he spent two months in Africa last year. At present, he is preparing a long article on Richard Nixon that will appear in the _Sunday Times_ magazine this August to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the ex-president's resignation.